An unfinished business

On December 16, 1971, LG AAK Niazi, the Commander of the Pakistan Eastern Command, signed the Instrument of Surrender in Ramna Race Course in Dacca which was accepted by Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of India's Eastern Command, formally ending what is usually called the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. However, this nomenclature elided and even eclipsed several distinct wars that culminated at this moment. As I describe below, despite the passage of nearly 50 years, the wars continue to cast a long shadow. In retrospect, while Pakistan may have lost that battle, in many other ways Pakistan seems to have won the long war. Let me explain.

The wars

First, there was an internal conflict between Pakistan's ethnic majority Bengalis who dominated East Pakistan and the ruling elite in West Pakistan. This internal conflict precipitously expanded after the ruling junta of General Yahya Khan refused to convene the parliament following the 1970 elections in which the East Pakistan-based Awami League, led by Mujibur Rahman, decisively defeated Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples' Party. The consequences of these elections were monumental because the victors were tasked with writing Pakistan's third constitution. Mujibur Rahman's party, under the banner of the Six Points Agenda, had long advocated for greater federalism; separate convertible currencies; fiscal responsibility to be delegated to the federating units; as well as the right to maintain a separate militia. The political elites in the west, spearheaded by General Yahya and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, wanted a strong federal government and found the Awami League's Six-Point Agenda to be a thinly veiled demand for outright cessation.

Despite winning too few seats to veto any constitution offered by the Awami League, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto refused to let his party participate in any convening of the parliament and made absurd demands for a power-sharing agreement. After Mujibur Rehman refused to cede and insisted upon the Awami League's right to form the government, General Yahya Khan commenced Operation SearchLight, which was a brutal and thuggish military operation to disarm the Bengalis. As refugees began fleeing into India, the second phase of the war would begin — a proxy war between India and Pakistan.

Given the riverine terrain of Bangladesh, any military operations had to wait until the monsoons' conclusion. In addition to these meteorological and geographical constraints, India was ill-equipped to undertake military action in the spring of 1971. India used the summer to reposition forces from the west to the east and construct necessary infrastructure to support military operations while seeking diplomatic support from Russia and imploring the US to counsel Pakistan to end what was clearly an ethnic cleansing in East Pakistan.

US President Richard Nixon was unmoved by India's requests, even though he did provide a significant amount of aid to subsidize in some measure the enormous and growing cost of caring for the refugees who continued to flood India. While initially, the refugees were both Hindu and Muslim, it soon became evident that the refugees were increasingly Hindu as the West Pakistani forces were engaging in cleansing of Hindu Bengalis from the country.

While India prepared for the larger war, throughout the summer it trained and equipped the Bengali Resistance while also mentoring the shambolic, disorganized and ineffective Bengali political elites. Pakistan too worked through a number of Islamist militant organizations. By the end of the summer, India was providing artillery support to the Bengali insurgents. East Pakistan had become a killing field. While it is unpopular to say so: the Bengalis, in and out of the resistance, also victimized non-Bengali combatants and non-combatants alike in the East.

The third, conventional war officially commenced on December 3 when Pakistan's Air Force conducted preemptive strikes on Indian Air Force forward airbases and radar installation. When the war ended on December 16, 1971, Pakistan was vivisected with East Pakistan emerging as an independent Bangladesh. Some 93,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered to the Indian Armed Forces and were taken to India as POWs. Pakistan lost more than half of its population and about 15 per cent of its territory.

Who won the long game?

India successfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed the July 1972 Shimla Accord with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, which formally concluded the end of the war. Despite being the clear victor in the war, India bizarrely acquiesced to most of Pakistan's demands. Notably, Pakistan demanded that India return the 5,800 square miles of territory it captured in the west, the repatriation of its 93,000 prisoners of war, assurance that Bangladesh would not conduct war criminal trials against its military personnel, and to protect the viability of its long-standing, if baseless, claims on the disputed disposition of Kashmir.

India's aims were modest despite vivisecting the country: it aimed to secure Pakistan's commitment to resolving outstanding disputes peacefully and bilaterally. Some Indian interlocutors justify India's appeasement of Pakistan as a strategic decision to not impose a "Treaty of Versailles"-like condition of Pakistan.

The Pakistan that emerged from the war was more defensible, more ideologically coherent, had significantly fewer non-Muslim minorities, and was strategically positioned to extract rent by collaborating with the US. Unfettered by the problematic Bengalis, Pakistan was able to seek financial, diplomatic and political support from the Gulf State monarchies. By 1979, President Carter sanctioned Pakistan for its progress in nuclear reprocessing, thanks to Bhutto's perseveration. Throughout the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the US continued funding Pakistan even though it understood it was still developing its nuclear assets. While the US reimposed sanctions in 1990, Pakistan was once again able to resurrect its strategic importance in the wake of 9/11. While benefiting from American assistance, Pakistan became the world's fastest-growing nuclear stockpile and has likely outgrown that of France while also developing battlefield nuclear weapons. Pakistan remains both able and willing to undermine India's quest for hegemony in South Asia and beyond.

Those who struggled to achieve Bangladesh failed to create a durable democratic state with a broad consensus on secularism. Within a few years, Mujibur Rehman and much of his family were murdered in a bloody coup having left a legacy of corruption and authoritarianism that resembled that of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Through a tumultuous power struggle, in 1977, General Zia-ur-Rahman was in control. He removed secularism from the constitution and began revivifying the Jamaat-e-Islami. By 1988, Bangladesh's next military leader, General Ershad declared Islam to be the state religion.

While Bangladesh returned to democracy in 1990, the two main political parties vied for power. While the right of centre Bangladesh National Party, "led" by Khaleda Zia (the widow of Zia ul Haq), is reviled for its explicit reliance upon the Jamaat-e-Islami among other Islamist parties, the Awami League, "led" by Sheikh Hasina (the daughter of Mujibur) has also courted Islamist parties to retain control. India's hope that Bangladesh would not be a "Pakistan'' on the east has not fully fructified.

The question that must be asked then: Is India safer today than it was before December 1971? It faces a country of uncertain future on the east and a Pakistan that is ever more committed to using violence in pursuit of its policies at home and abroad.

An argument can be made that despite losing the battle, Pakistan continues winning the wars.

Views expressed are personal