Dr. Abdur Rabb, Montreal
Published in the CanadaBdNews.com on March 18, 2011
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I have often been asked how I found myself in West Pakistan during the period of political conflict between East and West Pakistan. I have also been asked about our experiences of living there. I have already written an article on our experiences of March 25, 1971 while we were at the professors’ quarters of the University of Dhaka. I have also written an account of our escape from Karachi on April 6, 1972. Now it is time that I fill in the gap and explain why we were in West Pakistan, and describe the kind of life we lived there.
After having completed my Master’s degree in Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dhaka in 1958, I joined the Department as an assistant professor (lecturer) the same year. In 1963, after five years of work in the University, I came to McGill University in Montreal for higher studies on a Ford Foundation scholarship. My wife Aishah, and our three-year-old son Hamid, joined me in Montreal two years later in 1965. It took me almost seven years to complete my studies at McGill. I had to have a good grasp of Arabic because most of the original material of my research on the famous Sufis–Junayed al- Baghdadi for my Master’s degree and Abu Yazid al-Bistami for my Doctorate degree–was available in Arabic. I was also required to learn Persian and French. The Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill required that a candidate for the degree of Doctor of philosophy acquired a good knowledge of the entire field of Islamic studies: Islamic history, Islamic thought, Islamic institutions, and modern developments in Islam. According to my plans, I got ready to return to the then East Pakistan and rejoin my work at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dhaka. Since we needed our visas to be extended for a short time, we paid a visit to the office of Canadian Immigration. For reasons not known to me, the immigration officer Mr. McNamara liked us very much. He insisted that we stay in Canada. I said, “I came to Canada to get an education so that I could go back to my country and serve my people.” When he failed to persuade me to change our plans of returning to Dhaka, he gave me his business card and said, “Keep this card. If you ever need help, get in touch with me.” I preserved the card carefully. One Canadian University also tried to keep us in Canada. They wanted me to establish a full-fledged Department of Religion in that University, and work as the first head of that Department.
Early in 1970 we left Montreal for Dhaka. On our way we visited West Germany, France and Turkey. Soon after our arrival in Dhaka I joined my work at the University of Dhaka.
I was happy to be back to my own mother country. I loved to be with the Bengali students of the University, and the students were glad to have me back among them. I always loved and cared for my students, and they in turn loved and respected me. We were given accommodation in building No. 28 of the University professors’ quarters. Soon we faced two serious problems. First, although I was promoted to the position of an associate professor (reader), I was given a gross salary of 650 takas per month. After all the deductions at source of income, I was receiving a net pay of approximately 375 takas a month. This amount of money was utterly insufficient for us, especially because our standard of living changed during our seven-year stay in Canada. Hamid used to love to drink many glasses of milk a day back in Canada. Now sometimes we could not even buy one glass of milk for him. So often we did not have enough money to buy the minimum amount of food that three of us needed for our survival. On top of that we received many guests from my home district of Barisal. One day I was going crazy trying to borrow some money for buying foods for guests who just arrived from Barisal. I went to the wife of a colleague of mine who lived nearby, and literally begged her for a loan. She understood my plight and loaned me a small amount of money.
Our financial difficulty worsened when we faced a second problem. Hamid did not study Bangla or Arabic in his Canadian school, and the level of arithmetic at his school in Montreal was relatively low. I admitted him to an English medium school in Dhaka that followed the British system of education; yet he faced a very difficult situation at that school. He just could not handle the work in Bangla, Arabic and Arithmetic. He reached a crisis point so that we thought that he might lose his mind. We were then forced to send him to the Dhaka American School in Gulshan. Then there was a bigger problem: how was I going to pay his monthly tuition fees of 1,200 takas to the American School? I had a total take-home pay of approximately 375 takas. I also had to pay the expenses of driving him to and from Gulshan five days a week.
The Principal of the Dahka American School was a gentleman named Dr. Phillip Capen from California. He was a wise and kind man. He sympathized with my financial dilemma and hired to temporarily teach Bangla culture to the young children of his school. As far as I can remember, I taught two hours a week early in the morning before my regular work at the University. Once Hamid found himself in the American system of education, he did very well so that the school awarded him a scholarship, and gave him a double promotion. My extra work at the American school and Hamid’s scholarship brought temporary financial relief for us.
In the fall of 1970, I saw an advertisement for the position of the Director of Iqbal Academy in West Pakistan. This Academy was a federally funded institution. The primary function of the Director was to conduct research in Islamic philosophy, theology, Sufism, and modern developments in Islam—the fields in which Allamah Iqbal was interested. The Director also conducted the
administration of the Academy, published a quarterly magazine called Iqbal Review, guided Master’s and Doctoral students in their research, delivered lectures at the University of Karachi, and organized an Iqbal Day celebration once a year.
The Academy was located in a posh residential area of Karachi. A local Executive Committee made decisions which the Director executed on a day-to-day basis, and a Governing Body set policies for the Academy. The Governing Body also hired the Director of the Academy. The central Education Minister was the president of the Governing Body which also included the members of the Executive Committee. Dr. Ali Ashraf, brother of Dr. Ali Ahsan who was the former Director of the Bangla Academy, Dhaka was also a member of the Governing Body. Dr. Ali Ashraf was a noble man. He was the head of the Department of English, University of Karachi for many years. He was highly respected by all the people who knew him. Later in life he became a Sufi pir with murids in many countries of the world, including Canada. Before he passed away he came to visit his murids in Canada. I had the honour of receiving him at my home during that visit.
The chairman of the Executive Committee was Mr. Abdul Wahed. He retired as the head of the Forest Department of India. He was a very influential man in Karachi having connections with the upper echelon of the Karachi society. There were three other members of the Executive Committee. Two of them were anti-Abdul Wahed, and the third one more or less neutral. (The significance of the details of the two committees will be explained later in the article.)
I did not think that I could get the job advertized: position of a full professor, many times the salary that I was receiving at the University of Dhaka, a large and beautiful house on top of the Academy office, many bearers, a gardener, gate-keepers, and so on. I was a fresh graduate from McGill, had no publication, and did not know Urdu. Yet I applied anyway. I did not mind wasting the cost of a stamp for a registered letter that I needed to send to the Academy.
To my surprise I was called for an interview in mid-December. I decided to go for the interview because that would at least enable me to visit Karachi at someone else’s expense.
A number of people applied for the job. I was sitting in the lounge of the Academy for my interview. I saw some senior candidates also waiting for their turn. They had many years of experience in teaching and research. Some brought heaps of their published books with them. By contrast I was 34 years old, a fresh graduate of McGill, and had no publication to my credit. I had no doubt in my mind about the result of my interview. I thought that I would go back to Dhaka empty handed; but Allah had made other plans for me.
To my utter surprise I was offered the job. Now the big question is: why did they give me the job? The Academy was riddled with so much internal politics that no significant work had been done at that institution for some time. The Governing Body wanted to employ someone who was not corrupted by the politics of the place. The most important reason for which I think they hired me is that the Bengali Education Minister Professor Shamsul Haqq, and Dr. Ali Ashraf saw an opportunity to give this job to a Bengali for the first time. The entire fund needed by the Academy was provided by the Central Government, but no Bengali, not even a bearer, had ever been employed at the institution in Karachi. I was told later that the Governing Body had no other choice than to respect the wishes of the president Professor Shamsul Haqq and Dr. Ali Ashraf. Mr. Wahed had his own reason to support my candidacy. Two of the four members of the Executive Committee made his life miserable; they always opposed him in whatever he wanted to do in the Academy. These two members were staunch supporters of Mr. Kamali, the existing Deputy Director of the Academy. They fought very hard to give the job of the Director to Mr. Kamali.
I made two conditions for accepting the offer: one, to join the position only after I visit my family in Dhaka; and two, to obtain leave of absence around the time when my wife would deliver (our daughter Shirin) sometime in February 1971. The governing Body accepted my conditions.
I should mention here that the Dhaka University authorities, including my Chairman Dr. G. C. Dev and the Vice-Chancellor of the University, were very happy about my appointment, and sent me to the Iqbal Academy on deputation from the University of Dhaka.
I joined the Academy in January 1971. Within two weeks or so I returned to Dhaka to be with my family. Our daughter was born in February 1971. I returned to Karachi a few days after her birth. In the meantime the political situation of the country was deteriorating fast. Hence I went back to Dhaka to be with my family. I arrived in Dhaka on December 7 by the last PIA flight before the military action on the night of March 25. I left my bags at home and rushed to the Race Course to listen to the speech of Bongobondhu Sheik Majibur Rahman. I was not far from the podium from which he spoke. I still see him in my mind’s eye standing amongst hundreds of thousands of people, and declaring in a thunderous voice: “The struggle now is the struggle for our emancipation. The struggle now is the struggle for our independence. Joy Bangla! Since we have given blood, we shall give more blood. Allah willing, the people of this country will be liberated….Turn every house into a fort. Face (the enemy) with whatever you have in your possession.”
In my article on our experience of the Night of March 25 I have described our experiences from March 7 to April 6, 1971. Hundreds of thousands of people left Dhaka for villages in fear of their life. I decided not to go to my village in Barisal because I feared that we could be killed on the way to that district. I found out later that people were killed by the Pakistani army when they were fleeing from Dhaka. The wife and son of the first Governor of the Bangladesh Bank Mr. Hamidullah, for example, were killed by the army while they were fleeing in small country boats. I just did not know what to do in that situation. On April 6 when the curfew was lifted for the first time for the entire day-light period I decided to see Principal Dr. Capen for his advice in the matter. He was not only a wise man and a good friend of mine; as an American he also knew through diplomatic sources what was going on in the country. A relative of ours Mr. Anisur Rahman drove me to Dr. Capen’s house in Gulshan One. My meeting with Dr. Capen was very brief, not lasting more than ten minutes. He said to me forcefully, “Get the hell out of here.” I also learned that the American Government ordered the evacuation of all the American women and children from East Pakistan.
I would like to pause for a moment to say how I took major decisions of my life. The way I got married will serve as the first example. I knew a gentleman from Barisal named Professor Maksudur Rahman. I also knew that he was a trustworthy man. On an evening of October 1959 when I met him at a bus station in Dhaka he told me that his colleague, who according to him was a saintly person, had a daughter, and that he would like to give her in marriage to a good young man. He also told me that the young lady was a student in the University. The next morning I saw her from a distance near the famous amtola in front of the old Arts Building, and instantly decided to marry her. We have now been happily married for 51 years. As a second example I wish to say that although I worked as a professor, I have been running a real estate business on the side for the last 30 years. I buy, renovate, rent and sell apartment buildings in Montreal. In many cases I entered a building on sale, looked around for a few minutes, and told the owner or the real estate agent, “I shall buy the building for the asking price.” The owner or the agent was surprised that I instantly decided to buy the building without any inspection by experts and negotiation of the price. I think a little, and do a lot. Once I make a decision, mostly on intuition, I work hard to implement that decision. . I believe that Allah makes those decisions for me, and I just act as a tool in His hand. I can say that all the major decisions of my life that I took on the basis of intuition produced worthwhile results.
I instantly decided to accept Dr. Capen’s ‘order’. We left his place without a minute’s delay. On our way to Baitul Qadri on Elephant Road where we were staying we stopped at the Tejgaon Airport. We learned that the first PIA flight since March 7 was leaving the same afternoon. Mr. Rahman who drove me to Gulshan was a rich man. He had a bundle of money with him, and he loaned me the amount of money that I needed to buy four tickets to go to Karachi on that flight. I came home and told my wife that we were leaving for the airport within two hours. As far as I remember, we could only inform my father-in-law about our planned departure.
I will never forget what I saw at the airport. The entire open space of the airport building was filled with thousands of people sitting on the floor. They were all Pakistanis and Biharis anxious to leave East Pakistan. There was a long and narrow passage from the main entrance door of the building to the ticket counter at the opposite end. On both sides of the passage at two feet intervals were vicious-looking soldiers with their guns drawn. We somehow squeezed through the passage and reached the ticket counter. I saw many eyes of the people sitting on the floor staring at us. I think that they were asking themselves: “Who are these crazy Bengali guys who are going to West Pakistan at this time?” The same happened in the aircraft. We were the only Bengali passengers. The non-Bengali passengers were staring at us and, I think, asking themselves the same question about us.
We took about six hours to reach Karachi. The aircraft was not allowed to fly over India. It flew south to the Bay of Bengal, then the Indian Ocean passing over Srilanka, and finally over the Arabian Sea. We were very much shocked by what we saw outside the Karachi Airport. We saw some people playing football and others going about doing what they normally do in the late afternoon. One part of the country was burning and thousands of people there were being killed every day; and in another part of the country, mostly unaware of what was happening in the other part, the people had completely normal life. I just could not believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. The same happened during the next nine months. Killing, rapes, burning and destruction continued in the East; but the people of the West were kept in the dark as to what was happening in the other part of the country. It was only the military and the upper-level bureaucrats who knew what the military was doing in the East.
From the very beginning I had to deal with a serious problem at the Academy. The Deputy Director Mr. Kamali, and the librarian of the Academy refused to accept a Bengali Director. They decided not to come to the Academy for work. Mr. Kamali had his friends in the Executive Committee pass a resolution asking me to send his salary cheques to his house on the first day of every month. The matter did not end there. It seemed that these two employees of the Academy knew what was going on in East Pakistan. Hence they took advantage of the existing political atmosphere and tried to oust me from the Academy. I received several anonymous telephone calls asking us to leave the Academy. The callers said that they were going to kill me and my family if we did not leave within specific dates. More than once I visited the police station to register the death threats against us. The authorities provided 24-hour police protection for us. The military general in charge of Karachi received many serious complaints against me. I was allegedly “holding secret meetings with Bengali Air Force officers planning to blow up the military installations of the Karachi area” and “plotting to overthrow the Government of Pakistan.” Another complaint was that “I had had grenades, bombs and guns in my possession.” I was summoned by the general. Mr. Abdul Wahed accompanied me to the general’s office. As I said earlier, Mr. Wahed was an influential man of Karachi. He told the general that all those allegations against me were false. The general closed the file of complaints against me.
I organized the Iqbal Day celebrations in the largest and most beautiful hotel of Karachi. The foreign diplomats, the dignitaries and members of the public numbering about five hundred people filled the large hall of the hotel. At the rear seats of the hall were sitting about 100 people. They came there as a group to prevent the Bengali Director from speaking at the Iqbal Day celebrations. Since I was aware of their plans to disrupt my speech, I stood up at the podium, greeted the guests in a sentence or two, and went back to my seat. I did not give the group a chance to achieve their goal. I am pretty sure that the Deputy Director and the librarian, supported and encouraged by their friends in the Executive Committee, were responsible for all the acts of mischief that I have mentioned above.
I visited Dhaka twice in the early summer of 1971. As I said earlier, the Academy was entirely funded by the Federal Government of Pakistan. I came to learn that there was a branch of the Academy in Dhaka which was also funded by the same Government. I became suspicious of the existence of this branch. I never heard of this institution in Dhaka. Hence I decided to investigate the matter. I had the address of the institution in Puraana Paltan and the name of its Director. I made a surprise visit to the address and discovered that there was no institution there. The gentleman had a few books on Iqbal in a small armour in the living room of his house. For years he
was receiving funds to pay rent for the place and the salaries of the Director, a secretary and a bearer. At my recommendation the Academy authorities stopped sending money to that man. I went back to Dhaka to re-establish a research institution there. I discussed the matter with my teacher and colleague shahid Dr. G. C, Dev who was then the Head of the Department of Philosophy, University of Dhaka. He gladly accepted the responsibility of supervising the research work as a volunteer for a temporary period. At his recommendation I requested the secretary of the Department to do the typing work on a part-time basis, and arranged to employ a bearer.
You may ask how the Bengali man could do a pukur churi for years. I can think of two reasons. First, the Iqbal Academy management was so busy fighting amongst themselves that they had no time, energy or desire of taking care of anything else. The second reason could be that because a large sum of federal money was spent for the institution in West Pakistan, they could show on paper that part of the federal fund was also spent in East Pakistan.
Although some members of the Academy made our life miserable, we were treated with respect by the people of West Pakistan. My position of the Director of the Academy brought me in contact with many dignitaries of Karachi and Islamabad. Mr. A. K. Brohi, an internationally known lawyer and a former law minister of Pakistan, became my friend. Once in July of 1971 he told me at dinner table at his house, “Brother Dr. Abdur Rabb, Pakistan was founded on the brotherhood of Muslims. March 25 destroyed that foundation. It is now only a matter of time that the country will fall apart.” Mr. Brohi was a wise man. In less than six months his prediction came true.
In spite of all the difficulties I faced in the Academy, I found the job of the Director exciting. I had free hand in research and publications. Hence I got a chance to put in practice what I learned at McGill University. For the first time in a long time post-graduate students started coming to the Academy for my guidance in their research work. I also initiated the process of lecturing at the Department of Philosophy, University of Karachi. I published the issues of the Iqbal Review regularly and on time, and published a special issue of the magazine in connection with the celebration of 5,000 years of Iranian monarchy. My book on Abu Yazid Bistami was also printed in Karachi. I succeeded in clearing at least some of the mess created by in-fighting at the institution. I established a good rapport with embassies and other institutions and organizations, and many dignitaries of Karachi. The people of West Pakistan held the Director of the Iqbal Academy in high esteem. I used my position as the Director to do whatever I could for the good of the Academy.
Our son Hamid studied at the Karachi American School, and I taught Muslim culture at the same school two hours a week. Many of the Americans whom I knew in Dhaka, including Dr. Capen and his family, also moved to Karachi soon after I had left Dhaka.
Now I come to the happenings of December 1971. I went to Islamabad to discuss matters of the Academy with the Secretary to the Education Minister. That gentleman loved to talk. One of the things that he said to me is this: “Dr. Abur Rabb, isn’t it a shame that the East Pakistani Muslims would merge into Brahminism?” As we know, the secretaries to ministers have a very important role in making the policies of the Government. The idea that Bengali Muslims were half-Hindus, and that it was the responsibility of West Pakistani Muslims to bring the Bengali Muslims back to pure Islam, was one of the important elements that formed the Government policies towards East Pakistan. The same was the rallying cry of the Pakistani government to attract West Pakistanis to join the army. A very influential woman of Islamabad told me that the soldiers who were sent to East Pakistan were told that they were going to fight for bringing Bengali Muslims back to Islam. They were also told that they were going to be engaged in jihad, and that, therefore, if they were killed, they would become shahid. When this woman’s only son, a captain in the army, left the Lahore train station on route to East Pakistan via Karachi, she went to the station to see him off. The train that day carried only soldiers including many captains. Before the train left, all the people in the train were shouting slogans to the effect that they were going to perform jihad in East Pakistan. The captain son of this woman was later killed by the Mukti Babini in the Jessore sector.
One of the serious consequences of the belief in Hinduaization of Bengali Muslims was that the Pakistani army wanted to eliminate the Hindus of the East. It is well known that the army was allergic to the very word Hindu. Starting from the massacre at Jogonnath Hall and the Dhaka University professors on the night of March 25, Hindus were a primary target of the Pakistani army for the next nine months. When a former Hindu student of mine told me his story, I could not hold my tears. He said, “Sir, I was hiding in jute fields and bushes for a long time. After weeks and months when I was unable to continue to live in that condition, I declared that I became a Muslim just to keep myself alive.” West Pakistani policy makers and administrators never trusted Hindus. Dr. Ghulam Jilani was a powerful Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, University of Dhaka for more than twenty-two years. He had close connections with governors, ministers, secretaries and many other influential people of the government. Some of them were his close relatives. He was also a great administrator and philanthropist. He helped many of his students in an extraordinary manner. Without his generous help, I would not have been where I am today. Yet, there was one thing about him that was unacceptable: he did not trust many Bengalis. As far as I knew, he trusted only two Bengalis– his bearer Khagen and me. One day in 1962 he told me, “Hindus never accepted the creation of Pakistan. The Hindus of West Bengal and East Pakistan have plans to break up Pakistan and unite East and West Bengal to form a new country. They already have a shadow cabinet for the new country with Dr. G. C. Dev as its Education Minister.” I was surprised to have heard a very responsible person like him making that silly statement about Dr. Dev.
I shall take this opportunity to say a few words about Dr. Dev. He was an embodiment of many saintly qualities. I do not know how many people knew Dr. Dev as I did. I was not only his “favourite” student and colleague; I literally lived in his house. He was a prolific writer; but it was almost impossible for someone to read his handwriting. He also did better giving dictation to someone than writing in his own hand. He used to walk round and round in the office room of his house, sometimes with his folded palms on his forehead in the position of prayer and sometimes looking upward, and dictate the ideas of his books. I took his dictations, got the material typed by the typist, had the typed draft corrected by him, took the material to the press, proof-read the material, again got the text approved by him, and then took it to the press for printing. I did this for many years even after my marriage. I was involved in the whole process of publishing two of his first books. A number of times he was upset with me. His office room was somewhat like that of Einstein: books and papers were spread out everywhere in the room. More than once I somehow organized all that stuff. I had to do that when he was not home. I knew that he would never have let me organize his stuff. On his return home when he saw his books and papers organized, he gave me a good piece of his mind. Today my office room is much worse than Dr. Dev’s was more than 50 years ago. My wife sometimes try to clear some of the mess; but she cannot do much because I vehemently oppose it. I know what is where. If my stuff is organized, that stuff is just lost to me. I am sure that Dr. Dev did not want his things to be organized for the same reason.
Dr. Dev was also a humorous man. He taught us the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel of Germany. He not only made the difficult philosophies of these thinkers easy for us; he also kept us entertained in the class rooms. Sometimes he talked about marriage, husband-wife relationships, children, and so on. We would ask him jokingly, “Sir, how do you know about these matters? You never had a wife or children.” His usual reply was: “I may not have married, but my father did.” Dr. Dev’s generosity knew no bounds. Some acts of his generosity almost crossed acceptable limits.
Dr. Dev was never involved in any kind of politics. Yet Dr. Jilani who knew Dr. Dev as his colleague for a long time, and probably other Pakistanis, had that kind of idea about that saintly man. The reality was one thing, and the perception of that reality another. Dr. Dev was one of the first ones to be killed by the Pakistani army on the night of March 25. I wrote in my article on March 25 that on the morning of March 26 I saw through a small opening of an window curtain of our living room an army bulldozer digging a mass grave in the Jogonnath Hall playground. The army buried in that grave the people of the area that they killed the previous night. It is possible that Dr. Dev’s body was also one of the bodies buried there. Khagen whom Dr. Jilani trusted so much is also resting in the same grave. He was killed the same night along with many other fourth class employees living in the huts on the compound of Jagannath Hall.
Pakistani army succeeded in keeping a large majority of the people of West Pakistan ignorant about what was happening in the East. Even listening to the broadcast on foreign radio stations, especially BBC, was forbidden. We had a Bangladeshi captain of the PIA from Barisal named Mr. Talukdar. He was grounded on March 26, the day after the military action started in Dhaka. He lived close to my house. Sometimes Mr. Talukdar and I covered ourselves with a blanket and listened to BBC news from under the blanket. Obviously, we kept the volume of the radio very low so that nobody from outside the house would know what we were doing.
I was in Islamabad when the war started on December 3. Pakistani army was losing in East Pakistan. Since India was helping the Bengalis of the East in their struggle against Pakistan, Pakistan started the war against India. Their plan was to destroy the Indian Air Force fighters and bombers in major installations such as those in Agra area by surprise attacks. They failed miserably in achieving that goal. I was staying at the East Pakistan House in Rawalpindi that night. Siren was sounded many times throughout night signalling impending attacks by the Indian Air Force bombers. It was cold in Rawalpindi at that time. Hence I went to the trenches with a blanket to protect myself from the cold weather. Rawalpindi was not attacked that night. I did not feel safe at Rawalpindi because it had an important Air Force base of Pakistan. I thought that the Indian Air Force could attack Rawalpindi any time. Hence I moved to Islamabad and took shelter in the house of a Bangladeshi family. I stayed there three or four days. From time to time Indian bombers flew fast and low, but never bombed the capital city.
I became very worried about my family in Karachi. As I said in my article on our escape from Pakistan, the Indian fighters and bombers flew over Karachi absolutely unchallenged by any Pakistani aircraft, and did whatever they planned to do: heavily bomb the city, especially the Clifton beach Area on the Arabian sea. Bombs set the oil depots of the area on fire so that a large part of the city was lighted. As a result the Indian Air Force planes could see the important spots of that area at night and destroy them with bombs. The whole city was also covered with thick smoke. I was in touch with my family every day. Frequently they had to take shelter in trenches dug on the compound of the Academy. One bomb fell very close to our house and shattered our windows. I was very anxious to return to Karachi to be with my family. How could I return? There was no plane service. The train and bus lines went along the eastern border of West Pakistan. The Pakistani and Indian forces were fighting along that border. Hence there was no train or bus service from Islamabad to Karachi. Finally I took a bus that went though muddy roads, fields and deserts of the interior far away from the border. It is needless to say that I was the only Bengali in the bus. There was blackout every night; hence the bus could move only during day light period. At night we had to stop at small towns on the way. Where could I stay in those small towns? It is the Pakistanis I met in the bus who took me to their homes, fed me, gave me a bed to sleep, and bring me to the bus in the early hours of the next morning. Every time we arrived at a town we looked like snow men covered from head to toes with white dust from fields and desert. The fact that my Pakistani hosts arranged for a bath for me was most gratifying. It took me three nights and four days to reach Karachi.
Our last stop before we arrived in Karachi was Larkana, the home town of Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It was very dark when we arrived in that small city. We came to a place which I never visited, and it was pitch dark at that time because of the blackout. Where could the passenger of the bus go? The whole city was like a refugee camp. People were sitting and lying down on the side of roads. Because of the heavy bombings in Karachi, hundreds of thousands of people fled the city, and many of them went to the north. Larkana was the closest city on the north where they could take shelter. There was only one small hotel in that city. I was told that there was absolutely no room for us in that hotel. I somehow managed to get to the hotel to see the situation myself. There I met a group of journalists among the guests of the hotel. When they came to know who I was, they gave me one of their beds, and the persons to whom the bed belonged slept on the floor. On top of that they organized a small party to honour me that night.
The hospitality and care that the Pakistanis accorded to me show that the ordinary people of West Pakistan are loving and caring people. That was our experience throughout our stay in West Pakistan. If the army and politicians were as unselfish, humble, caring and loving as the ordinary people were, I do not think that Pakistan would have broken up. Did we face any problem in West Pakistan other than those caused by some members of the Academy? There were only two minor incidents that I encountered in the summer of 1971. Once someone at a market place looked at me and said, “Bangali babu, Bangali babu.” On another occasion a man in a carpet shop on Tariq Road refused to sell carpet to me because I did not speak Urdu.
The bus arrived in Karachi in the mid-afternoon; but I could hardly see the buildings and vehicles on the streets. The dark smoke produced by the fire of the oil depots many miles away was so thick that I could hardly see things some 25 feet from where I was. I somehow managed to come to our house near Drigh Road. My wife and I both heaved a sigh of relief because we were now all together while Karachi was being heavily bombed.
As I mentioned in my article on our escape, I saw many Indian fighters and bombers flying sorties over Karachi completely unchallenged. I also discussed in the same article why it happened. This time the Pakistani army could not hide from the people that there was a war going on; but the Government- controlled media kept on telling lies about the happenings in the East up to the last day. On the 16th of December East Pakistan fell, and General Amir Niazi already surrendered to the commander of the Indian army Jagjit Singh Arora in Dhaka. The BBC radio was announcing Niazi’s surrender again and again. Yet the Government-sponsored loud speakers on top of trucks on Karachi streets were saying, “Do not believe in the BBC news reports. We are winning in East Pakistan. We are winning the war.”
I shall conclude this article with the description of an incident that took place after our return to Montreal in 1972. The Pakistani community of this city organized an Iqbal Day celebration. Since I worked as the Director of the Iqbal Academy, I was invited to deliver a key-note speech on Iqbal’s Philosophy. On my arrival at the hall where the celebrations were scheduled to take place, I discovered that my name was dropped from the list of speakers that evening. As an explanation I was told that the organizers could not let me speak because I was “the first man to have raised the flag of Bangladesh on McGill campus in 1971.” The truth is that I was not in Canada in 1971; that year I was working at the Iqbal Academy in West Pakistan.
