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War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh

University of California Press

Nineteen seventy-one was a year of national and international crisis in South Asia. The year commenced with two historic elections; the first national election ever held on the basis of universal franchise in Pakistan, where the incumbent martial law regime was endeavoring to transfer power to civilian authority; the return of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in an election with a massive turnout in India. By year's end there had been two wars; as a consequence of the first, millions of refugees from East Pakistan sought exile in the politically unsettled and economically impoverished eastern provinces of India; as a consequence of the second, most of the refugees returned to their homes in the new and sovereign state of Bangladesh, and the political contours of contemporary South Asia were given shape.

Pakistan fought both wars; India one. The first, a civil war, deprived the Pakistani government of legitimacy in its eastern province; the second, the Bangladesh War with India and various Bangladesh liberation movements, resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan. Each war came at the end of a complex political process in which all the players hoped for and expected an outcome that would satisfactorily accommodate their interests and that would be reached nonviolently—by negotiation prior to the commencement of the civil war in the first, by international pressure and rational conciliation prior to declarations of war in the second. Our purpose in this study is to reconstruct as best we can the decisional structures and processes that characterized these two major crises as a matter of historical record; our purpose also is to understand the relations between motivation, calculation, and context in explaining why two wars were fought when at the outset the principals neither anticipated nor wanted them.1

The first crisis and war were the outcome of the efforts of Pakistan's military regime to arrange for the creation of a liberal

constitutional order and to withdraw from power. Upon assumption of power through an "invited" military coup on 26 March 1969, Gen. Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan indicated his intention of arranging a return to a representative form of government with a constitution to be devised by "representatives of the people elected freely and impartially on the basis of adult franchise."2 Within six months, general guidelines had been decided upon; they were made public in November 1969, and were formulated in legally binding fashion in the Legal Framework Order (LFO) Of 1970, promulgated four days after the first anniversary of the coup, with a call for general elections at both the national and provincial levels to be held in October of that year. The newly elected National Assembly would then be convened to draft a constitution within 120 days of its first sitting as a constituent body.

The LFO set forth a number of basic principles and arrangements that would have to be honored in the new constitution. It stipulated that the new constitution would have to provide for an Islamic republic in which laws repugnant to the Quran and Sunnah would not be admissible, though guarantees of religious freedom would be extended to minorities; the constitution was also to include constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights of the citizen, together with an independent judiciary. The new order would be organized as a federal system that would allow for the "maximum" provincial autonomy concerning legislative, administrative, and financial powers, and, in a formal expression of concern to East Pakistan, stipulated a commitment to the removal of interprovincial "economic and all other disparities" within a "specified period."3 Direct elections were to be held from territorial constituencies on the basis of a universal franchise, with no "separate electorates" for religious minorities or functional groups, thus giving East Pakistan an absolute majority in the National Assembly for the first time. In order to encourage expeditiousness in the drafting of the constitution, rules governing the transfer of power required that before the National Assembly could sit as a legislative body, provincial assemblies convened, and representatives from among them called upon to form governments, a constitution had to be completed and had to have received the "authentication" of the president.

In the elections to the 300-seat National Assembly held on 7

December 1970, the regionally oriented Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was elected with an absolute majority, all its seats being in East Pakistan. The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto won the majority of the seats in the newly reconstituted provinces of West Pakistan, but none from East Pakistan. The elections resulted in the creation of two regionally dominant parties, each bent upon wielding power at the national level, the former asserting its right to govern as a consequence of its predominance under majoritarian rule, the latter asserting its claim to participate in governance on the basis of the necessity of a "concurrent majority" of broader regional representation to assure governmental legitimacy in Pakistan's consociational polity. Each threatened to make governance difficult, if not impossible, were its claim not honored.

In the political games and formal negotiations that followed, each of the players was committed at the outset to reaching a constitutional consensus and a transfer of power under the rules set forth in the Legal Framework Order.4 Yet during the two weeks before civil war commenced on 25 March 1971 with a military crackdown in East Pakistan, the rules governing the transfer of power were abrogated by each of the three major actors. While the initial conflict between the Awami League and the People's Party was joined over the substance of the former's Six-Point Demand (first advanced in 1966), which provided for substantial decentralization of power and provincial autonomy and had served as the core of the party's election manifestos, agreement on a revised version of these points had been reached two days before a "military solution" was imposed.5

After the elections, as before, leaders of the martial law regime were committed to withdrawing from governance and transferring power to an elected civilian government. Increasingly during the negotiations, however, as their suspicions of the fidelity and trustworthiness of the Awami League leadership were aroused, a core group of army officers started to think in terms of a "military solution according to plan." With groups within the Awami League also preparing for armed resistance, and Bhutto threatening a revolution from the "Khyber to Karachi" if the interests of West Pakistan as defined by his People's Party were not conceded, this "solution" was imposed on 25 March.

Thus although each party to the negotiations commenced its labors with the expectation that a negotiated settlement of outstanding differences would be achieved, they ended them engaged in or prepared for armed combat. In the wake of the military crackdown, most of the leaders of the Awami League, except Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was taken prisoner, went underground and fled to India, where they...