“Amar shonar Bangla, ami tomai bhalo bashi (My golden Bengal, I love thee)”. I picked up the refrain of the always rapturously sung Bangladeshi anthem as a reporter covering rallies of solidarity with the newly rising nation. So did thousands of schoolchildren in New Delhi and other cities through that memorable Indian summer.

There was no doubt at all that the liberation struggle of Bangladesh touched a chord in India’s heart. This country, like the rest of the world, had watched with growing sense of outrage as the military regime of general Yahya Khan refused brazenly to accept the clear verdict of Pakistan’s first general election on December 7, 1970. Islamabad had no problem accepting the victory of the Pakistan People’s Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan. The general, however, did not have the least intention to recognise the landslide victory vote in East Pakistan for the Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. The Sheikh symbolised the Bengali-speaking east and an ethnic-cultural sub-nationalism that the Punjab-based Pakistani army could just not countenance.

Power-sharing negotiations between Pakistan’s two wings broke down by February 1971. The autonomists of East Pakistan became separatists launching a struggle for Bangladesh. East Bengalis soon went on a total strike and stopped paying taxes. Came the Pakistani army’s inevitable crackdown on Dhaka, East Pakistan’s capital, to begin with, and then the rest of the region. This sparked off an unprecedented exodus of refugees from East Pakistan into the neighbouring Indian State of West Bengal. By mid-May, the refugee population had swelled to some 10 million.

The refugees brought their tales of woe. These included stories of massacres, mass burials and gang rapes by Pakistani armed forces. A million of the fugitives might have perished in the process of flight, while no reliable estimate of the number of general crime victims is still available.

The tragedy was bound to trigger off a massive tide of solidarity with the people of East Pakistan in India, particularly across the border in West Bengal. The adoption of the song of pioneering Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore as the anthem of Bangladesh was only one of the many factors contributing to a growing feeling of kinship with the Bangladeshis in West Bengal and, indeed, across India.

Reportages of the atrocities and the resistance in Bangladesh in the then dominant print media strengthened the solidarity. At least one film-maker, S. Sukhdev, was inspired to make a documentary on the struggle titled ’Nine Months to Freedom: The Story of Bangladesh’. Given Bengali proclivities, West Bengal witnessed a flurry of publications compiling lyrical poems produced by the liberation war. Translations followed. Sample these lines from Humayun Azad’s The Blood Bank: Each day blood flows on Bengal’s soil:/every traveller leaves behind some of his blood/in this blood bank/where it is stored for the future needs/of the land..../Yet one day from this same blood/shall emerge a new river/a fresh garland of nature..."

The Bangladesh war led to considerable internal consequences for India. In the immediate aftermath of the war, victory seemed to mark post-Independence India’s highest point and to make then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the country’s and even the subcontinent’s most powerful leader. But it did not take too long for India and Indira to discover the political and economic prices that had to be paid.

The political cost of the war and the victory was even higher than the economic (about 4000 million Indian rupees at that time for the Indian army alone plus the subsequent inflation of a spiralling order). The events paved the way for a return to the political centre-stage of the religious-communal Right, which had been rejected in general election before the war’s outbreak. Then Opposition leader and would-be Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee hailed Indira as ’Durga’ (Hindu mother-goddess seen as a demon-slayer) on the floor of Parliament.

The war was used to serve the cause of an Indian version of fascism, seeking to pit the country’s Hindu majority against its largest minority of Muslims. Vajpayee and company found no irony in hailing the war outcome as a defeat for the “two-nation theory” as well as a victory for a Hindu India. After shedding all those crocodile tears over the refugees, they had no qualms in launching a campaign later against a continuing influx of impoverished immigrants as “infiltrators” from Bangladesh.

India’s solidarity with the Bangladeshi struggle was strengthened also by indignation at a widely perceived imperialist attempt to intervene against it. The US tilted demonstratively in Yahya Khan’s favour during the crisis, though without making a difference to its course. The then Richard Nixon Administration went to the extent of dispatching a war ship (USS Entreprise) of the nuclear-armed Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal. The Far Right, which claimed to support the country-wide mass protests against this US move, was to become the future builder of a US-India strategic partnership under George W. Bush.

Nothing much has changed ever since. For the liberal and Left sections of India’s political spectrum today, Bangladesh remains an Islamic neighbour where secularism and democracy have survived despite continuous threats to them. For the Far Right, Bangladesh can exist only as India’s client state or is fit to be treated as a supplier of ’terrorists“and”infiltrators".

J. Sri Raman