Yahya Khan was Pakistan’s military dictator from March 1969 to December 1971. But for his penchant for genocide, we’d regard him as a uniformed buffoon from the cast of an operetta, with his bushy eyebrows, thirst for booze and priapic lust for plump paramours. It was somehow fitting that he declared war on India in a whiskey-fueled rage after finding his mistress in bed with his own son.
The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
Ecco 528 pages
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The mistress was Bengali—from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh—and it is entirely possible that she cuckolded Yahya Khan in this spectacular way as a form of revenge for what the general was doing to her people. In March 1971—under a plan called Operation Searchlight—the Pakistan army, consisting predominantly of Punjabi soldiers from West Pakistan, was given orders to conduct massacres in Bengali-dominated East Pakistan. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian tell us in “The Vortex,” soldiers killed 25,000 unarmed civilians in the first 12 hours of the operation, targeting especially East Pakistan’s intelligentsia and Hindu minority. By the time the army left several months later, an estimated three million Bengalis had been killed, with 10 million more marooned as refugees in neighboring India.
Messrs. Carney and Miklian write that the Pakistan army also opened a “diabolical new terror front”: the systematic rape of Bengali women, 250,000 in the spring of 1971 alone. The general commanding the Pakistani troops, the authors say, told his men “to rape as many women as they could to breed out East Pakistan’s Hinduness.” This directive reflected a belief widely held in West Pakistan—and held, in fact, by Yahya Khan himself—that the Bengalis were “fake Muslims,” still in thrall to the Hindu religion from which they’d converted to Islam centuries earlier.
By this reckoning, the substantial Hindu minority in East Pakistan was an affront to Pakistan’s status as an Islamic nation. Many West Pakistanis—particularly those in the military establishment—also regarded the Bengalis as racially inferior, dismissing them as effete and unmanly. The Punjabis were particularly contemptuous of the Bengalis’ skin color, which is a few shades darker than the Punjabi norm. Yahya Khan, we’re told, regarded Bengalis as “those black bastards.”
The authors describe “The Vortex” as a book of narrative nonfiction, and it certainly is that, the product of more than 200 interviews and multiple trips to Bangladesh, undertaken to help build dramatic (and occasionally theatrical) reconstructions of events. Mr. Carney is an investigative journalist with a raft of lively books to his name, and Mr. Miklian is an academic who works on political conflict and human rights. The word in the title is literal and metaphorical. It refers not just to the political upheaval in late 1971 but also to Bhola, the cyclonic storm that barreled up the Bay of Bengal—“an expanse of water about the same size as Texas”—and hit the coast of East Pakistan on Nov. 12, 1970. An estimated 500,000 people lost their lives, making it, the authors say, “the largest loss of life in a single weather event in all of human history.” For the authors, Bhola is an emblem of intensifying misery and a harbinger of the human violence to come.
“The Vortex” is at its best in its first third, where the authors describe in harrowing detail nature’s assault on the island of Manpura, one of several silt islets carved into existence by rivers pouring into the Bay of Bengal. At the time of Bhola, Manpura was home to 50,000 people, of whom 40,000 died. We witness the cyclone descending on the islet through the eyes of Mohammad Hai, a local teenager who would, months later, join his fellow Bengalis in a guerrilla war against the Pakistan army. He survived by clinging to a palm tree for hours, but his entire family and all their livestock perished. As the cyclone descended, the authors write, “the ropes around the cows’ necks became nooses.” The wind “blew so strong that it dragged the cows sideways until they strangled to death.”
Afterward, the air took on “a darker character”—conveying “the smell of mass death.” Bloated bodies choked the channels. Boatmen slowed down when they got near women’s bodies “lest their long, tangled hair get stuck in the propeller.” Yahya Khan didn’t bother to tour the cyclone-hit areas until well over a week later. He was, the authors say, too busy brokering a meeting between President Nixon and the Chinese. When he did helicopter in to inspect a havoc-stricken island, his aides were more interested in ensuring that he’d have his favorite whiskey on hand than in delivering assistance. When he spoke to the destitute Bengali villagers, he exhorted them to “eat roti”—the wheat-bread staple of West Pakistan—instead of rice. “You will be stronger and more able to tackle the challenges in this difficult time.”
Bhola was, in the authors’ telling, a perfect storm. For its devastation occurred at a time when East Pakistanis, despised as second-class citizens since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, were feeling ever more mutinous. The callousness with which the Yahya regime responded to the ravages of Bhola made it plain that “West Pakistan didn’t care if Bengalis died”—as an American meteorologist, on a fact-finding mission to East Pakistan after the storm, concluded. A Pakistani general told him that “this cyclone solved about half a million of our problems.” Hair-raising though it seemed, the military welcomed the deaths.
There was method to this callousness. Yahya Khan, intent on going down in history as Pakistan’s greatest statesman, had committed himself to holding free elections on Dec. 7, 1970, to decide his successor. His aides urged him to cancel them, as did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leading candidate from West Pakistan. The problem was demographic—Bengalis outnumbered West Pakistanis. A man named
Mujibur Rahman
—Sheikh Mujib, as he was known—was the leader of the Bengali nationalist Awami League. If elections were held, and if Bengali voters united behind him, there was no mathematical chance for anyone other than Mujib to form the next government. That the country might be governed by Bengalis was, of course, anathema to Bhutto and the army.
But Yahya Khan, the authors write, was determined to “fulfill his audacious promise” to deliver Pakistan’s first-ever fair election. Mujib won, taking roughly double the number of seats of Bhutto’s party, making him, by right, Pakistan’s prime minister. The results, however, jolted Yahya Khan out of his delusions. Egged on by Bhutto, he never accepted the Bengalis’ victory. On March 7, 1971, Mujib all but declared an independent Bangladesh at a massive political rally in Dacca, East Pakistan’s capital. Both Bhutto and Gen. Tikka Khan—Yahya’s murderous governor in East Pakistan—wanted Mujib executed. Yahya refused, calling Bhutto a “venomous toad” in a shouting match. But he ordered Mujib’s arrest, flying him to a jail in West Pakistan. Mujib, say Messrs. Carney and Miklian, was the only person captured alive during Operation Searchlight.
The rest of the story is well known, though the authors tell it with riveting panache. Pakistani troops butchered Bengalis for several months. The Bengalis fought back, with the aid of India, as a mighty mass of refugees crossed the border. India was itching to intervene militarily but lacked a cast-iron casus belli. On Dec. 3, 1971, a drunken Yahya Khan gave it one. After threatening to shoot his son for sleeping with his Bengali concubine—whom he called “Black Beauty”—he ordered airstrikes on India. “Thank God, they’ve attacked us,” Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, is reported to have said. Indian troops now poured into East Pakistan. On Dec. 16, the general commanding Pakistani troops in Dacca surrendered. India took 90,000 prisoners of war.
The storm was over, for the moment. Yahya Khan went into retirement. The scheming Bhutto became prime minister of a truncated Pakistan. And Mujib became the leader of a sovereign Bangladesh, appointing himself, the authors tell us, prime minister, minister of defense, home minister and minister of information while also buying himself “the country’s first Cadillac.” He would be assassinated in 1975, in a military coup. The Bengalis may have rid themselves of their Pakistani overlords, but they hadn’t rid themselves of old Pakistani habits.
—Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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