Violence Against Civilians As a Strategy in Counter-Insurgency Campaigns the Case of the Pakistani Civil War of 1971

Violence against civilians as a strategy in counter-insurgency campaigns The Case of the Pakistani Civil War of 1971 Syed Muhammad Saad/11790709 MA Political Science (International Relations) Supervisor: Seiki Tanaka Second Reader: Mike Medeiros June 2018 1 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 3 Literature Review .................................................................................................................................... 9 The link between strategy and violence .............................................................................................. 9 The case of the Pakistani Civil War .................................................................................................. 12 Empirical observations and analysis ..................................................................................................... 19 Research Design................................................................................................................................ 19 The systematic extermination and expulsion of Hindus ................................................................... 21 Causal mechanisms behind Hindu targeting ..................................................................................... 26 Other arguments ................................................................................................................................ 29 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 33 Appendix A ........................................................................................................................................... 37 Appendix B ........................................................................................................................................... 38 Appendix C ........................................................................................................................................... 39 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 40 2 Abstract This study attempts to link theories on strategic violence against civilians during counter- insurgency campaigns and civil wars with the case of the Pakistani Civil War of 1971. It seeks to look specifically at the role the demographic weight of the sub-groups of rebelling ethnicities plays in the wider confrontation between the state and the ethnic group. By arguing that the demographic weight of the Hindu population caused it to be at the receiving end of brutal targeting during the Pakistani Civil War, it tries to establish that the strategic causal mechanism that links a state’s strategic interests with its violence against the sub- group of a rebelling actor may lie in the significance of the sub-group’s demographic weight in the broader politics of the region. Key words: Counter-insurgency, Civil War, Violence, Ethnic cleansing, Ethnic expulsion 3 Introduction “In April the second phase [of the 1971 military campaign in East Pakistan], the concentrated persecution of the Hindus, began. By the beginning of May it was obvious to observers that it was the Government’s avowed intention to kill or drive out of the country all of the eight to ten million Hindus in East Pakistan. Throughout the country, the Army was searching out Hindu villages and deliberately destroying them and murdering the people. The Army would come into a new area, enquire where the Hindus lived, and proceed to wipe them out…They [Hindus] were simply marked for extermination.” (The Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurists, 1972) The above is an excerpt from A Legal Study by the Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, published a year after the civil war in Pakistan in 1971 that led to the breakaway of East Pakistan from West Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. The above passage is one among many that describe the Pakistani state's brutality against the Hindu population in East Pakistan. These acts were committed while the state was engaged in a campaign to counter the secessionist Bengali rebellion in the province of East Pakistan. Reading such passages, one wonders why the military was deliberately and so brutally targeting the civilian members of the Hindu population, who were a minority in the ethnic group whose movement for independence the state was trying to suppress. For the Pakistani state engaged in a counter-insurgency campaign against armed insurgents of the Bengali nationalist movement, it would make more sense to allocate all its resources to combating the secessionist Bengali insurgents. Why then was the state engaged in a policy of deliberate targeting of the minority Hindus? Though it is not uncommon to see civilian populations in insurgent strongholds to be at the receiving end of the wrath of state militaries, targeting of Hindu civilians in the case of the Pakistani Civil War is puzzling indeed. This is because the secessionist movement was supported wholly by the Bengali ethnicity, i.e. by both the religious sub-groups. If both the sub-groups of the rebelling ethnicity were in support of the secessionist movement, the question of the deliberate targeting of Hindus begs an explanation. The aforementioned report, along with works of authors such as Bass (2013) and Beachler (2007) suggests that the targeting of Hindus was a policy separate from countering the secessionist movement, with Beachler (2007) arguing that the state aimed to eliminate 4 Hindus by death or expulsion. Moreover, authors like Bose (2011) and Akmam (2002) have argued that if the violence against Muslim and Hindu Bengalis were to be compared, the violence against the latter as a group was more intense and can even be considered genocidal. Thus, in light of the fact that there existed this variation in the nature and intensity of violence towards the Hindu and Muslim Bengalis, this thesis raises the following question: What explains the variation in the violence against civilians of the religious sub-groups of the rebelling Bengali ethnicity during the Pakistani Civil War? In the scholarship on the 1971 Civil War in East Pakistan, the targeting of the minority Hindu Bengalis has not received much attention. Authors like Akmam (2002), Bose (2005), Reza (2013), Saikia (2004), Alamgir and D’costa (2011), Beachler (2007) have mainly focused on violence against the general civilian populace of East Pakistan, but not specifically on Hindu targeting. The explanations that do come for Hindu targeting, like those from Payne (1973), Akmam (2002), Beachler (2007), Debnath (2011) have also always been part of studies on the targeting of the Bengali population as a whole, and these authors do not delve deeply into the matter. The targeting of Hindus is thus an aspect of the civil war that has failed to attract much attention and this thesis is an attempt to research and analyse this intriguing aspect of the war in detail, focusing on the causal mechanisms behind the targeting of the Hindu ethnicity during the counter-insurgency campaign to suppress the secessionist Bengali movement. In the already existing literature, we see two main explanations regarding Hindu targeting. The first line of argument is based broadly on ideas of religious prejudice, which has been taken by Akmam (2002) and Beachler (2007) who have attributed the violence against the Hindu minority to their religious identity being considered a negative influence on Muslim Bengalis. Moreover, Payne (1973) has argued that the violence was the result of the actions of the fanatical Muslims in the Pakistan army. The second line is based on the broader relations between Pakistan and its neighbour India, which is predominantly Hindu. This line has of argument can be been taken by Debnath (2011), who has argued that the Hindus were targeted because they were considered ‘enemy agents’ of India. But these views, do not explain why the state would partially deviate its resources from suppressing a rebellion, and spend its resources to target the Hindu Bengalis. Was it simply the case that religious prejudice caused the Pakistani state or its soldiers to divert some of its focus away from eliminating the insurgency and expending its resources on 5 killing a group that it hated? If these arguments are to be accepted, then why did the state not carry out acts of mass violence against the Hindu minority before and why did the violence occur when the state was fighting a secessionist rebellion? Moreover, why did such incidences of violence against Hindus only occur in East Pakistan and not in West Pakistan? From the point of view of a counter-insurgency policy maker, targeting Hindus during the Bengali liberation movement would be considered detrimental to the counterinsurgency campaign as it would divert the military’s resources away from suppressing the rebellion. After all, exterminating large numbers of people also requires ammunition, time and energy, which should have been solely focused on suppressing the secessionist insurgents. Considering the fact that violence on such a large scale against Hindus specifically occurred during the state’s

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