The Caricatured Bengali & the Pakistan Army
A look at the racist beliefs about Bengalis peddled privately and publicly by Pakistani military officials in the lead up to 1971.
Street art in memory of the genocide that took place during Operation Searchlight in 1971. Image: Monirul Alam via twitter.
The Bangladeshi War of Liberation is remembered very differently in Pakistan. It is a memory buried deep under mounds of denial, amnesia, and obfuscation. As we approach 50 years since Bangladesh’s independence, we should dig out the stereotypes and representations of Bengalis that contributed to their marginalization.
Here, I focus on some of the accounts, memoirs and narratives by members of the Pakistan Army who were important figures in the lead up to 1971 or who witnessed, participated or steered the War.
We should begin with the opinions of General Ayub Khan, whose authoritarian regime (1958-1969) spanned Bengali agitations for autonomy and the emergence of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Six Point Movement. As military dictator, he spearheaded the period of crisis which eventually culminated in 1971, and his rule aggravated Bengali grievances against West Pakistan. Two particular books shed light on Ayub’s opinions of Bengalis: Friends Not Masters, his autobiography published in 1967, and the Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, his private diary entries from 1966 to 1972, published 30 years after his death in accordance with his instructions. Three specific tropes of Bengalis emerge from these texts, which are also found in other military accounts.
Image: WorthPoint
Illiberal Bengalis
Ayub openly subscribed to the idea of racial difference between the Bengalis of East Pakistan and the “races” of West Pakistan. He wrote that the Bengalis were unfamiliar with “any real freedom or sovereignty” till the creation of Pakistan, as they had previously been ruled “by the caste Hindus, Moghuls, Pathans, or the British”. As a result, they possess, he went on to write, “[both] Hindu cultural and linguistic influence” and “all the inhibitions of downtrodden races”, including their “exclusiveness, suspicion and a sort of defensive aggressiveness.”
Ayub expressed these ideas in the 1960s, around the same time when Bengali discontent was escalating. His ideas thus aimed to dismiss Bengali concerns and protests as the immature tantrums of a historically subjugated race “psychologically” unfit for new-found freedom within an independent state.
Pathologizing Bengalis
Ayub’s diaries convey other racist beliefs about Bengalis. He wrote that they have “no stomach for self-criticism.” In the same vein, he commented that
The Bengali temperament is mercurial and highly unstable. He does not like discipline and does not like making a team. Leadership is difficult to produce. This is because of the nature and climate in which he lives.
By branding this cluster of characteristics as “the” Bengali “temperament”, Ayub implied that these are natural to them.
Ayub pressed on:
Sheikh Mujib may be exploiting parochialism but its causes are probably much deeper. The Bengalis have a long, long history of exploitation by outsiders. Their hot and humid climate puts them at a physical disadvantage and the marshy nature of terrain with poor communications make them exclusive, mother-attached and inward-looking. No wonder they are secretive, unsocial and unpredictable.
In correlating climate, landscapes, physical profiles and behavioural traits, Ayub replicated colonial racial logics, and did so to denigrate Bengali nationalist aspirations.
A cover image for the April-May 1971 issue depicts the military dictator Yahya Khan butchering East Bengalis. Source: JSTOR
Across several entries, Ayub also quotes various people who confirm his racist suspicious about Bengalis. For instance, he cites Qazi Qadir, a minister in East Pakistan, who declares that “Bengalis are by nature treacherous and unreliable”. Writer Nirad Chaudhari, also cited, concludes that
Bengalis, and for that matter all the Hindus, are not capable of governing themselves nor exercising political power. They are narrow minded and fractious and suffer from crises of character.
Ayub himself deduces that the Bengali outlook does “not conform to any rational yardstick” and that it was only with the birth of Pakistan that Bengalis “got the blessing of freedom”. “Any normal people should have recognised and rejoiced at this blessing”, he writes, “[but their]…minds are totally shut to reason, and full of suspicion and scepticism”. Ayub’s racist characterizations of Bengalis provided grounds for keeping them restrained, subjugated and subdued.
Ayub’s opinions were shared by other military officials. Brigadier Abdurrahman Siddiqi, the Director-General of the Pakistan Army’s media and public relations wing the Inter-Services Public Relations during the war, noted that:
Too much freedom was not good for the Bengalis. They did not have it for centuries and were likely to make a mess of it when they did!
Brigadier Asif Haroon also supported the same argument when he wrote:
East Pakistan grew up as a misled nation easily swayed by Hindu history. Their ‘emotional nature’ saw Indian Hindus as their saviours against their pre-supposed ‘West Pakistani Masters’.
In a talk delivered at BRAC University in 2011, the late Colonel Nadir Ali further detailed the attitudes of army officers stationed in East Pakistan towards Bengalis. Nadir Ali first served in Dhaka in the 1960s and, from April to October 1971, commanded a battalion during Operation Searchlight, after which he had a nervous breakdown due to the tragedy and his own guilt. He recounted the chasm between West Pakistani officers in East Pakistan and the Bengali officers and Bengali culture, and the former’s dismissal of the latter, long before the military operation began.
Chougacha, Jessore in Bangladesh, after a military strike in 1971. Image: Mohammad Shafi/Autograph ABP
Inadequately Muslim, Partially Pakistani
Bengalis were also demonized as Hindus. They were painted as inadequately Muslim, and thus inadequately Pakistani, under the constant influence of their Hindu past and the Hindus of East Pakistan and West Bengal. This otherization is evident in Ayub’s diaries:
[The Bengali] urge to isolate themselves from West Pakistan and revert to Hindu language and culture is close to the fact that they have no culture or language of their own nor have they been able to assimilate the culture of the Muslims of the subcontinent by turning their back on Urdu.
Ayub makes several assumptions here. He demeans Bengalis as culturally impoverished by assuming that their language is actually alien to them, and actually belongs to Hindu culture. He further equates Urdu with Muslim culture and Pakistan, thereby casting Bengali demands for official recognition of their language as a rejection of Muslim culture and a “reversion” to Hindu culture.
In a May 1967 entry, he adds:
They [the Bengalis] are consciously Hinduizing the language and culture. Tagore has become their god. Everything has been Bengalized, even the plate numbers on vehicles are in Bengali. Consciously or unconsciously, they are moving towards separation and exposing themselves to absorption by Hinduism.
Ayub loathed this alleged Bengali-Hindu alliance. As he once said to Khawaja Shahabuddin, “We could not think of a worst combination. Hindus and Bengalis.”
Ayub later suggested that most Bengali beliefs are only barely punctuated by Islam because Bengalis are essentially Hindu:
Without meaning any unkindness, the fact of the matter is that a large majority of the Muslims in East Pakistan have an animist base which is a thick layer of Hinduism and top crust of Islam which is pierced by Hinduism from time to time.
By conflating Bengalis with Hinduism, Ayub and other military officials casted them as disloyal and unfaithful citizens. As early as 1967, a law minister branded Bengalis as “traitors and enemies of the country”, a judgement Ayub agreed with. As he wrote in his diaries, “This is the sort of language in which they should be spoken to.”
1971
The idea of an indissoluble difference between Bengali “Hindu” culture and West Pakistan Muslim culture was entrenched by 1971. Lieutenant Colonel Mazhar Ali Shah reframed the Two Nation Theory as the “Two Cultures Theory” to describe and explain the divide between West Pakistan and East Pakistan.
Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Six Point Movement for East Pakistan, which commenced in 1966 following the Bengali Language Movement of 1952 and demanded greater political autonomy, coincided with a burgeoning cultural pride among the Bengalis centered on Rabindra Nath Tagore. By that time, Bengali culture and language had become anathema to the Pakistani state, leading the then Governor of East Pakistan Monem Khan to ban the Rabindra Sangeet (Tagore Songs) from being played on television and radios on the basis that “Bengali was a “non-Muslim” language and a carrier of ‘cultural domination’ by Calcutta”.
1952: A student meeting in support of the Bhasha Andolan (Language Movement) at Amtala in Dhaka University. Image: Daily Sun
Military officials also believed East Bengal’s Hindu minorities were influencing the Muslim majority. Major General Khadim Hussain Raja, who designed Operation Searchlight,
believed East Pakistan’s “large Hindu minority—about 17 percent in East Pakistan—took advantage of these differences [between West and East Pakistani Muslims] and did all they could to emphasize and accentuate them”.
Comments like this indicates how beholden military officers were to the Two Nation Theory. The loyalty of non-Muslim minorities, especially Hindus, was always suspect. They were conveniently scapegoated on the basis of their religion, despite their citizenship.
The prevalence of this prejudice, especially within the Punjabi dominated bureaucratic-military oligarchy, is pinpointed by Anthony Mascarenhas. He was one of the journalists flown to Dacca on the invitation of Pakistan’s Ministry of Information in April 1971 to report on the carefully curated “return of normalcy” in East Bengal in the middle of Operation Searchlight. However, he penned the explosive story which exposed the full extent of atrocities in East Pakistan, even declaring it a genocide.
Mascarenhas traced the reasons for the Bengali secessionist movement and the bloodshed to “Pakistan’s precedence for Muslim identity over Pakistani and rejection of the Hindu community in the eastern wing as undependable, undesirable aliens.” He enumerated four major reasons for “Bengali sensitivity about the ‘colonialism’ of West Pakistan,” one of which was “the absurd denigration of the piety of the Muslims in the east wing by those in the west.”
The thinly veiled contempt and blanket condemnation of Bengali culture is exemplified in Brigadier Asif Haroon’s book. He employs old tropes such as the “emotional Bengali” and the malicious Hindu bania to elucidate “Hinduization” and its permeation in Bengali arts, music, literature, clothes, and TV, and even the ritual practice of Islam among Bengali Muslims.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi, a commander in East Pakistan who was later among the 90,000 prisoners of war taken by India, also seconds Haroon that “Bengali Muslims were set up for a cultural onslaught by Bengali writers, mostly Hindus.”
While villainous characterization of Hindus, Hinduism and Hindu culture in East Pakistan are manifest, it is equally notable that even Bengali Muslims are incriminated in the sweeping charge of “Hinduization”. Bengali Muslims are displaced from the category of Muslims and Pakistanis.
The disdain heaped onto Bengali Muslims by West Pakistan is encapsulated in an incident quoted by Mascarenhas about the Punjabi Governor of East Bengal Malik Feroz Khan Noon. He is reported to have remarked in 1952 “that the Bengalis were ‘half Muslims’ and accused them of not bothering to halal their chickens. This insult provoked a counterblast from the venerable Maulana Bhashani. ‘Have we to lift our lungis (loin-cloths) to prove we are Muslims?” Bhashani’s rhetorical question, an allusion to the ritual of circumcision which Muslim males undergo, demonstrates the degree of doubt Bengali Muslims were met with in West Pakistan and the anger this caused.
According to General Rao Farman Ali, General Niazi possessed the same ideas about the Bengalis. He saw the war as a chance to “convert” the “poor and downtrodden” Bengalis to “their original Islamic faith from which he believed they had gone astray under Hindu influence.”
However, even as military generals blamed Hindus for the trouble in then East Pakistan, this did not relieve Bengalis since the lines between Hindus and Bengalis had long been blurred.
In General Rahim’s opinion,
Until such time that the Bengalis persisted in holding on to their Hindu mindset, as evident in their script, their dress, and their love for Tagore and other Hindu intellectuals, there was little hope of their ever becoming good Pakistanis.
Thus, the Bengalis were practically treated as Hindus who had to be brought back into the fold of Islam and Pakistan. In fact, Brigadier Siddiqi admitted that Operation Searchlight and the army’s activities in East Pakistan were “not just temporary missions of pacification but one of conversion and transformation of the Bengalis into true Muslims and Pakistanis”. He added that the top leadership of the Pakistani military, including General Niazi and General Rahim were “hell-bent on cleansing the Bengali race and culture.”
These beliefs had obvious violent consequences, as the tragedies wrought on East Pakistan’s Bengalis during 1971 makes clear. On the rare occasions when it is remembered in Pakistan, 1971 is often carefully curated as a “debacle”, “tragedy” and “betrayal.” But a question stares us right in the eye: “who betrayed who?”
And the answer is inescapable: a sin ours to face, to own, and to bear.
Hafsa Khawaja holds an MA in South Asian Studies from Columbia University, and currently teaches history and political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.