MILITARY action (operation Searchlight) was launched from the Dhaka Kurmitola Cantonment at midnight on March 25, 1971. It went on for nine long months till the surrender of our East Pakistan-based military forces on Dec 16 of the same year. The military action, gaining in ferocity and expansion by the day, passed through six well-marked crucial phases. These were, one, a sledge-hammer punitive blow to the Awami League rank and file, two, clean-up drive to throw these elements out of the province, three, civil war, four, guerrilla / mobile warfare, five, India breaking cover and invading East Pakistan in full view of the world, and, sixth, surrender.

Military surrender, therefore, was not a sudden, unexpected and unpredictable culmination of the prolonged military action but its inevitable sorry finale. Amongst the host of numerous factors contributing to the poorly-scripted tragedy ending in disaster was the astounding indifference of West Pakistan’s civil society towards the East Pakistan crisis. Except for odd, desultory voices and press statements, hardly anything was either heard or seen in West Pakistan against the crackdown.

Barely a couple of days after it, the leader of West Pakistan’s majority party on his return from Dhaka declared: “Allah be praised, Pakistan has been saved.” A better chit in support of the military action would be hard to imagine. The party supremo, together with his party’s top brass, happened to be in Dhaka to see parts of the city go up in flames and rock with gunfire on the fateful night.

Now what exactly is civil society? In effect, it’s only the other name for a nation and a people as a whole. In more a specific and definitive context (such as ours), however, civil society is the national constituent as opposed to the armed forces. There is no such thing as a civil-military divide except when each may happen to be pursuing its own chosen path even one leading to the same goal. Such, unfortunately, happens to be the case in our own country. While the ruling military establishment and the struggling political forces, both seek to serve the country in the “supreme national interest”, each does it according to its own perception. Hence the civil-military tension and the emerging divide.

Through the 1971 crisis and war in East Pakistan, however, the civil society and military forces in West Pakistan appeared to have had all but a signed and scripted MOU (memorandum of understanding) on the endless military action in East Pakistan. That West Pakistan’s people (civil society) were kept uninformed about the events in East Pakistan would, at best, be only technically accepted to give the West Pakistanis the benefit of the doubt.

For everybody, with a radio set of one’s own or one at hand, listening to the BBC and other networks was supposed to have had a fairly good idea about the mess in East Pakistan. Not many would, however, like to see or learn the bitter truth about the military excesses in the eastern half. They would tend to dismiss all that as “enemy propaganda”. And in spite of their growing scepticism, they would trust their own media (print and electronic) stories on the return of normalcy to East Pakistan.

Besides, the mass of the people — masses and classes — refusing to see the truth about East Pakistan, there had been also a relatively small, but highly influential coterie voicing their full support for the military action. It comprised the business community, political partisans, stock exchange brokers and racists dismissing the Bengalis as oppressed and down-trodden a la Ayub Khan.

Even a number of known intellectuals actively sought to use the military action as the “best opportunity” to bring the Bengalis into the national mainstream. The Society for the Promotion of the Arabic Language in Karachi was part of one such effort. A mullah-military combine would even speak of converting the “Hinduized” Bengali Muslims to their pristine Islamic faith. In East Pakistan, the military commander, Lt-Gen Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, himself led the drive to bring patriotic Bengalis back to their Islamic faith as good Pakistanis.

The high point of the stolid detachment of West Pakistani civil society towards the rapidly worsening situation in East Pakistan was reached in August-September 1971. About that time the government announced the schedule for holding by-elections to fill in the seats falling vacant in the wake of the Awami League MNAs and MPAs defecting to India. A more comical or stupid exercise would be hard to believe.

However, instead of dismissing the idea without a second thought, almost all West Pakistan parties (alongside the largest majority party) enthusiastically agreed to take part in the elections. Each party demanded the maximum number of seats for its own candidates to contest. Contest against whom? Nobody seemed to bother. The irony marking the whole three-legged race for seats was that none of the parties bidding for the vacant Awami League seats had won a single seat in the national elections (the first ever in the country) of Dec 7, 1970.

As for the government’s producers and script writers of the show, they would not seem to have any doubts about the positive outcome of the elections as planned. “We would have our candidates return unopposed,” they would say in response to any question about the absurdity of an electoral contest in a circumstance of sheer anarchy in East Pakistan.

So the elections were held and candidates were returned unopposed as planned. But within just about a month came India’s naked, multi-pronged invasion to throw out the electoral baby with the water of a bloody bath.

The question at the end is: Could civil society in West Pakistan possibly reverse the march of events leading to military surrender and the loss of our eastern half? It might or might not have in the final analysis. It could nevertheless have arrested or slowed the drift to disaster.

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army