By Prashant Dikshit

As I write these lines, I recall the thrill of standing on the soil of Bangladesh whilst it celebrated its liberation and victory day in its capital Dhaka on 16th December 2023. In a small manner, I was also a part of India’s national endeavours for liberating Bangladesh from the cruel Pakistani regime.

But this euphoria seemed to evaporate after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India on 5th August 2024. Whole of Bangladesh was engulfed in widespread unrest. There were reports on attacks on Hindus and minorities and most distressingly on the virulent de- edification of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. The founding father of Bangladesh. Also known by the honorific Bangabandhu. His statues were vandalized. Worse, his house was burnt down. The slogan “Joy Bangla” coined by him is allegedly being undone by a judicial process. It was as if there were elements in Bangladesh society who wanted to eradicate his memory from peoples’ psyche. These were deliberate attempts at Iconoclasm. 

But what needs to be perceived by the milieu of Bangladesh is that nations which aspire to rise to great heights need Icons in their memory and history. There are several examples to draw inspiration from. Mahatma Gandhi continues to thrive in the hearts of the Indian Milieu despite several attempts at shattering his image. The Indian nationhood is thus nurtured.    We must remember that despite the upheavals within their countries, the American people did not shed George Washington from their history and nor were Kamal Ataturk forgotten in Turkey, Lenin in Russia and Winston Churchill in England.

As the leader of Bangladesh, Mujibur Rehman had held continuous positions either as Bangladesh’s president or as its prime minister from April 1971 until his assassination in August 1975. But he also served 13 years in prison during the British Raj and Pakistani rule. During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, Mujibur Rehman   declared Bangladesh’s independence. Bengali nationalists declared him as the head of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, while he was confined in a jail in West Pakistan. 

In the following years, he played an important role in rebuilding Bangladesh, constructing a secular constitution for the country, transforming Pakistani era state apparatus, bureaucracy, armed forces, and judiciary into an independent state.   

We must not forget that on the night of 25th March 1971when the Pakistan Army launched a relentless crackdown on citizens of East Pakistan, their own country. Thousands of people were shot, bombed and burned to death in Dacca alone. That is Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh now.

By July 1971, India the neighbour was saddled with six and a half million refugees fleeing from this pogrom. Over five million of them were in the Indian State of West Bengal. It contained over 400 out of nearly 600 camps in India. In the dark annals of human cruelty, the killings in East Pakistan perhaps rated bloodier than Bosnia and in the same accounts in the same gruesome league as Rwanda.

India could not ignore this slaughter any more.  For purely humanitarian reasons it had to intervene.  India was facing a trauma in its extreme. It was necessary to rescue itself from the clutches of a severe emotional and economic burden engulfing its people. A military campaign was the only plausible solution for this excruciating human problem, facing the Indian Government.

Recorded history reveals that India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had then held a meeting with the Army Chief General Sam Manekshaw (Later Field Marshal) and then military planners drew their plans.

Whilst the Yahya regime was crushing its own people in East Pakistan, it was carrying messages back and forth between Washington and Beijing. During these meetings Kissinger is known to have asked the Chinese Prime Minister Chou- en –Lai to secretly mobilize troops to threaten India in order to defend Pakistan. And that was well before the Indian troops had actively moved into East Pakistan. That was Nixon’s USA, deep with  the cold war syndrome and fixed in its belief that India being a strategic ally  of Soviet Russia could not be trusted  and with whom India has signed a mutual interest treaty for its protection. Then India’s army Chief General Sam Manekshaw had foreseen this development and prepared its commanders for such an eventuality.

What is truly forgotten is the horrendous discovery that this arsenal consisting of fighter jets and modern tanks supported by rapid fire weapons was unleashed by Pakistan’s troops and his own people. Above all what is truly lost in the maize of history is that the US consulate in Dhaka had witnessed this genocide from its very inception in March 1971 and without fear of their masters sitting in Karachi and in Washington, had rendered factual reports of the killings. This process was led by Archer Blood, the American Consul General in Dhaka. These reports were purposefully ignored by the US Administration. Eventually, other US employees had joined ranks and sent the famous “Blood Telegram” to Washington in which they termed the mayhem as Genocide.

We now know of the emergence of “Mukti Bahini”, the India-supported freedom fighters of Bangladesh perhaps in April 1971 a prelude to the military action to follow on 4th December 1971. But not before Pakistan launched pre-emptive aerial strikes on Indian bases in west India on 3rd December 1971 and Pakistan declared war on India. A war which lasted till 16th December 1971 when about 93000 troops of the Pakistan Army laid down their arms and surrendered to Indian Forces. Bangladesh thus came into being.

But it was only in the year 2001, the Indian Nation learnt that 3843 Indian Defence personnel were killed and 9851   wounded in this war. These were the highest figures seen in all wars faced by independent India.   

However , there is light ahead at the end of the tunnel. Amid ongoing political instability and alleged attacks on minorities in Bangladesh, the caretaker government led by Yunus Muhammed has confirmed that Mukti Bahini (Liberation War) veterans will participate in India’s Vijay Diwas celebrations on December 16, 2024. This act will substantially assuage the anguish in the hearts of the war veterans who had participated in the liberation of Bangladesh. That country needs to be brought back to its evolutionary stride and it needs to be protected from deep religious radicalization taking roots.   

The author is an Indian Air Force Veteran & strategic affairs commentator.

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