16th December is the darkest day in our history and when it comes every year it brings along with it many sad memories. On that day this country was dismembered ——- thanks to the Indo-Soviet collusion which assisted the Mukti Bahini rebels to give a deadly blow to the unity of this country. There is no point in laying all the blame of what happened to us squarely at the doors of India or Soviet Union. No doubt they did conspire to break us but it were the insiders who caused us more damage than the outsiders. New Delhi has always been on the look out for an opportunity to damage us as much as possible. Moscow was nursing ill-will against us from the day we provided an air base near Peshawar to the US for use by an American spy plane to fly over Soviet Union for photographing Soviet military installations.
We have been rather unfair to our Bengali brothers of East Pakistan in respect of use of natural resources. When Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League won absolute majority in 1970 general elections we dilly dallied in transferring power to him. Bhutto should have shown large heartedness by sitting on the opposition benches as leader of the opposition in the NA. Surely, had he tried he could have established his power base in the east Pakistan too like his political following in west Pakistan and might have swept the next polls in east Pakistan also. After all Bengalis are not bad people. They love leaders who work for their uplift. Didn’t they love General Azam Khan, who was a west Pakistani and who had served them well as their governor?
We ought to take lesson from the east Pakistan tragedy by making it a point to spend judiciously our national resources in a just manner on all the provinces of the federation so that there is no sense of deprivation anywhere.
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