The struggle of the ethnic Bengalis of Pakistan for political and cultural equality began five years after Pakistan was established by the departing British rulers in August 1947.
The imposition of Urdu as the sole official language of Pakistan led to the Bengali Language Movement in 1952. The Bengalis resented the imposition of Urdu because they were 54% of the total population of Pakistan. And the Bengalis were in an overwhelming majority in East Pakistan, a part of Pakistan which was separated from West Pakistan by more than 1000 miles by Indian territory.
The language issue was solved eventually, but other divisive issues were piling up dividing East and West Pakistan. These were mainly economic and political. While much of the dollar earnings of Pakistan came from exports emanating from East Pakistan, East Pakistan did not get equitable benefits from it. Actual political and economic and bureaucratic power was in the hands of the West Pakistanis. The Western wing also dominated the military. And military domination was explicit under the dictatorships of Gen.Ayub Khan and Gen.Yahya Khan.
The last straw on the backs of the East Pakistani Bengalis was the refusal of the West Pakistani politicians and the military to accede to the Six Point Charter of Demands for autonomy and an equitable division of economic resources and gains.
The East Pakistani party, the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, fought the 1970 parliamentary elections with the Six Point Charter of Demands as the plank. The Awami League swept the polls in East Pakistan and also emerged as the single largest party in the Pakistani parliament. The Awami League is expected to form the government. But West Pakistani politicians and then President Gen.Yahya Khan refused to allow that.
A widespread agitation, which followed in 1971, was sought to be suppressed brutally by military action against students, intellectuals, artists, other activists and also the Hindu minority. Estimates of the number of civilians killed vary from 300,000 to three million. Ten million refugees poured into neighbouring India, drawing New Delhi into the conflict.
The movement in East Pakistan was from then onwards, for complete independence through an armed struggle. The youth took to arms. And with the help of India, formed the Mukti Bahini guerilla force.
The sarong-clad, lightly-armed groups of Bengali youth, mostly from the villages of East Pakistan, took on Pakistani army units. The Mukti Bahini guerillas and regular Bengali soldiers who had defected from the Pakistani army inflicted heavy damage on Pakistani morale and logistics.
Dr Ahmad Ahsan, Director in the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh wrote in the Dhaka-based The Daily Star on December 26, 2020, that the 83,000-strong Mukti Bahini destroyed or damaged 231 bridges and 122 railway lines, disrupting the Pakistan army’s supply lines and mobility. The guerillas not only targeted army detachments in the countryside but took on targets in the urban areas, including Dhaka.
Towns across Bangladesh plunged into darkness as guerrillas blew up 90 power substations and transmission towers.
“One of the most significant attacks took place in Dhaka on June 6, 1971 when the East Pakistan Governor, Tikka Khan, was hosting a dinner for a visiting high-powered World Bank mission that had come to evaluate the situation. Just when the Governor and his officers were making the case that everyday life had resumed, the Mukti Bahini launched coordinated attacks around the Government House,” Ahsan recalled.
He quoted Hassan Zaheer, later Pakistan’s Cabinet Secretary, as saying that bomb explosions and machine-gun fire at regular intervals drowned out any attempt by Pakistani government officials to persuade the visiting mission that things were normal.
By November 1971, 237 Pakistani officers and more than 3,695 soldiers had been killed or wounded in Mukti Bahini attacks, Ahsan says.
Quoting from Gen. Shaukat Riza’s book entitled: The Pakistan Army 1966-71, he says: “Pakistani troops facing the enemy in one direction found themselves outflanked, their rear blocked. Troops moving from one position to another got disoriented and then encountered hostile fire when they expected friendly succour. By November 1971 most of our troops had fought for nine months in a totally hostile environment. By November 1971, most of the troops had been living in waterlogged bunkers, their feet rotted by slime, the skins ravaged by vermin, their minds clogged by an incomprehensible conflict.”
According to Ahsan, Mukti Bahini’s attacks broke the Pakistan Army’s morale; forced the Pakistanis to spread their forces thinly over the country and stay put in their bases without reliable supply lines. Cut off from the population, the troops were denied field intelligence.
The Indian input for the establishment of the Mukti Bahini came from an order of the then Indian army chief, Gen.Sam Maneckshaw. According to a December 26, 2021 article by Praveen Swami in The Hinduentitled India’s Secret War in Bangladesh the order instructed the Eastern Army Commander, Lt.Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora, to “assist the Provisional Government of Bangladesh to rally the people of East Bengal in support of the liberation movement,” and “to raise, equip and train East Bengal cadres for guerrilla operations in their own native land.”
The Eastern Command was to ensure that the guerrilla forces worked towards “tying down the Pak [Pakistan] Military forces” and “sap and corrode the morale of the Pak forces in the Eastern theatre and simultaneously to impair their logistic capability for undertaking any offensive against Assam and West Bengal.”
Finally, the guerillas were to be used along with the regular Indian troops “in the event of Pakistan initiating hostilities against us.”
The Eastern command was instructed to provide training facilities and logistical and operational support for the liberation of Bangladesh on the basis of an assessment by Gen. Aurora. According to Praveen Swami, the task was then handed over to Brig.Sujan Singh Uban of the Special Frontier Force (SFF), a unit originally put together for operations in Chinese-held Tibet. Operatives of the Research and Analysis (RAW) under R.N.Kao, were a key part of the operations throughout.
The selection of Bangladeshi recruits, discipline, motivation, planning and execution of operations was an exclusive prerogative of the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) Bangladesh, Gen.M.A.G Osmani, a Bengali officer formerly of the Pakistan army.
The recruits were trained in the Indian Army’s “Operation Jackpot” camps, each led by a Brigadier. The camps were in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and Bihar with the Indian government meeting all expenses including salaries. Training for four to six weeks was on handling small arms, light automatic weapons, mortars, and explosives. Advanced leadership training was to be given by instructors under the command of the C-in-C Bangladesh, Gen.Osmani.
An article written by an Indian army trainer, Brig.R.P.Singh in The Daily Star on May 24, 2021, entitled: How the Mukti Bahini was trained, says that the Mukti Bahini had two wings – a regular force (Niyomito Bahini) and a guerrilla force (Gano Bahini). The Niyomito Bahini comprised offers and men who had defected from the Pakistan army. The Gano Bahini, a force of irregulars, had a separate unit called Mujib Bahini, composed of youths loyal to Awami League leader, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
To politically motivated the fighters, Bengladeshi politicians were employed. Broad political directions were issued to the sector commanders by the leaders of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh headed by Prime Minster Tajuddin Ahmad located at Mujib Nagar in Kolkata.
Singh says that at a conference in July 1971, the Provisional Government and the Indian army decided that (i) a large number of guerrillas must be inducted inside Bangladesh to strike at every conceivable place through raids and ambushes, (ii) industries would not be allowed to run; their electricity supply would be cut off by blowing electric sub-stations, poles etc., (iii) Pakistanis would not be allowed to export any raw material or finished product from Bangladesh, (iv) vehicles, railways, river crafts and ferries which enemy used for supplies to their troops were to be systematically destroyed, and (v) after isolating the enemy, guerrillas would strike deadly blows on the isolated groups.
By November 1971, battalions of the erstwhile Pakistani East Bengal Regiment were grouped into three infantry brigades named after their commanders. ‘Z’ Force was commanded by Major Ziaur Rahman, ‘K’ Force was commanded by Major Khaled Mosharraf and ‘S’ Force was commanded by Major Shafiullah. Bengali officers from the Pakistan Air Force and Navy also joined. The naval personnel and the guerillas inflicted heavy damage on Pakistani boats.
By November 1971, the Mukti Bahini numbered 83,000, out of which 51,000 were operating inside Bangladesh. In addition, 10,000 strong Mujib Bahini cadres were also in action. At the cost of just 56 dead and 190 wounded had done a lot of damage.
“On December 3, Pakistan attempted to relieve the pressure on its eastern wing by carrying out strikes on major Indian airbases. India retaliated with an offensive of extraordinary speed that has been described as a blitzkrieg without tanks,” Praveen Swami says.
Bangladesh’s Mukthi Bahini had paved the way for the capitulation of the Pakistani army in just 13 days of Indian military action and also for the netting of 93,000 Prisoners of War, the single largest group of POWs since the Nazi surrender in Stalingrad during World War II, according to Gen.M.M.Naravane, a former chief of the Indian Army.
