AND so after General Musharraf's petulance in calling off a meeting in New York (during the UN Millennium Summit) with the Bangladesh prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, for remarks delivered by her against dictatorial rule in general (remarks that we took personally), we now have one of our diplomats in Dhaka putting his foot into his mouth.
Reportedly, he has said that the atrocities committed in 1971 in what was then East Pakistan (do we even remember this?) were sparked by 'Awami League miscreants' and not the Pakistan army. This statement, made at a seminar in Dhaka, has upset people in Bangladesh. The BD foreign minister has expressed his anger and in front of the National Press Club during a demonstration the Pakistani flag has been torched.
For its part the Pakistan foreign office in one of those statements for which it is justly famous has urged Bangladesh to set aside the 'tragic past' and forge ahead with stronger relations. With the kind of petulance that the Chief Executive showed in New York and the subtlety one of our diplomats has demonstrated in Dhaka there should be little problem in building an exemplary relationship with Bangladesh.
Stupidity is of two kinds: forced (that is, by circumstances) and gratuitous. I have heard it said of Nawaz Sharif (lately of the Heavy Mandate, now Pakistan's leading democrat - along with, of course, the Queen of the East) that if an arrow was flying past him he felt impelled to catch it and stick it in his back. The Punjabi translation of this is more earthy.
But then Nawaz Sharif represents a national trend. As a country we have a tendency towards gratuitous folly. We have stumbled into wars ('65 and Kargil being the prime examples) without comprehending what we were trying to prove or achieve. We have sold ourselves cheaply, as in Afghanistan, without realizing what we were getting into. And we have flexed our puny nuclear muscles when anyone with the least intelligence could have figured out that it would serve our national interests better to keep them covered.
Let me be permitted a digression here. After India had carried out its nuclear tests in May 1988 Punjab's Gauleiter, Shahbaz Sharif, summoned his MPAs, division-wise, for a series of meetings. At the meeting of Rawalpindi division MPAs, out of 22 members hardly three or four spoke in favour of testing. The rest of them argued for restraint and moderation. Let me put it on record that Raja Azmat Hayat from Choa Saidan Shah, no Ph. D. from Oxford or Berkeley, set the tone of the meeting by saying that we should ponder the fate of the Soviet Union whose collapse had not been averted by all the nuclear bombs in the world.
Visibly confounded, Shahbaz Sharif said that these might be our personal opinions but what about our constituents? Having gone up the length and breadth of my constituency in connection with the local bodies elections which were then being held I piped up and said that wherever I went I was asked about schools, hospitals, roads and jobs but not at one place about whether we would give a tit-for-tat response to India's nuclear tests.
To put this exchange in context it should be remembered that the four districts of Rawalpindi division are from where the army draws the bulk of its recruits. And this was the sentiment coming from this so-called martial belt. But we went ahead with testing because the decision lay not with ignorant MPAs but the stars of the military establishment (the real force behind the folly of that confused summer).
Given all this, what is a misjudged action in New York or a stupid statement in Dhaka? We are good at this sort of thing. Bangladesh should not be losing any sleep over it.
If anyone should be concerned it is us. Bangladesh is not just another country for us. We have to be especially benighted not to realize this. Its people were flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, soul of our soul. In pushing them against the wall, in pushing them to seek India's help, we did violence not only to them. We injured ourselves and committed something worse than fratricide.
How forgetful can we be. If anything can be called Pakistani nationalism - or more accurately subcontinental Muslim nationalism - its cradle lay not in the areas which now constitute Pakistan: Punjab, Frontier, Sindh, Balochistan. It is no small historical irony that these areas were latecomers to the Pakistani dream. The idea of Pakistan drew inspiration from two centres, north India (now Uttar Pradesh) and East Bengal. The Muslim League saw its birth in Dhaka. The idea of Muslim separatism gained strength from the partition of Bengal in 1905. By the same token this sentiment suffered a reverse when a few years later this partition was undone. Let us not forget that at that time Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lived largely in amity in Punjab. In Bengal, on the other hand, the sense of Muslim grievances, fuelled in no small measure by the fact that the great movement of Hindu revivalism in the 19th century arose from Bengal, was stronger.
In the 1946 elections which set the stage for the partition of India it was only in Bengal that the Muslim League emerged as the single largest party, capturing almost half the seats. In Punjab it did well but its numbers were almost equalled by the Unionist Party. In Sindh it won a large number of seats but could not achieve a majority. When Jinnah gave his call for Direct Action in July 1946 the Calcutta killings a month later convinced everyone in India, including the British, about the gulf that had opened between the two communities. Not that the Direct Action call was in any way responsible for the Calcutta riots but that those riots on such a scale happened in Bengal rather than anywhere else shows the inflamed state of Hindu-Muslim feelings in the province. So the question is pertinent: without the push that the Muslim cause received from Bengal, could there have been a Pakistan?
We can be forgetful indeed. The provinces which conjoined to form Pakistan were not forced to do so by the British. According to the Partition Plan, power at the centre was to be devolved to the Congress as the majority party. The princely states could choose between independence or India and Pakistan. And, most important of all for our purposes, the Muslim majority provinces could choose to stay as part of the Indian Union or opt for Pakistan.
The Muslim halves of the Bengal and Punjab legislatures opted for Pakistan. So did the Sindh legislature. In the Frontier because there was a Congress ministry the issue was decided by a referendum in which the overwhelming majority of the votes cast were for Pakistan. In Balochistan in the absence of a legislature the Quetta municipality voted for Pakistan. In Assam the Muslim majority district of Sylhet decided by referendum to join Pakistan.
Pakistan thus came into being as the result of a freely-exercised choice by the Muslim majority areas of India. It was born not by coup or military revolution but by an act of pure democracy. East Bengal, more than any other province or region, was pivotal to this exercise.
How could the army bring itself to use violence against the people of East Pakistan in 1971? If its higher command had been imbued with any sense of history, could it have allowed itself to play the infamous role it did? How could Yahya refuse to call a sitting of the National Assembly? How could Bhutto speak the intemperate language he did, thus encouraging the obduracy and belligerence of the army command and stoking the fires of intolerance in West Pakistan? And how could all of us be silent spectators of that grim and tragic drama?
The foreign office, as so often in its history, is wrong once again. We must not put the past aside. That's what we do all the time: forget the past and repeat its follies. For once we must understand the past and come to terms with it. This might just help us rid our minds of the demons which impel us from one act of gratuitous folly to another.