"Jinnah’s Pakistan died on March 26, 1971, with East Bengal drowned in blood. Two senior West Pakistanis had, to their credit, resigned in protest against what was about to happen. Admiral Ahsan and General Yaqub left the province after their appeals to Islamabad had been rejected. Both men had strongly opposed a military solution. [[Zulfikar Ali Bhutto|[Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto]], on the other hand, backed the invasion. "Thank God, Pakistan has been saved," he declared, aligning himself with the disaster that lay ahead. Rahman was arrested and several hundred nationalist and left-wing intellectuals, activists, and students were killed in a carefully organized massacre. The lists of victims had been prepared with the help of local Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not “proper Muslims”—their genes needed improving. This was the justification for the campaign of mass rape."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Anti-war activistsPolitical authors from PakistanNovelists from PakistanPeople from LahoreHistorians from Pakistan
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tariq_Ali
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Tariq Ali
59 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Tariq Ali →
Related Quotes
"The Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province had been through a brutal process of ethnic cleansing."
"Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setti…"
"Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting."
"I loved Lahore. By the time I was at secondary school we had moved from Race Course Road to our own apartments in a l…"
"And then the burnt houses. How were they burned? I would ask the locals. Back would come a casual reply. 'They belong…"
"Nonetheless Russell had intuitively grasped that the first two decades of Islam had a distinctly Jacobin feel. I thin…"
"The reality of women in Islam is a prefabricated destiny."
"Soldiers were incited to mass-rape the women in order to mutate the Hindu Bengali gene. This is what was said by Punj…"
"I wrote and spoke and appealed for support, but the West remained silent. Nixon had ordered Kissinger (or perhaps it …"
"Stupidity knows no bounds, especially when fuelled by narcissism and a tongue laced with demagogy. There is no other …"