‘Mujib’s secularism had limits, and so did his trust in India’: Looking back at Bangladesh in 1975

Informed about these developments just before her Independence Day speech at the Red Fort, Gandhi was shaken. It fuelled her paranoia about what her own enemies could do — a fear that developed in parallel with India’s rise as a paramount subcontinental power after 1971 and led to the imposition of Emergency in June 1975. She used Mujib’s assassination to justify the imposition and continuation of the Emergency. In four years of liberation, India lost an ally in Dacca, and R&AW, the Machiavellian architect of Bangladesh’s liberation, stood humiliated. India saw Mujib’s assassination as Pakistan ‘striking back’.

New Delhi had feared for Mujib’s life. Ten days before the assassination, Kao visited Dacca to warn Mujib about such threats and requested he shift his residence to ‘Bangabhaban’. Mujib refused. But now that Mujib was dead, New Delhi engaged with the new regime. It debated the merits of such engagement and also considered arming pro-Mujib figures. To understand India’s actions after Mujib’s death, it’s critical to understand how it viewed Bangladesh’s economic and political situation before the act.

Bangladesh felt the real force of the 1947 partition’s economic disconnect from India after liberation. Pakistan’s half-hearted attempts to augment jute and textile production and exports from East Pakistan, failure to enhance industrial and infrastructure capacities, and inability to manage unionism meant that economic disenfranchisement with West Pakistan drove Bengali separatism as much as language politics. During Operation Searchlight, Bangladesh’s human capital received a further blow as its educated and business elite were targeted.

Inheritance of such a troubled economy ensured that feeding all Bangladeshis and stabilising the economy were pressing concerns for Mujib. Unfortunately, he failed to develop systems that could prevent famine. Food grain production was not the problem; lack of distribution capacities coupled with corruption and instability was. Bangladeshi leadership’s failure to overcome internal fissures helped create the 1974 famine. Mujib’s ‘drastic’ response to ban political parties and create a one-party system known as the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League (Baksal) — a Moscow-backed idea that Mujib termed a ‘second revolution’ — topped the list of structural causes for his assassination in India’s reading.

As someone who lived through the famine remembers, “during 1974 all we used to eat was rice water, and my mother owned just two sarees”. For an economist, it was “1943 re-enacted”. The traumas of the 1974 famine, which occurred after the flooding of river Padma, are documented in The Unfashionable Tragedy by filmmaker John Pilger. He notes that it was “possibly the greatest famine in recorded history”. The official death estimate stands at 27,000, but unofficial estimates range between 1 to 1.5 million. Indian officials noted that the famine led to another spurt in cross-border displacement and the BSF ‘intercepted about 50,000 Bangladesh nationals’ between August 1974 and July 1975. Most were ‘pushed back’.

Mujib needed to urgently augment food production and streamline distribution. But to fill the gap, food donations from India and the US were critical. The US food aid, as part of the PL480 programme, helped preventing famine before 1974. But it was contingent on Cold War geopolitics. Washington, DC cancelled two large shipments scheduled for delivery in September 1974. Why? Because the aid came with a clause that recipients must not trade with countries blacklisted by the US (Cuba in this case). Indian food aid itself had stopped in July 1972 due to drought in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal. Bangladesh’s tiny forex reserve and a global food grain price hike in the early 1970s worsened the situation. India offered to rebuild destroyed infrastructure and improve bilateral trade as solutions. But that counted for little.

The speed and scale of Bangladesh’s economic collapse meant that India was first in line for people’s fury. Propaganda blaming India for destroying the Hardinge bridge and Indian engineers who repaired it for stealing Bangladeshi property was pervasive. Bilateral ties tensed over Ganga river water sharing. The existence of Farakka barrage and hitherto abortive talks with Pakistan meant that ‘India is drying us up’ became a popular refrain. In April 1972, India offered 40,000 cusecs of water, as opposed to Mujib’s demand for 35,000 cusecs, to subside the issue.

But a popular feeling that India was exploiting Bangladesh took root. Worried that Indian private interests were encouraging smuggling, Dacca demanded government-to-government economic interactions only. This meant that big businesses such as the Scindia Steam Navigation Co. led by Sumati Morarjee, the first woman leader in Indian shipping, who wanted to ‘serve Bangla Desh by establishing its trade and commerce with the rest of the world’, were asked not to enter the field. The idea of an India-Bangladesh Economic Community was also shot down. It could make ‘third countries … inimical to India and Bangladesh’ argue that India was ‘trying to exploit Bangladesh and are treating it as a satellite country’.

On 5 July 1973, months before famine hit, India and Bangladesh signed a trade agreement that came into effect on 28 September. It introduced a Balanced Trade Payments Arrangement (BTPA) for a three-year period with the clause of planning annual trade deals. Trade plans for 1973–74 allowed India to import Bangladeshi jute and newsprint at international prices but sell coal at a domestic price of 82 rupees per tonne when the international price was 364 rupees. Expectedly, none of these arrangements or post-war relief prevented the famine that began in March 1974 due to flooding, state incapacity, and corruption. The government opened 4,300 langar-khaana (feeding camps) that fed nearly 6 million people by October–November 1974. But even here, the hoarding of supplies undermined efforts. Itself banking on PL480, India viewed the BTPA as unsustainable and increased coal prices by 50% mid-famine. The Indian Red Cross did offer 500,000 rupees (65,000 USD) worth of relief, and Gandhi sanctioned another 5.5 million rupees (700,000 USD) in assistance, but clarified that India couldn’t offer more.

Indian diplomats felt that Mujib’s 1975 emergency measures were too little, too late. From Dacca, Jyotindra Nath Dixit, India’s ambitious deputy high commissioner, reported that Mujib’s plan to shift the ‘centre of gravity from the District headquarters to the Taluk headquarters’ was done in the ‘pious hope’ of shifting the state’s distributive capacities in rural Bangladesh. Instead, it alienated elites, and ‘did nothing to remove the burden on ordinary Bangla citizens’.41 Though Mujib was still popular, Baksal’s failure could ‘result in his elimination from the political affairs’. The authoritarian anticipations on Mujib’s part had come true.

As Amartya Sen notes in his seminal 1981 study, Bangladesh’s food grain production in 1974 was higher than in previous years. It was post-Emergency measures, including the creation of Baksal, that were ineffectual. Bangladesh was played a bad economic hand in 1971, and there were limits to what any government could have done. But Mujib made the situation worse, and many people believe that he paid the price for it with his life. A week after his assassination, Indian officials noted the ‘deep scepticism of Mujib’s capacity to improve matters’ tilted the balance against Bangabandhu.

As India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh negotiated on the prisoners of war issue, diplomatic recognition, and repatriation, two official antinomies emerged — and caused political collapse.

The first antinomy was Bangladesh’s reliance on India. Coupled with a troubled experience of joint warfighting and tensions over water-sharing, trade, migration, and smuggling, such reliance became a liability for Mujib. This antinomy turned Bangladeshi opinion against India. The notion that India treated 1971 as a conflict with Pakistan instead of a people’s war continues to rankle Bangladeshis. Leaders such as Bhashani, who received Indian support during the war, returned to anti-India politics. Equally, the NAP-B, along with the ‘best organised of all’ 47 left-wing Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) led by former freedom fighter and India critic Md. Abdul Jalil, claimed that India was encouraging smuggling (a long-time Pakistani allegation). They criticised Calcutta-based Marwari businesspersons for dumping sub-standard products and stealing Bangladeshi wealth.

Such campaigns fed popular beliefs that India was looting Bangladesh and wanted to make it a semi-colony. Public sentiments were on display when people blocked the train in which Indian engineers who repaired the Hardinge bridge were returning. Under impression that their equipment was Bangladeshi, protesters allowed the engine and the engineers to leave, but confiscated the wagons and goods.

Mujib’s secularism had limits, and so did his trust in India. Soon after liberation, one of the first things he did was reduce India’s intelligence footprint in Bangladesh. He didn’t want R&AW to cultivate links with his opponents, especially the JSD. Mujib’s ties with Indian intelligence in the 1960s to subvert Pakistan worried him that New Delhi could adopt a similar strategy against him. There was truth to this because Banerjee, R&AW’s point-person on Bangladesh, was indeed engaging with Mujib’s critics in the Chattra League who joined the JSD. In September 1972, Dutt warned that while he had ‘no knowledge whatsoever of R&AW’s activities in Bangladesh’, he hoped that Banerjee didn’t offer money to ‘Ganakantha’ (a newspaper run by Mujib’s critics), which many believed was the case.85 Undoubtedly, R&AW was furious that it ‘lost’ Bangladesh less than four years after 1971.

Here, it’s critical to underscore how India viewed the role of external powers in Mujib’s assassination. India’s first reading shows that it saw the killing as a Pakistani plot with an indirect British connection. In a political sense, Indian officials felt that Bhutto and Pakistan were ‘merely pegs on which anti-Mujib groups wanted to hang their coat on [and] Pakistan could very well be exaggerating its influence or responsibility’. Given that neither Pakistan nor China were physically present in Bangladesh, India sought to ‘avoid jumping to conclusions about actual physical interference by their agencies’ because ‘there is all the difference in the world between diffuse sympathy and actual conspiracy’. But in a practical sense, the real villain of the piece in New Delhi’s eyes was the Bangladeshi community in the UK that housed ‘a highly organised pro-Pakistan anti-Mujib movement’ with Pakistani support.

India concluded that the ‘necessary details of the actual coup, the courier arrangements etc. must have been the work of conspiracy between anti-Mujib Bangladesh bureaucrats and Army officers in the U.K. with the Pakistan government’. The belief in a British link to the conspiracy was strengthened by the fact that a ‘crucial military intelligence figure’ returned to Dacca from London on 12 August, indicating that the ‘manner of the coup’ was decided abroad. India was not blaming London for the coup, but such aspects deepened India’s concerns that the Pakistani and British Bangladeshi diaspora was inimical to India.

On the role of the US, Indian officials were unsure whether the CIA was involved and assessed that ‘in the absence of hard evidence, it would be unwise to distribute responsibility over too wide an area’.

Given the turbulent underbelly of India’s relations with Mujib, his assassination shocked Gandhi and humiliated the R&AW, but India’s overall reaction was measured. A K Damodaran, Joint Secretary (Public Policy) at the MEA, who followed the situation closely with Jagdish Ajmani, JS (Bangladesh), identified four areas where India’s interests could face direct consequences.

The first was the ‘possible revival of Mizo rebellion’. The second was an uptick in Naxalite activity in the border areas, and ‘recrudescence’ of ultra-leftist groups in the Sunderbans. The third was an attempt to ‘reactivate the small Muslim minority movement in the Arakan district of Burma’, namely the arming of Rohingyas. Finally, Bangladesh could call itself an Islamic Republic, leading to another Hindu exodus. None of these issues required drastic measures.

India dealt with Moshtaque with caution but not panic. Damodaran recommended that having expressed ‘unequivocal regret’ at Mujib’s death, India must return to ‘business as usual’. This was done when the Bangladeshi high commissioner to India called foreign secretary Kewal Singh four days after the killing and clarified that there would be no change in Dacca’s foreign policy. Singh welcomed continuity, regretted that the Indian high commission’s telephones were disconnected, and signalled that New Delhi sought normalisation between Pakistan and Bangladesh. In fact, the MEA recommended that Samar Sen, India’s high commissioner in Dacca who’d recently replaced Dutt (was in India on the day of the killing), must return to Bangladesh sooner rather than later to avoid indicating ‘India’s coolness or even displeasure towards the new government’.

India’s aid commitment must not increase but should be ‘purposeful and efficient’, and the security forces must create a cordon sanitaire along the borders to ‘prevent population transfers and smuggling’. On Farraka, India should insist on the observance of the interim agreement, and stress continuity between the two governments given ‘Khondkar’s Mujibnagar past and presence of some pro-Indian Ministers’. On publicity and cultural matters, Damodaran recommended maintaining a low profile, operating on the assumption that…anyone not overtly anti-Indian is for us and not the other way round. We have to be extremely subtle and delicate to the point of hypocrisy in attributing to most Bangladeshi bureaucrats and politicians a virtue they may not possess. This is what Pakistanis are now doing. We should assume that Bangla population continues to be grateful to us and would be with us if only their major economic ills are overcome.

Then came the kicker. To justify this approach as if nothing had happened, Damodaran counselled, and others agreed, that India ‘should recall the converse fact that at no moment did Mujib or his colleagues make any basic concessions because of his being ‘pro-India’’. In agreement with Damodaran, Dixit forewarned that Moshtaque ‘himself may be replaced by a more authoritarian political leader or officer from the Bangladesh armed forces’. He advocated that India had to maintain its extensive contacts in the army and para-military forces whom we should continue to cultivate to the extent possible. Our overall objective should be to encourage the re-emergence of a government which would be friendly to India, and which is dedicated to the ideas of policies which motivated the liberation struggle of Bangladesh.

India’s relations with Mujib were troubled, but he was essential to Indian interests. Unsurprisingly, the Indian army’s eastern command including GOC-in-C Lt. Gen. Jack F R Jacob, who fought in 1971, was ‘relaxed and unconcerned’ on the day Mujib died. But this changed in November. On 3 November, Tajuddin, India’s actual ally, was murdered in Dacca Central Jail along with three AL stalwarts: Syed Nazrul Islam, AHM Qamaruzzaman, and Md. Mansur Ali. Four days later, another coup—a countercoup, in fact—rocked Dacca. Tajuddin was killed by Dalim and his comrades just before they flew to Bangkok to ensure that R&AW stood no chance of re-installing pro-India figures in Dacca. Now India panicked.