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December 16, 1971: a flashback: A day when Lahore was thunderstruck
LAHORE: December 16, 1971 was a day when Lahore was thunderstruck. People were glued to their radios hearing BBC reporting that Pakistan Army had surrendered in Dhaka and East Pakistan had become a new country, Bangladesh.

Daily Times spoke to Dr Mubashir Hassan, former federal finance minister and the then Pakistan People’s Party Lahore chapter chairman, and Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan, an eminent activist, on the fall of Dhaka and its impact on Lahore and its people.

“The city was totally stunned with the news of the humiliating surrender,” Dr Mubashir said. “The people could not believe their eyes when Indian General Arora brandished his sword and cut the lapels off Pakistan’s General Niazi’s shoulders on Indian Television.”

“For a whole week before that,” he said, “Pakistanis had been told of their victories over the Indian army and how it had been stopped from marching into what was then East Pakistan.” Dr Mubashir said the people of Lahore fully supported the army. “When I told a very educated man that we are losing, he said, ‘No, we are not. Chinese armies are about to march into India to support Pakistan and the American fleet has arrived in the Bay of Bengal armed with nuclear weapons which will be used against India’,” Dr Mubashir recalled.

He said General Yahya Khan asked Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to return to Pakistan. “Bhutto did not reject Yahya’s offer but was not willing to return to Pakistan unless he was sure that Yahya had become week enough not to take action against the PPP,” Dr Mubashir said.

“When Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) announced a procession against Yahya’s government on December 17, I announced that the PPP would also hold a procession,” he said. “Mustafa Khar tried to convince me to call off the procession. I did not cancel the procession but postponed it. Two days passed in the suspended state, then I got a coded message from Khar, ‘It is a turnkey job’. This message brought back Bhutto.”

“Meanwhile, some people had burned down Yahya’s house in Peshawar and not a single magistrate or constable stopped them,” he said. “The end is: The Pakistan Army lost all the respect it had among people on December 16, 1971.”

Talking to Daily Times, Tahira Mazhar Ali, a progressive activist from Lahore, recalled seeing an old man going on his bicycle on the Shadman Road loudly mourning the fall of Dhaka that evening. “We were only eight women who protested on the Democratic Women’s Association platform, and were later arrested.”

“There were rapes in Dhaka and tears in the eyes of Lahori women because they thought that whoever raped women was someone’s son, father, brother or husband,” she said. The majority of Lahoris were silent but sad, she said. “They were keeping their voices low, afraid of the military, but BBC broadcasted the news and the Pakistani media released it later. The military had been claiming that all was well in West Pakistan and things were in control,” Tahira said.

“We demanded that military action be stopped in Dhaka,” she said, “but the protest only resulted in our office being raided and all the literature confiscated.” Tahira blamed the army for the East Pakistan debacle.
Posted by: john 2006-12-17
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=175340