Why Pakistan Needs a Rear-View Mirror

India should take additional economic sanctions that hurt, initiate a few covert actions and expect some fireworks on the LoC. The government must do what it has to do, without remorse or without pity. The endgame is important.

- SHIV KUNAL VERMA

I was barely eleven years old when Pakistan launched its preemptive air strike on 3 December 1971, which led to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declaring on All India Radio that ‘India is at War with Pakistan’.

Huddled around our radio sets, the entire country knew the gloves were off and what had been on the cards for a few months, was then a reality. The ground shook as the big guns opened up both in the eastern and western sectors, and six years after the two countries had been involved in a slugfest, war had been thrust upon India by Pakistani generals yet again.

No matter how one looks at it, just what were Yahya Khan, Tikka Khan and the redoubtable AAK Niazi smoking, remains a mystery, for despite their big talk, they not only shot themselves in the foot but succeeded in blowing off East Pakistan from the world map.

Bangladesh was liberated in 14 days, and 93,000 Pakistani officers and men, were sitting behind barbed wire fences in various POW camps across India. And yet, the Pakistani army once again escaped censure in the eyes of their own people.

The enigma that became Pakistan based on a forced ‘two-nation’ theory continues to baffle. That the British played us as a people is a well-established fact, and once they zeroed in on personal ambitions and individual greed for what would become the Radcliffe Line, it was a cake walk for them to split the Subcontinent.

Yet, the final nail in the coffin was hammered in by our own people. Ironically, Bengal, which during the INA trials had shown an unprecedented degree of solidarity when Congress and Muslim League flags had flown from the same poles in Calcutta, became a battleground as Jinnah’s call for a Direct Action Day saw horrific communal violence at an unprecedented scale.