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Why the Intellectuals? A Heinous War Strategy to Cripple Bangladesh

Martyred Intellectuals Memorial in Dhaka, at the Rayer Bazar. Source: shutterstock. By PickGraphy360 on 31st March, 2023

Why the Intellectuals? A Heinous War Strategy to Cripple Bangladesh

02-11-2024

Somya Sharma & Ilaria Nilges, 

Bangladesh Campaign Team,

Global Human Rights Defence

Abstract

The article begins with the historical birth of East Pakistan in 1947, followed by the prompt push from political and religious leaders to declare Islam as the state religion with Urdu as its official language. Intellectuals and students at universities, particularly in Dhaka, played a crucial role in organising movements that supported the voice of the Bengali identity and ‘Bangla-deshis’ (literally ‘the nation of the Bangla or Bengali speaking people’). This rise of collective Bengali identity and its association with nationalism led to the direct political threat of separatism. Under the rule of a military dictator, horrific eliminationist ideas used by the Pakistani army and the allies to crush the soul and identity of Bengaliness ended with a last attempt to liquidate and wipe out the intelligentsia through a specialized phase of  ‘Operation Searchlight’, leaving a broken Bangladesh and unrecognised Genocide.

 

Introduction

This article focuses on the objectives of ‘Operation Searchlight’ targeted to liquidate and exterminate Bangladeshi intellectuals by Pakistani forces and their allies. The objective of the article is to critically analyse why the intellectuals were specifically targeted and how this strategy functioned as a deliberate war tactic to cripple the emerging nation of Bangladesh. Before diving into the issue, however, a brief historical excursion will explain the evolution of Pakistan and Bangladesh since the partition of British India in 1947. Against this background, the article will present the deep-rooted cultural, geographical, and economic disparities between East and West Pakistan that led to the emergence of a Bangladesh liberation movement driven by the intelligentsia and its core occupational population. The collective formulation of all such factors can be seen as the reason for the development towards the heinous tactic of targeting the intelligentsia by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its sympathisers during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.

 

The latter sections will investigate the targeted elimination of Bangladesh’s intellectual class as a last attempt to crush the war. Placing it in the context of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, this ‘eliticide’ paved the way to destroy a nation’s leadership and future. This article argues that by deliberately targeting intellectuals, Pakistan aimed to hinder Bangladesh’s ability to organise itself politically, socially, and culturally after independence. This development has created a deep divide between the intellectuals of the 1971 liberation war and subsequent generations, making it more difficult for a rising Bangladesh to forge its own path to self-determination.

 

Partition(s)

To understand lost questions of the horrific post-1971 events in East and West Pakistan, it is worth taking a step back and analysing the historical context that shaped this region from the Partition to the formation of Bangladesh. In 1947, the year of the culmination of a long independence struggle, British India was partitioned into two separate states. This partition happened based on  the “Two-Nation Theory”, which relies on a religious majority, India and Pakistan (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). The latter was divided into two parts geographically separated by more than 1,600 kilometres from India: West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) (Akmam, 2002).

Map illustrating the geographical distance between East and West Pakistan (today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh), separated by approximately 1,600 kilometres (2024). This map was created by the author to visualise the territorial separation between the two regions before the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Cultural divide and the Bangla language

The differences between the two regions were deep-rooted. East Pakistan was predominantly inhabited by a more homogeneous ethnic identity of Bengalis, who speak Bangla or Bengali with a rich culture, literary history, and lineal traditions (Akmam, 2002). A region formed from the geographical division of the province of Bengal in British India, along with a district of Sylhet (Maron, 1955). West Pakistan, on the other hand, was dominated by six  major ethnographies, including, Punjabis, Pashtuns, Balochs, and Sindhis, amongst others (Mazari, 2003). With Urdu as the dominant identified language amongst different languages and cultures, West Pakistan rapidly lost most of its Christian and Hindu minorities, who preferred to move to India. The rapidly declining numbers of the minorities who chose to stay in West Pakistan became victims of  forced religious conversion, mass abduction, rape, honour killings, or intense massacres (Dalrymple, 2015). Both West and East Pakistan faced horrific violence; the numbers in the former can be estimated to be higher, as ten  million out of 13 million refugees created with the Radcliffe line were in Punjab (Western territory of British India divided into two separate countries, i.e., Pakistan and India) (Lionel, 2008 ).

Geo-economic disparity

Despite the lush-green riverine East Pakistan contributing the largest earned share of the nation’s foreign exchange to the national budget through exports of jute and rice, compared to the barren West Pakistan, it received only a fraction of government investment (Maron, 1955). This economic disparity fuelled growing discontent among the population of East Pakistan over the years, who felt exploited and marginalised. Added to this was the strong anti-Hindu sentiment of the almost entirely Muslim West Pakistanis, who saw the Hindu minority in East Pakistan as a foreign body (Akmam, 2002). Moreover, the closeness of Bangla with Sanskrit and Hindi (spoken by Hindus) was used to generalise the inferior status of the majority Bengali-speaking community in East Pakistan. Such associations with the enemy culture and country foster the idea of ‘the other’, igniting and altering hate into political righteousness (Kundu, 2023).

 

Rise of identity through language

In 1948,  Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the governor at the time) visited East Pakistan, declaring Urdu to be the state language for both regions, reinforced by  the visit of the second Prime Minister of Pakistan, Khawaja  Nazimuddin, a Bengali, which provoked strong opposition in East Pakistan (Munier, 2018; Maron, 1955). In 1952, this decision culminated in a student movement, which later turned into a mass protest, to make Bengali the official language of modern-day  Bangladesh  (Munier, 2018). Through this initial protest, Bangladesh’s movement for self-determination began to gain momentum.

Political disparity

The first general elections of 1970 based on adult franchise represented a turning point. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, gained an overwhelming majority of seats in East Pakistan, winning 167 of the 313 seats in the entire Pakistani Assembly (i.e. West and East) (Munier, 2018; Akmam, 2002). This success gave the Awami League the right to form the national government. However, the West Pakistani authorities, dominated at the time by General Yahya Khan and President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, refused to cede political or military power (Munier, 2018; Mazari, 2003). Prior to this, proposals like the ‘One Unit’ scheme, which aimed to shift political power to West Pakistan by consolidating its provinces to form a political majority in the constituent assembly, had been suggested as direct political actions against the Bengali majority but could not be fully enforced (Mazari, 2003).

 

At this point, the situation quickly degenerated. Seeing not only their political, but also their social, cultural, and economic rights denied, the people of East Pakistan began to make their voices heard through violent protests (Munier, 2018). On March 7th, 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman delivered a historic speech in Dhaka, inciting the Bengalis to prepare for a liberation struggle (Munier, 2018).

The operations

On March 25th, 1971 the Pakistani government launched ‘Operation Searchlight’, a brutal military campaign aimed at suppressing the independence movement in East Pakistan (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). The Pakistani armed forces attacked Dhaka with extreme violence, starting a series of atrocities that led to an estimated three million Bengalis being killed, between 200,000 and 400,000 women subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence, approximately ten million people forced to flee to India, and 30 to 40 million internally displaced (Munier, 2018; D’Costa, 2015).

 

Throughout the war, Pakistan carried out a systematic operation aimed at liquidating and exterminating Bangladeshi intellectuals (Nishat and Hossain, 2022), targeting professors and academics, doctors, activists, journalists, lawyers, and more to create an intellectual vacuum (Ahmed, 2016). This led to the elimination of Bengali intelligentsia, leaving a broken Bangladesh with a lack of critical knowledge and expertise necessary for rebuilding the nation.

 

Since 1952, when the student movement demanded that Bengali be recognised as the official language of East Pakistan, many academics began to voice their opposition to the oppressive Pakistani regime. Therefore, from the beginning of the war, Pakistani forces have specifically targeted these intellectuals, with one of the first brutal attacks occurring at Dhaka University on the night of March 25th, 1971 as part of Operation Searchlight (Nishat and Hossain, 2022).

 

A second major attack against intellectuals took place on December 14th, 1971 commemorated as Martyred Intellectuals Day, or ‘Shaheed Buddhijibi Dibosh’ in Bangladesh (Munier, 2018). In December 1971, despite the war coming to an end, the Pakistani army made a final effort to eliminate the intellectuals, going so far as to kill what is believed to be 80 percent of the intellectuals based in Dhaka (Akmam, 2002). The modus operandi used for their termination varied. Still, many were abducted from their homes, blindfolded, and taken to the Mohammadpur Physical Training College (also known as the Al-Badar torture camp), where they were subjected to physical torture (Rummel, 1998). They were then transported to the Rayer Baazar extermination camp and the Mirpur cemetery, where they were brutally murdered (Rummel, 1998). In other cases, they were either shot in the head and dumped in the riverside brickfield or buried alive with their hands tied back (Rummel, 1998; Pizuar, 2018).

People from all walks of life paid tribute to the martyred intellectuals of 1971 on Martyred Intellectuals Day, on December 14th, 2020. Source: Shutterstock, Bayazid Akter, 14 December 2020.

Targeting Bangladeshi intelligence was, as mentioned, one of the major objectives of Operation Searchlight during the Bangladesh Liberation war (Pizuar, 2018). A list of names that became public in 1972 proves that the killing of this specific group was indeed premeditated and planned. The initial, incomplete list included 1,111 names, of which 991 were academics, 13 journalists, 49 doctors, 42 lawyers, and 16 writers (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). More recently, in 2020, the Bangladesh government approved a list of 1,222 martyred intellectuals (The Dhaka Tribune, 2020). On the other hand, reports from 1971 from Bangladesh have highlighted a list of 5000 people from the core occupational forces who were on the hit list of the Pakistani army and the sympathisers (Nishat & Hossain, 2022).

Suppressing the Identity Voices

“The responsibility of the intellectual is to tell the truth and expose lies.” – (p. 2, Chomsky, 1967)

 

As demonstrated by Chomsky’s quotation and the facts outlined in the previous sections, intellectuals hold a fundamental role in society, expressing their opinions and challenging injustices. This is precisely why they were perceived as a threat by Pakistan. These individuals were at the forefront of advocating for justice, equality, and independence, making them prime targets for those determined to suppress dissent (Munier, 2018).

 

Genocides

The extermination of a nation’s or community’s intellectual class is often one of the first steps in many genocides, as used by Hitler, “Intelligenzaktion  Pommern” in Poland during the Second World War, the Armenian genocide, and the Cambodian genocide (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). This phenomenon is usually referred to as eliticide or elitocide, referring to the deliberate killing of a group’s leadership, educators, and clergy (Toker, 2019).

Self-Determination, The Operation & Today

Bangladeshi intellectuals were viewed as a threat because they were capable of leading a vulnerable Bangladesh towards development and self-determination (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). Their elimination was intended not only to halt the independence movement but, even if independence was inevitable, to leave Bangladesh without its intellectual foundation, ensuring it would struggle to rise from its fragile state (Pizuar, 2018; Munier, 2018).

 

Indeed, a new country without teachers, academics, doctors, engineers, and lawyers—precisely the professions outlined on the list underlying the final phase of Operation Searchlight—would have struggled to lay down its foundation (Nishat and Hossain, 2022). As a result, a newly independent Bangladesh would encounter immense difficulties in organising itself politically, socially, and economically without 80 percent  of its intellectual class situated in Dhaka (Akmam, 2002). Those who remained active in Bangladesh were targeted by the Al-badars, while others were either forced to flee the country or left as migrants (Choudhury, 2015). A similar comparison can be drawn between the intellectuals, scientists, and historians, amongst others, fleeing to neighbouring European countries during the holocaust – 1930s and 1940s (Grant, 2018).

 

As a result, the country experienced significant transformations, particularly among its core occupations, which had initiated many democratic protests. The developments in the Bangla language in contemporary times have been significantly impacted by the inability of the institutions to incorporate Bangla in all three levels of education, minimising the language, nationalistic identity, and significance for future generations. The intelligentsia martyred during this eliticide did not only lose the professionals, intellectuals, and students, but with it, Bangladesh also lost the frontliners of its nationalistic identity who used language and theatre to bring the voice of Bangladesh together. Similarly, the group theatre movement led by intellectuals and artists for the liberation campaign is now a lost art (Choudhury, 2015). Intelligentsia, who were widely involved in the rise of Bengali nationalism in 1971, has now been reduced to the institutional jurisdiction. The religious identity like the ethnic identity became stronger with strengthening of the religious institutions and schooling systems of madrasas lessening the scope of secularism and democratic institutions to grow in the independent Bangladesh (Ali, 2015). A social scenario with wide-scale political power imbalance and socialist ideas uprooted began to surface. There was a deep divide between the intelligentsia during the 1971 Liberation War and those that came after, creating a generational gap and the lack of footsteps to follow for a rising Bangladesh(Ali, 2015).

Intent and recognition

As per international standards and scholars, eliticide has not been recognised and is still a growing concept. Even with the proof of intent, specific cases have been identified as crimes against humanity under the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT-BD) (Nishat, Hossian, 2022). Other scholars like, Fournet, still argue that categorising it as a crime against humanity is absurd. The intention to target Bengali intellectuals has also been clearly identified as an act to disrupt the foundation of a self-determined country. An overlap creates difficulty in distinction and identification. The conduct of targeting specific groups, such as the intelligentsia, with the intent of destroying the future generations’ idea of national identity, infrastructure, and potential figures to re-shape a country, as seen in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and Operation Searchlight can find legal jurisdiction under the Article 2 of the Genocide Convention (Nishat, Hossian, 2022). However, restrictive definitions of national, religious, ethnic, and racial in the International Criminal Tribunals (ICT), later added by political groups  have made it even more difficult to recognise and represent against the perpetrators of the intellectual ‘genocide’. (Nishat, Hossian, 2022)

Conclusion

The historical developments that framed the basis of upholding diverse identities were led by some of the core occupations and the intelligentsia. The Bangladesh Liberation Movement was initiated solely to reaffirm the self-identity and showcase dissent against the significant discrimination witnessed post-partition. Intellectuals, students, and the occupational workforce were the leading figures of not just the movement but also a newly emerging Bangladesh. The Pakistani army, along with its sympathisers, took upon themselves a last opportunity to destroy what was left of Bangladesh and Bengaliness. Eliticide, largely disregarded and left unidentified in the international community, has often found itself being misrecognised as a mere crime against humanity, making it not just absurd but also unjust  (Nishat & Hossain, 2022). The evolution of a fragile state arising out of conflict with an intellectual vacuum creates a fundamental problem for the holistic development of the state, which was further confronted  with the re-questioning of ideas of identity, democracy, socialism, and secularism.

Floral wreaths laid by people paying homage to martyred intellectuals at the Martyred Intellectuals Memorial at Mirpur in Dhaka on 14 December, 2023. Source: Shutterstock, Mamunur Rashid, 14 December 2023.

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