MJ Akbar
AN unanswered question that has been sitting on the shelf of history for half-a-century may offer a clue to the volatile imponderables of Pakistan today. A distance of 50 years is sufficient for an objective appraisal even within the emotive turbulence of a war that was started by Pakistan in October 1947 and could easily continue till 2047.
The first three phases of the longest continuous conflict in modern times established lines of demarcation that resemble lava more than stone. Pakistan’s capricious, ruthless terrorist invasion of Kashmir on October 22, 1947 ended on January 1, 1948 on a ceasefire line which has not stopped a continual offensive by terrorists who remain as barbaric as they were in October 1947.
Pakistan’s second war to take Kashmir by force, in the autumn of 1965, ended in a fiasco and ended the political career of its first military dictator Ayub Khan, who had upgraded himself from General to Field Marshal, possibly in anticipation of a military triumph against India. He learnt the depth of Indian resolve when Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri ordered Indian troops across the international border into the vicinity of Lahore. The Pakistan Army has never again attempted to seize Kashmir through conventional war.
East Pak genocide
The 1971 war began in March with a horrific genocide by the Pakistan Army on Bengali civilians in what was then East Pakistan who refused to sacrifice their language and culture at the altar of fanaticism. Some 10 million refugees took refuge in India to escape the authorised massacres. The situation was resolved only with the birth of Bangladesh after the Pakistan Army was annihilated over a two-week war in December 1971 which ended with the surrender of 93,000 Pakistani troops and officers in Dhaka before the commanders of the Indian Army, Lt General Jagjit Singh Aurora and Lt General JFR Jacob.
A simple question has never been answered: Why did 93,000 Pakistani officers and soldiers, in good health and fully armed, choose the humiliation of surrender instead of continuing to fight when they had the weapons to do so? Every soldier is not expected to die in war, but military valour is about the will to die in the course of action. That is why the armed forces are such a hallowed institution. This enormous force of Pakistani troops was outmanoeuvred by a brilliant Indian operation, but they could have continued to fight longer. They chose the option of cowards: surrender. Pakistan did not ask the question since the answer would have undermined its existence; India did not ask it because no one questions victory.
Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders were unanimous in the proclaimed view that their Army was fighting for Pakistan and Islam. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the maverick demagogue who took over governance from the bloodstained hands of General Yahya Khan, famously told the United Nations that Pakistan was ready to fight for a thousand years, after having been defeated in 14 days. Bhutto was echoing the birth rationale of his country. In 1946 and 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the sole proposer, propeller and spokesman for the concept of Pakistan, sold the preposterous notion that Islam was in danger in order to persuade the credulous elite among Indian Muslims that their future lay in Partition. By the value system of religion, this was heresy: if you are a true Muslim, you cannot believe that Islam can be in danger. Muslims can be in danger, but then that proposition has to be endorsed by the Muslim masses.
The idea of Pakistan was never supported by any mass movement. Partition got traction only after engineered communal violence. The British colonialists, masters of manipulation, chose to treat the results of the 1946 elections as the alleged basis of Muslim opinion, but this was a gigantic fraud since the electorate was limited to only the upper 10 per cent of the population who were ratepayers. The British supported Partition with barely concealed glee since this was the best way to maim the future of the first nation to demand, and get, liberation from their insidious and corrosive colonial rule. Every successor of Jinnah had parroted the lie that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous and told the Army to die in defence of the faith.
Article of faith
This was the fundamental article of faith for the Pakistan armed forces in 1971. If those 93,000 soldiers had truly believed that their reward for martyrdom was an eternal place in Paradise, they would have chosen death.
Paradise must be a better option than the more crowded lanes of Lahore or Sialkot or Karachi or a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Instead, Pakistan’s soldiers chose the comfort of their pind over the streams of Paradise.
General Zia-ul-Haq, the first of the Islamist Generals (his predecessor Yahya Khan loved a bottle a day), understood this contradiction even if he never publicly admitted it. He changed the motto of the Pakistan Army from Ittehad, Yaqeen, Tanzim (Unity, Belief, Discipline) to Iman, Taqwa, Jihad fi sabilillah (Faith, Piety, Holy War). Islam was the basis of each element in General Zia’s formulation, having been merely implied before.
