POLITICS-SOUTH ASIA: Furore over 1971 India-Pak War Probe

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 21 2000 (IPS) - Events leading to the painful birth of Bangladesh have resurfaced three decades later, this time in the Indian media, causing a furore in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf is reported to have ordered a probe into the ‘leak’, to a popular Indian newsmagazine, of the classified findings of a probe into circumstances leading to the separation of the former East Pakistan in December 1971.

“It is really a sensitive matter and we must nab the culprits who provided classified information to India just to humiliate the Pakistani army on the eve of Independence Day,” former Pakistani army chief Mirza Alam Beg was quoted as saying.

The report was published by the ‘India Today’ magazine and was timed with the Aug. 14 and 15 celebrations of 53 years of the subcontinent’s independence from British colonial rule.

The Indian government has declined to comment on the sensational release of the report, except to say that it contained nothing that was not already well known.

“We must behave as a responsible nation,” said a government official.

Leading Indian defence and strategic affairs analyst, K. Subrahmanyam said those indicted in the report should be tried and punished.

“When Pakistan has been claiming to speak up for Kashmiri Muslims, they forget what they did to Bengalis in East Pakistan. Were they not Muslim enough?” asked the hawkish Subrahmanyam.

Long-suppressed, the Hamoodur-ur-Rahman Commission report deals with the December 1971 surrender of the Pakistani army to the Indian army and the creation of Bangladesh from the former East Pakistan.

The report, as published in the newsmagazine, has severely indicted former Pakistani generals who conducted the war. Over a million Bengalis were estimated to have lost their lives in events leading to the birth of Bangladesh. Another ten million fled to India as refugees.

The contents of the report were said to be so damaging that former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who commissioned it, was forced to suppress it.

Every single copy was said to have been burned. But according to India Today, one copy did survive.

The publication of the report by the magazine has given rise to demands in Islamabad, to de-classify the report. Among those demanding this are the people mentioned in the probe.

Political observers in Pakistan do not expect military ruler Musharraf to accept the demand. This would be specially embarrassing for Islamabad at a time when Musharraf is already under pressure to order a probe into last year’s military debacle in Kargil, they point out.

India and Pakistan fought an undeclared war on the cold heights of Kargil in Kashmir, last summer, when Pakistani irregulars intruded across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir.

The conflict was ended by U.S. President Bill Clinton’s personal intervention with Islamabad to order withdrawal of the intruders.

“The foundation of the (December 1971) defeat was laid way back in 1958 when the armed forces took over the country,” M. Sharif, former top naval officer, who was commanding the Pakistani Navy off the East Pakistan coast during that war, was quoted as telling the probe.

“While learning the art of politics in this newly assigned role to themselves, they gradually abandoned their primary function of the art of soldiering; they also started amassing wealth and usurping status for themselves,” Sharif deposed.

The commission noted that senior Pakistani army officers “particularly those occupying the highest positions, had not only lost the will to fight but also the professional competence necessary for taking vital and critical decisions…for the successful prosecution of the war.”

Former Pakistani army chief Beg and others have criticised successive Pakistani governments for not publishing the report earlier. This has now given India an opportunity to embarrass Pakistan, they said.

According to Iftikhar Ahmad Sarohi, former Pakistani naval chief and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee, publication of the report is necessary because its suggestions are relevant to Pakistan’s current situation.

Those clamouring the loudest for its publication are former Pakistani army generals who were accused of the genocide in the former East Pakistan.