Yahya Khan—Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman

The relationship between Yahya Khan and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman is a political negotiation that ends in rupture and military action. After Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s party won an overwhelming majority of East Wing seats in the 1970 election, Yahya offered immediate talks with Mujib and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The offer briefly suggested that the competing claims might be addressed through negotiation; the talks instead broke down, and the military operation that followed exposed the gap between the public appearance of conciliation and the government’s intentions.

The election and the promise of talks

The political imbalance behind the negotiations is made concrete by the election results: Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s Awami League won 160 of 162 East Wing seats, while Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party won 81 Western constituencies. Saleem frames the result as a source of irritation among West Wing leaders, placing Yahya and Bhutto’s response alongside the irritation of a lower-ranking soldier. The election is therefore not just background to the relationship; it establishes the representative mandate that Mujib’s claim to form a government rests upon, and the political grievance that the negotiations fail to resolve.

Yahya’s offer of immediate talks with Mujib and Bhutto is presented against the apparent urgency of resolving those political tensions. Yet Saleem stresses the difference between the offer as it appeared and what lay behind it: the presidential portrait in the soldiers’ briefing hut gives no indication of the intentions the narrator says were shocking. The scene makes the negotiations legible as both a public political process and a concealed prelude to force.

A military preparation under a misleading description

On March 15, 1971, twenty units of the Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities assembled in a hut. The gathering included sixty-one men and nineteen dogs, with Brigadier Iskandar present and Sergeant-Major Najmuddin issuing instructions. The troops were ordered to remove their uniforms, and the dogs’ identifying collars were also taken off. The regimented actions suggest an operation requiring concealment, but the recruits were not then told its real political purpose. After waiting, they were issued uniforms again; Saleem describes this as a second transformation, marking the transition from unexplained preparation to overt military deployment.

On March 25, after Yahya and Bhutto abruptly ended their talks with Mujib and returned to the West Wing, Brigadier Iskandar and Najmuddin arrived at the barracks with Lala Moin carrying the men’s uniforms and the dogs’ collars. The recruits were ordered to dress, take up arms, and act rather than talk. Only then did Iskandar identify Mujib as the target of the mission. The sequence gives the relationship’s breakdown a practical consequence: the same military force that had been assembled under a general account of pursuit and capture was now directed against the leader with whom Yahya had recently offered to negotiate.

The crackdown and disputed accounts

At midnight on March 25, the narrator’s unit moved through Dacca toward Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s location. The university was being shelled, and students and lecturers came out of their hostels as soldiers entered the area. Mujib was captured rather than shot; Ayooba Baloch led him, manacled, to a waiting van. These events give the political break a decisive outcome: the negotiations did not produce a transfer of authority to Mujib but preceded his arrest and the wider military crackdown.

Saleem’s account of what followed is marked by a conflict between witnessed violence and the insistence that it could not have happened. In a later recollection of that night, he and Shaheed see the city’s intellectuals being killed and other atrocities, while the narrator repeatedly measures what they saw against the claim that their own soldiers could not have behaved so badly. He invokes the decency attributed to Tiger Niazi and the asserted worth of the soldiers, turning denial into part of the account rather than a reliable correction of it. The novel thus connects the failed talks to a crisis of historical testimony: the facts of the military action are narrated through the very habits of official and personal disbelief that make violence difficult to acknowledge.

Political consequence and narrative significance

The relationship’s course is defined by the contrast between an election result that gave Mujib’s party a commanding East Wing mandate, Yahya’s offer of talks, and the abrupt decision to end those talks and proceed against him. The available account does not present the negotiations as a personal reconciliation between the two leaders; it shows their political dealings through the public offer, the breakdown, and the military action that follows. Mujib’s capture and the assault on Dacca make the consequences of that failure visible without resolving the conflict through dialogue.

The episode is also shaped by the narrator’s retrospective method. Saleem’s account moves from a training scene in which the troops are not told their real purpose, to the revelation of their mission, to a remembered night whose events are later resisted as impossible. That structure makes concealment and denial part of the relationship’s history. Yahya’s visible offer of talks and the hidden intention attributed to his government belong to the same narrative pattern: political appearances promise negotiation, while the consequences arrive through military orders and a story that struggles to state what its witnesses saw.