CUTIA unit's obedience and moral numbness

CUTIA’s obedience and moral numbness are shown through Unit 22’s transformation from a team trained to follow orders into an instrument of the military crackdown in Dacca. Its members are taught to treat unquestioning compliance as discipline, and their later participation in arrests and pursuit continues even after they witness the violence carried out in the name of national unity. The change is not a sudden conversion to cruelty: it is the gradual erosion of certainty under orders that leave little room for judgment.

Training in obedience

In a hut with a blackboard, Brigadier Iskandar and Sergeant-Major Najmuddin present CUTIA as a pursuit-and-capture force. The recruits are organized into canine units of three people and one dog, without officer personnel in the field. That absence is framed not as freedom from authority but as a reason to supply their own discipline and responsibility: the unit’s purpose is to find people designated undesirable, while its members are instructed to obey without question, seek without tiring, and arrest without remorse. The prescribed method is covert, efficient, and quick.

The recruits are given an official account of what makes a person dangerous: the alleged destruction of family life, rejection of religion, expropriation of landowners, and opposition to film censorship are gathered under the larger charge of threatening the state. The coming elections and the prospect of civilian rule are named as causes for concern. Detention is authorized under the Defense of Pakistan Rules, which allow designated people to be held incommunicado for renewable periods of six months. The training converts political judgments into operational instructions: once someone has been classified as an enemy, the unit is not asked to reconsider the classification.

The name itself carries a bitter irony. CUTIA is explained as meaning bitch, and the unit receives she-dog badges for its lapels. The recruits’ identity is thus marked by the canine language that also structures their work: they are to track, pursue, and seize, while the command system expects them to behave with the trained responsiveness of the dogs beside them.

Disguised deployment

On March 15, 1971, twenty CUTIA units assemble in another hut. Sixty-one men and nineteen dogs are ordered to remove their uniforms and identifying collars. The dogs remain quiet; the men change into army-approved civilian clothes, including lungis, kurtas, turbans, and ordinary shirts and trousers. The Buddhist member of Unit 22 wears a dhoti and kameez. The scene makes obedience visible as a bodily routine: a command is given, uniforms are removed, and the group stands ready without protest.

The units are flown to Dacca by way of Ceylon, avoiding Indian airspace. They travel among a much larger force: sixty thousand West Wing troops are also sent east in civilian clothing. The narrator retrospectively connects the deployment to the political crisis, while the troops themselves are initially not told the name of the city. Ayooba Baloch misreads the disguises as preparation for spy work against vegetarians. The gap between his expectation and the actual mission reveals how little the recruits know about the purpose of their movement.

After waiting in the military camp, the unit is issued uniforms again on March 25. Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto have broken off talks with Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman and returned to the West Wing. Brigadier Iskandar now makes the mission plain: the troops are to make Mujib “jump.” The recruits exchange civilian clothes for uniforms and take up arms. Their earlier obedience to the instruction to disrobe is followed by obedience to the instruction to act; the intervening delay has not given them the information needed to judge their role.

The crackdown in Dacca

At midnight on March 25, the Buddhist member of Unit 22 leads troops toward Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s residence, near a university under shelling. Students and lecturers run from their hostels and are met by gunfire. Sheikh Mujib is captured rather than shot, manacled and taken to a waiting van by Ayooba Baloch. The unit then transports him to the airport, where he is put aboard a plane bound for captivity in the West Wing.

During the drive, Shaheed Dar sees soldiers enter women’s hostels and take women into the street. He also sees newspaper offices burning, trade-union offices destroyed, and people lying in roadside ditches. The narrator emphasizes that these sights are difficult to accept as true, but they are witnessed from the moving vehicle by members of the unit. At the airport, Ayooba pushes Mujib onto the aircraft. The Buddhist closes his eyes, a gesture that does not stop the operation or reverse his part in it.

The violence continues beyond the arrest. Brigadier Iskandar declares that subversive elements remain to be rooted out, and the canine units are released to track and seize people. Their targets include professors, poets, Awami League members, and fashion correspondents. The language of the operation recasts arrests as the detection of threats; the narrator’s irony exposes the distance between this official rationale and the destruction unfolding across the city.

From revulsion to moral numbness

The unit’s members do not remain untouched. Farooq Rashid, Shaheed, and Ayooba take turns vomiting as the smell from burning slums overwhelms them. The Buddhist, whose exceptional sense of smell is repeatedly associated with his work, continues to perform his task, following scent trails while leaving the rest to the soldiers. His concentration is a form of narrowed attention: it allows the assigned work to proceed while the surrounding disorder is treated as outside the task.

In the account of the wider campaign, Unit 22 pursues people through Dacca’s blackened streets and then through the countryside. Villages are burned on the claim of collective responsibility for sheltering the Mukti Bahini. The unit passes displaced villagers carrying their possessions, damaged railway tracks, and burned trees while tracking local Awami League officials and known Communists. Its movement south toward the mouths of the Ganges and the sea extends the pursuit beyond the initial operation and into a landscape shaped by military violence and flight.

The narrator refuses to settle the number of arrests made by Unit 22 on that first night. Possible totals—ten, four hundred and twenty, or one thousand and one—are offered only to be left unresolved; some events of March 25, the narration says, must remain in confusion. This uncertainty is not a correction that releases the unit from responsibility. Instead, it sets the limits of a record in which the scale of the operation and the identities of those seized can no longer be confidently counted.

The decisive change is described as a loss of innocence, certainty, and moral absolutes. The men’s eyes are marked by a new grimness, yet they continue working. They do not mutiny against Brigadier Iskandar, Sergeant-Major Najmuddin, or Lala Moin, and the narrative gives no account of them refusing later assignments. The Buddhist is therefore not the unit’s sole example of obedience: the others also keep following orders after witnessing what those orders entail.

Narrative significance

CUTIA’s operating language makes violence sound procedural. To pursue, capture, and arrest are presented as duties, and the legal authorization for incommunicado detention gives those duties an official frame. The unit’s experience exposes the moral cost hidden inside that vocabulary: the recruits first meet it as training, then encounter the consequences in Dacca, and finally continue with work that has become harder to reconcile with their earlier assumptions.

The changing role of smell sharpens this pattern. What makes the Buddhist effective as a tracker also separates the act of tracking from the human consequences of capture. He follows scent; others carry out the rest. The division of tasks does not remove the unit from the crackdown, but it helps explain how action can continue when direct understanding becomes painful. The narrator’s retrospective self-criticism—linking the Buddhist’s philosophy of acceptance to consequences as unfortunate as his earlier desire for centrality—places compliance within a larger question of responsibility, not mere temperament.

The unit’s endurance is finally rendered as a failure of moral resistance rather than a simple absence of feeling. Its members are sickened, and their certainty is damaged, but neither response interrupts the chain of command. CUTIA’s story thus traces how a trained capacity to act without questioning can survive the very experiences that ought to call it into question: obedience persists, while the moral ground beneath it gives way.