DECEMBER 17 has just come and gone again, so let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a young slave boy. His masters decided to get him married to a young girl, though she was not the one he would have chosen. Once married, they would be set free. The girl was the one who had fought for freedom more than the young man. But though she was very intelligent and very beautiful, inside and outside, the young man did not think so, for where he came from beauty meant fair skin and good height, while she was short and dark. So instead of treating her like an equal and an honored life partner that was her birthright, he mistreated her, like a concubine, like a slave. From the moment his masters set him free he replaced them, behaving like a slave owner rather than a husband. He spoke to her in a language that was foreign to her. He forced her to speak that language. She belonged to a very advanced and superior culture, rich in language and the arts, a culture no less superior than his. She was a working girl, a very hard working girl, but he took everything that she earned away from her, leaving her little. Neither did he buy her enough: just enough to keep her going. Her station in life did not really go up, as it should have. She was always regarded as inferior, untrustworthy, genetically of the disloyal kind and incapable of participating in the family's decision-making. One day, when she was given the chance, she decided to assert her rights and take her rightful place in the family. The husband thrashed her black and blue until she ran away and took refuge in the neighbor's house, a neighbor who happened to be their enemy. It was a Godsend for the neighbor to take revenge, which he did. He attacked the husband's house, forced a divorce, took away half the house and gave it to the girl. And thus the marriage came to an end. Sounds familiar? No? Call the man West Pakistan and the girl East Pakistan and you will get my drift. Was East Pakistan part of our scheme of things? There is no mention of Bengal either in the name ‘Pakistan' or in the Pakistan Resolution passed in Lahore in 1940. We did not even agree on how Pakistan was to be run, despite Mr. Jinnah's very clear directions in his seminal speech of Aug. 11, 1947, which should have been the preamble of our constitution. Instead, we placed that in the deep freeze and took two years to forge the ‘Objectives Resolution'. Did we not consider the Bengalis short, dark, lazy and untrustworthy? Did we not deprive them of their most fundamental of democratic rights, in fact so fundamental that it is one of the cornerstones of democracy, which is the will of the majority? Else why would we take nine unnecessary years to make our first constitution? We took so long because we were trying to find a device by which to emasculate the majority of the East Pakistanis, their population being some six percent more than West Pakistan's. We called it the ‘Parity Principle'. The Bengali politicians agreed. There is the view that they wanted Pakistan to work, so they agreed to equalize their population with that of West Pakistan, giving up their majority. And look what we did to them. We had a chance to correct this wrong when we made our second constitution in 1962 under an army general. Instead, we adopted all the anti-democratic aspects of the 1956 constitution – what is the difference in constitutions made by civilians and military men? IS it true or not true that most of the foreign exchange earnings from East Pakistan's jute ended up in West Pakistan? Is it not true that during the 1965 war with India we left East Pakistan defenseless on the theory that the defense of East Pakistan lay in the plains of West Pakistan? 1971 showed that this theory was demented. Is it not true that we foisted Urdu on the Bengalis, a language that they were not familiar with, unlike the people of West Pakistan, even though it was not the tongue of any province of the country? The husband treated his wife like a concubine. West Pakistan treated East Pakistan like a colony. What's the difference? Do you think that we are poorer without them today or what? And I use the word ‘poorer' not in the monetary sense. Finally, the Bengalis got their majority back, when another army general did away with the parity principle, returned the unnatural West Pakistan back into its provinces and held elections to make a new constitution and form a government. Followed nine months of killing, loot and rapine – from both sides, millions of Bengalis took refuge in India, the neighboring enemy, which took full advantage, formed a fighting force out of the Bengalis and then attacked Pakistan. Despite the bombast and bluster of our general-in-charge who went by the name of ‘Tiger', it was all over in days and East Pakistan was wrested from us to become Bangladesh. If we had honored the voice of the people, would the outcome have been any worse? I beg to submit that it would not. In fact, Pakistan would have been a united and powerful country, rather than wondering where its sovereignty and independence have gone, as we are doing today. This is the day we sit and lament and analyze every December, blaming all and sundry for what happened but not ourselves. We have learned no lessons. Which is why we are still unable to find solutions to our problems. It is bootless to say that the Punjab did it or the bureaucracy is responsible or that the fault lies with the army or that it is the politicians who are the real devils. They all are to blame, for we forget that they are all the same. They are predators in different garb. It matters little to the prey what kind of clothes the predator is wearing or how he identifies himself. The Bengalis were in the forefront of our freedom movement – in fact the All India Muslim League was born in Dhaka in 1906. Those who belonged to West Pakistan joined the fray much later, some not at all. They belonged to Muslim-majority areas and where they were in a majority they did not feel threatened and feel the need for an independent homeland as much as Muslims who were in a minority did. When you get something without having yearned for it, you often don't treasure it, except for verbiage. As soon as independence came Pakistan was occupied by its predator class – the feudal robber barons of Sindh and Punjab, the tribal chieftains of the Frontier and Balochistan, the bureaucracy then led by the Urdu-speaking migrants from India, later the military, the media, academia etc, etc, etc. The fights between them are fights amongst predators: who will get a bigger portion of the kill. To be sure East Pakistan also had a predator class, but it was treated like hyenas, foxes, vultures and the like, to pick on the bones that the predators of West Pakistan has left. They wanted their rightful place in the gorging order and were denied. They same goes today for the sardars of Balochistan, with their slaves, their private jails and the power of life and death over their tribes. Now that the Bengalis of East Pakistan are free in Bangladesh, are they better off? The people are still the prey; their predators now have the premier place on the table. Their poor are as poor, their wretched as wretched. They were ruled twice by the Pakistani army and they have been ruled twice by the Bangladeshi army. We suffer from dynastic politics; they too suffer from dynastic politics. So what's the difference? That it's better to be ruled by one's own predators rather than someone else's? Pathetic. – The writer is Op
