As December draws to a close, it is time to go back to history. Pakistanis and Bengalis need to be informed anew of the conditions unfolding in Pakistan as the Mukti Bahini and its Indian allies raced to free towns and cities in occupied Bangladesh from the Pakistan army. In the west, in what would soon be transformed from West Pakistan to Pakistan, rather curious things were happening in December.

It was not merely the fact that the Indians and Pakistanis were locked in a war there from 3 December onward. It was also a matter of what a desperate military regime headed by General Yahya Khan happened to be doing as the conflict escalated on 3 December.

On that day, Yahya Khan and his junta made it known, in bizarre fashion, that a new constitution was on the anvil for Pakistan. The fact that East Pakistan was speedily on its way to being Bangladesh was ignored, that Pakistan’s eastern province would within days be a sovereign nation was not taken into account. There was more which happened on 3 December.

In the aftermath of the outbreak of war on the western front, Yahya Khan appointed Nurul Amin, the Bengali politician then head of the Pakistan Democratic Party (PDP), as Prime Minister. Amin was one of the Bengali figures who had travelled to Rawalpindi in mid-November, the others being Ghulam Azam, Raja Tridiv Roy, Mahmud Ali of Sylhet and Hamidul Haq Chowdhury.

Yahya Khan also appointed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been sent as his emissary to Beijing in November, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Bhutto was then despatched to New York to speak for Pakistan at the UN Security Council, where deliberations were going on about a ceasefire on both the eastern and western fronts.

Once Bangladesh stood liberated on 16 December, circumstances underwent swift change in Pakistan. On 16 December, Yahya Khan was too inebriated to speak to his people in a radio or television broadcast. Meanwhile, for a couple of times Pakistan Television showed the surrender ceremony in Dhaka in its news broadcasts but was soon compelled to stop doing it. The reason was obvious: demonstrations against the regime were breaking out in Pakistan’s cities.
A recorded speech of Yahya Khan, promising, rather improbably, a continuation of the war, was carried by Radio Pakistan the next day. On the same day, General Abdul Hamid Khan, the army’s Chief of General Staff, was shouted out of a room where he tried to explain the military’s position to angry army officers.

The officers would have none of it. The humiliation of the army’s surrender in Bangladesh quickly developed into a situation where the officers demanded that Yahya Khan and his fellow generals quit. It was at that point that Yahya Khan called Bhutto in New York, asking him to return home.

Bhutto did not fly directly back to Rawalpindi. He had no idea that he would take over from Yahya Khan and was in fact apprehensive of the post-surrender conditions in what remained of Pakistan. He travelled to Washington, where he met President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

Following the conversation, he flew to Rome, from where he took off for Pakistan. Bhutto arrived in Rawalpindi on the morning of 20 December and was received by his party’s influential figure Ghulam Mustafa Khar. It was Khar who whisked him away to the President’s House, where Yahya Khan waited for him.

At the President’s House was the bureaucrat Ghulam Ishaq Khan (he would years later become President and at one point dismiss Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1990). President Yahya Khan, according to a later version by Bhutto, made it known to him that prior to handing over power to him he would like to implement the sentence of death passed on the incarcerated Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was then in solitary confinement in Pakistan.
As Bhutto would later say, he rejected Yahya Khan’s request on the ground that the execution of the Bengali leader would jeopardise the lives of the 93,000 Pakistani soldiers and civilians who had become prisoners of war in Bangladesh.

Bhutto was sworn as President of Pakistan within minutes, a ceremony preceded by Yahya Khan affixing his signature to his letter of resignation. It was an inglorious end for Yahya Khan’s presidency, which he had assumed in March 1969 in violation of the constitution of 1962 at the time in force in Pakistan.
Instead of power being transferred to Abdul Jabbar Khan, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Yahya Khan and officers loyal to him forced President Ayub Khan to hand over power to him. Once in power, Yahya Khan promptly placed Pakistan under martial law, the second in the country’s history, abrogated the constitution, dissolved the National and Provincial Assemblies and clamped a ban on political activities in the two wings of the country.

It was Yahya Khan’s grave misfortune to have presided over the break-up of Pakistan only twenty-three years into the creation of the country. In March 1971, when he flew clandestinely out of Dhaka without calling an official end to the regime’s negotiations with the Awami League on the modalities of a transfer of power, he had Bangabandhu arrested and the Awami League banned as a political party.

He vowed to punish Bangabandhu, whose ‘crime will not go unpunished’. Meanwhile, Operation Searchlight was causing havoc in Dhaka and elsewhere in what had by then turned into an occupied Bangladesh.
One of Bhutto’s first acts as President was to place Yahya Khan under house arrest and retire all the senior generals --- Hamid Khan, SGMM Peerzada and others --- who had been part of the junta. Late in the evening, President Bhutto addressed the people of Pakistan over radio.

It was a rambling speech where he vowed to build what he called a new Pakistan. He said nothing about Bangladesh’s liberation but promised to ensure the rights of ‘East Pakistan’. The fiction of ‘East Pakistan’ was a refrain that would be voiced in Pakistan till August 1973, when a new constitution was adopted for the country.

In his broadcast, Bhutto told his audience that thenceforth there would be no commanders-in-chief of the three armed services. The heads of these forces would be chiefs of staff. Bhutto also had a dig at what he called the fat generals who had till then lorded it over the country. There would no more be fat and flabby generals, he declaimed. It was not a speech where Bhutto projected his vision for his country, which was understandable given the dire straits Pakistan had slipped into.
It was obvious, though, that Bhutto, who had been harbouring presidential ambitions since 1968, when he had announced his intention to take on his erstwhile benefactor Ayub Khan at the presidential election that would have taken place in January 1970, had begun to enjoy power. He was also Chief Martial Law Administrator, the first civilian politician to hold the job.

Within a couple of days of taking power, Bhutto appointed Nurul Amin Vice President of Pakistan. The position was the first in the country’s history and Amin would hold it till the National Assembly moved Pakistan from a presidential to a parliamentary form of government in 1973. Into his cabinet, Bhutto inducted Mahmud Ali and Raja Tridiv Roy.

On 22 December, on the instructions of Pakistan’s new leader, the incarcerated Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was shifted from solitary confinement in prison to house arrest in a rest house near Rawalpindi. The next day, 23 December, a surprised Bangabandhu saw Bhutto turn up at the rest house to meet him. It was their first meeting since the collapse of the constitutional talks in Dhaka in March.
The two men conversed, with Bhutto briefing, in his own fashion, the man who would have been Pakistan’s first elected Prime Minister of the change that had come over Pakistan. On 27 December, Bhutto met Bangabandhu again, pleading with Bangladesh’s founding father for some links, even loose ones, to be kept between the two countries.
That was December 1971 in Pakistan. It is history Bangladesh’s people as well as Pakistan’s need to go back to, now and always.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history