Covertly, the war broke out soon after the Pakistani Army cracked down on the Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan on the night of 25/26 March 1971—not merely on the Awami League led by Mujibur Rahman, the pro-Moscow National Awami Party led by Muzaffar Ahmad, and the pro-Moscow “communists,” but also, and significantly, on the so-called pro-China National Awami Party led by Maulana Bhashani (the “Red Maulana”) and the revolutionary left that had emerged within and without the latter. Indeed, at least for a while, it was the revolutionary left that went on to make significant gains in the rural areas politically, that is, when the Awami League, soon after the Pakistani Army crackdown, fled to safety in India alongside the massive stream of refugees. At that point, the revolutionary left took the lead, making it very hard for the Pakistani Army to control the 64,000 odd villages of East Bengal.42
Could the revolutionary left in East Bengal have turned the Bengali nationalist struggle into a People’s War? Most unlikely, unless one chooses to persist with one’s revolutionary illusions, for the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, in the face of brutal state repression, even if it were to have imagined a united communist Bengal, could not have begun the practice of such politics. Moreover, in East Bengal, it was not the Red Maulana’s Awami National Party but Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League that had the backing of the Bengali industrial and mercantile capitalists, kulaks, bureaucrats, the Bengali elite in the Pakistani Army, paramilitary and police who had split from their respective units, and opportunist sections of the intelligentsia. The Awami League also had close relations with the Indian establishment, which very quickly got into the act of intervention, followed by outright invasion aimed at turning East Bengal into an Indian protectorate. The Indian Army’s and the Mukti Bahini’s victory in East Bengal came on December 16, 1971.
Could Washington have restrained New Delhi from Indian Army intervention in East Pakistan? Article IX of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 that India entered into with the Soviet Union provided an assurance that the latter would back India in the event of external threat or actual breach of Indian security. And, as events were to unfold, the policy of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1973 squashed any lingering doubts that Washington wouldn’t adjust to the new geopolitical advantage that India had gained. And, if there was any specter of a united communist Bengal in the intelligence agencies of Washington and New Delhi, this was laid to rest by an Indo-Bangladeshi counter-revolutionary alliance in late-1973 which brought the Indian Eastern Frontier Rifles to closely coordinate its operations on the Indo-Bangladesh border with that of the Rakkhi Bahini (the counterpart of India’s Central Reserve Police Force) in the newly formed Bangladesh, unleashing a terror that even seemed to have surpassed that of the Pakistani military regime of Yahya Khan.43
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” so the saying goes, but in this case it seemed like the first—Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took full credit for the victory in the war with Pakistan and the “liberation” of East Bengal, which created Bangladesh. Sections of the Indian establishment, particularly the Jan Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee, hailed her as Durga, the invincible goddess of Hindu mythology, and she sought to make political capital out of what the Indian Army and East Bengali nationalist fighters had accomplished, quickly calling fresh elections in thirteen Indian states, some of which the Opposition parties governed. Such expressions of aggressive nationalism should have been a warning of what was to unfold. Her Congress Party won all these states very comfortably, except in West Bengal, where her party’s landslide came because of “terror, intimidation and fraud.”44
POLITICAL BARBARISM
Organizations for the protection of civil liberties and democratic rights (CL&DR) in independent India—the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) and the Organization for the Protection of Democratic Rights (OPDR), both formed in Andhra Pradesh in 1973, as also the Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) in West Bengal, which emerged in 1972—arose alongside the Naxalite movement and in the setting of the undeclared (pre-Emergency) emergency repression unleashed by the state and its hired hoodlums. The APCLC and OPDR came in the wake of efforts by radical intellectuals, ’68ers, to protect the rights of the poor peasants, landless laborers, and their Naxalite organizers in the face of the brutal state repression of the movement in Srikakulam and parts of Telangana that began in 1968-69, as we have seen in chapter 1.
The roots of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) can be traced to the People’s Union for Civil Liberties & Democratic Rights (PUCL&DR), which was formed in 1976, mainly conceived by the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan and a retired chief justice of the Bombay High Court, V. M. Tarkunde, to oppose the repression of civil liberties during the Emergency. After the lifting of the Emergency and with the Janata Party in power, which brought some of the PUCL&DR’s political associates into office as part of the new government, the PUCL&DR was rendered relatively inactive until it was revived as the PUCL when Mrs. Gandhi rode back to power in 1980.
The PUDR began in 1977 as the Delhi unit of the PUCL&DR, but after the latter was revived at the national level as the PUCL in 1980, the PUDR began functioning as an independent organization from February 1981. The APDR, APCLC, the CPDR (the Mumbai-based Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, also formed after the lifting of the Emergency), and PUDR, all owed their leadership and main cadre to Marxist rebels, ’68ers largely sympathetic to Maoism, who viewed their legal struggle to win civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights as a constituent part of the revolutionary process. Along with PUCL, these organizations believed that the winning of civil and political rights are an essential part of the struggle for the realization of social, economic, and cultural rights.
What was the CL&DR movement up against when it started off in the early 1970s? An example is what APDR ran into in 1972, this in its own words:45
[The] orgy of slaughter and brutal repression [during the] last two years all over India was unknown even in the days of British Raj. Reckless abuse of power [by the executive] in the name of maintaining law and order … (v)arious detention laws of the British regime … brought back under old and new names [for instance, DIR and MISA], thousands … detained under these draconian measures … many others … implicated in cases under false charges and thrown behind (bars) … (p)ersons released on bail … rearrested within the very premises of the court under newly fabricated charges46 … (the) (e)xtent of arrest(s) due to political reason(s) … so great … [the] number of prisoners … far surpass(ing) the capacity of the jail(s) …[with the] worst possible food … frightening sanitary condition(s) … facilities for (medical) treatment only in name … incurable and infectious diseases … playing havoc with the lives of the hapless prisoners … [and] no response from the government even after repeated appeals …
[P]ersons … detained due to political reasons … far from being recognized as political prisoners … refused even the minimum facilities … assured for all categories of political prisoners by the jail code … rights to have a weekly interview … not being allowed … [The authorities] (f)ollowing in the footsteps of the former British rulers, … deported [prisoners] to … far-off places from West Bengal … their relatives … getting no information about their wards … [B]arbarous torture [was] inflicted upon prisoners under the plea of extorting confession during their detention in police custody … [A] shameful record … of indiscriminate killings … slaughter … continuing outside [reference is made to mass killing outside the jails in] Barasat, Diamond Harbour, Burdwan, Kalna, Baranagore, Howrah, Bantra, Bhawani Dutta Lane … [A]lso … unarmed helpless prisoners in their hundreds … [were] … beaten or shot to death … under different pretexts in jails and police custody … [reference is made to mass killings in jails such as inside the] DumDum, Alipore, Berhampore, Midnapore, Bahkipur (Patna), Hazaribag,