The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was invited to attend the 50th Independence Day of Bangladesh scheduled to be held in March of 2021. Patriotic Bangladeshis at home and abroad strongly demand to the government of Bangladesh not to invite any Indian military and civilians to attend an auspicious event of Bangladesh which is written with the blood of hundreds of thousands martyrs of the Bangladesh war of liberation.
We tested Indian friendship for 50 years, which exploits Bangladesh for the last half a century, that proved that India exploited and looted Bangladesh just as its colony. The synonyms of Indian friendship are a bluff, pretense, deception and ultimately occupation. The more the Bangladeshi ruling party comprehends these realities and acts accordingly to deter this tendency, the the better it is for our nation. It is the sacred duty of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to get out of the Indian claws and follow a more dynamic and proactive foreign policy. Above all, it is her duty to follow patriotic and nationalistic steps to strengthen the defense of our country.
It needs to be mentioned that a group of fainéants and stooges was created to brand India as a friend in need and to give away anything India desires. India also claims it lost a huge amount of its assets and soldiers to liberate Bangladesh.
In the truest sense of the term, poor India’s shaky economy got a new life by misappropriating huge amounts of relief materials including food grains, building materials, medicines and even military hardware. The most notorious criminal act that India committed against Bangladesh was rampant looting, which superceded all the previous records of contemporary history.
Many in India and Bangladesh preach that India sacrificed a lot during our war of liberation in 1971. Their narrative is that India provided shelter to about one crores (1,000,000) refugees who fled from the then East Pakistan. India provided training and weapons to the freedom fighters, along with providing housing, food, clothes, medicines and all other materials required for the survival of the refugees and freedom fighters. The refugees were a serious burden for India. Above all, Indian soldiers shed their blood to liberate Bangladesh. India did all these free of cost only for humanitarian reasons.
The narrative continues to state that India not only provided training and weapons to the freedom fighters, it also provided housing, food, clothes, medicines and all other materials required for the survival of those refugees and freedom fighters. The refugees were a serious burden for India. Above all, Indian soldiers shed their blood to liberate Bangladesh and India did all these good deeds free of cost, only for humanitarian reasons.
But the ground realities tell a different story. The Bangladesh war of liberation acted as a fate changer for India. The above propaganda is factually untrue at least on two grounds:
1. In the the year of the Bangladesh independence, India was too poor to feed its own people, let alone construct camps for ten million refugees, providing mosquito nets and supplying food, clothes, medicines and other necessities.
Scarcity of food and starvation were a part of the daily lives of Indians. The following five-year statistics of India’s GDP (per capita income) demonstrates how poor India was in 1971:
GDP per capita (current US$)
| Year | Value |
| 1969 | $107.62 |
| 1970 | $112.43 |
| 1971 | $118.60 |
| 1972 | $122.98 |
Guruprasad, in his work, 1966 Famine in India brought to light some rare information about India’s poverty in the mid-sixties. Some of that information he reproduced from Toledoo Blade newspaper of January 7, 1966 (that borrowed from Time Magazine). It quoted U.S. officials saying: “Although the United States has come in for abuse in India for trying to put a
damper on the Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, the Indian government confidently as ever looks for the U.S. to help feed its starving people. Last year (1965), the U. S. shipped India 6.7 million tons of surplus wheat to India. In 1966, New Delhi expected we would send 10 to 15 million tons of grain. Indeed in the face of a threatened Indian famine, the United States has already been sending in grain on an emergency basis 20,000 ton daily pouring into Indian ports. The Indian foreign exchange situation is so bad that the country’s food minister says it cannot even pay the freight on these emergency shipments.”
Guruprasad added “When India requested the USA to supply grains, the USA offered wholehearted support. They began supplying 20,000 tons of grains on a daily basis and during the peak time of the famine, they were supplying almost 50,000 tons of grains daily. There was an article which said that ships would arrive at Indian ports once every 5 minutes!! There were even “ship traffic jams” because of several ships coming so frequently. That was the kind of food shortage India had, and the support given by the US helped India to narrowly escape from a disaster.”
India’s hunger remained the same for decades. The Hindus who migrated to India experienced so much extreme poverty and hardship that they repented for their erroneous decision of leaving East Pakistan. A veteran journalist who is now in his eighties, recollecting a letter of his school friend Shakti Ranjon Nandi, highlighted the extreme scarcity of food in India. In 1965, Nandi regretting his migration to Tripura in India wrote that it was “an extreme erroneous decision. “It was far better to live under a tree in East Pakistan than migrating to India.”
Awesome stories of India’s hunger was so widely known even in the remote regions of East Pakistan that the price of one kilogram of starch was 3 Rupees/Takas in Kolkata, while the price of one kilogram of rice was only six ana (less than one-third of a Taka) in East Pakistan.
Nandi continues, “When I went to India in 1971, I was stunned seeing the value of the currency to the Pakistani Taka/Rupee. In a remote rural shop of Tripua, I gave the shopkeeper one Taka and he gave me goods of 1.50 Indian Rupees.”
The question naturally arises as to how such a poor nation such as India could bear the burden of over 10 million refugees in 1971. This was only
possible due to the inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars to India from abroad that came as donations, aid and grants for the refugees.
India never officially disclosed (1) how many billions of dollars it received in case or kind from many countries via the UN, (2) weapons, vehicles, equipments, electronics, aircrafts, war planes, ships valued at trillions of dollars belonging to Pakistan armed forces were grabbed by the Indian forces after December 16, 1971; and (3) how many billions of dollars of booties the Indian armed forces looted from the newly liberated Bangladesh after December 16, 1971.
Let us look at the amount of money that India got in 1971 from some major countries via the UN:
$8,91,57000 from the UK, $3,81,12,132 from Canada, $2,32,60,000 Dahami from Oman, and millions from 68 other countries (UN member-states including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc.) The total amount was $16,81,03,727.
Due to the non-availability of data and information, the exact quantity or value of assets that the Indians smuggled to their country will remain unknown forever. Statements of eyewitnesses, foreign and local press reports, memoirs of freedom fighters and bureaucrats provide us some scant, but horrific datas, which unveil the ugly faces of Indian looters.
Martin Woollacott reported in The Guardian of 21 January 1972: “Systematic Indian Army looting of mills, factories and offices in the Khulna area has angered and enraged Bangladesh civil officials here. The looting took place in the first few days after the Indian troops arrived in the city on December 17”.
In a protest note sent by the then Deputy Commissioner of Khulna to Mrs. Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister at the time, the estimate of the Khulna loot was put at $30million. Later on, it was found that most district administrators had similar stories to tell. According to one estimate based on actual deployment of the Pakistan army during 1971, Indian troops transferred arms, including 87 tanks, worth $750 million . An Indian weekly named Aneek puts the value of the entire Indian loot consisting of arms, food grains, raw jute, cotton yarn, vehicles, ocean-going ships, industrial plant, machinery and spare parts, durable consumer goods, etc. at $1 billion. Although this appears to be an underestimate, on the basis of the above, the value of the total taken by foreign troops may be put at $2.2billion. We may accept this figure in the absence of any other estimate. Spreading it over seven years in order to facilitate comparison, the average yearly value of the direct plunder comes to $314million.
Looting:
Major Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the brave commander of the 9th sector during the liberation war of Bangladesh, was arrested by the Indian Army with the consent of the Bangladesh Government when he opposed them in smuggling billions of dollars of weapons and ammunitions to India from Bangladesh. The Indian Army carried everything, even the window and pillow covers, bad sheets, chairs, tables, electric wires, light bulbs, kitchen and bathroom fittings, etc. They looted whatever they found nearby and did not allow any Bangladeshi Army officera to enter in the cantonments.
India smuggled all the sophisticated and relatively new armaments acquired from the US and China. Everything that belonged to the Pakistani forces should belong to Bangladesh, as we declared the liberation war against Pakistan, fought against them till the surrender of the Pakistani forces. Uncounted number of Bangladeshi civilians and freedom fighters lost their lives. Most of the infrastructures and road communications were entirely or completely destroyed.
December 19, 2020
*Mohammad Zainal Abedin is a Bangladesh-origin American journalist and researcher.
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
