Bernard-Henri Lévy

Year 1971 was an important milestone in the current history whose importance is yet to be grasped by the historians. This is the year when the hitherto secular Pakistan army and Islamists came together and established a bond that remains intact even after the passage of four decades. When the people of erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) rose in arms to ask for their democratic rights, the ruling Pakistan army generals made no secret of their belief that they cared only for the land that is subject of so many romantic stories. Pakistani General Tikka Khan, who later came to be nicknamed “The Butcher,” publicly announced that the Pakistan army was interested only in the land and was ready to fight to the last Bengali. “Butcher” Tikka Khan and succeeding generals honored those words and killed as many Bengalis and raped as many Bengali women as they could before India, which had been inundated by the waves of fleeing refugees, intervened to save the situation.

The army under the general who had an inflated concept of his bravery and wanted to be known as a ‘Tiger’ surrendered within days. Photographs of calm and remorseless General ‘Tiger’ Niazi signing the Instrument of Surrender before Indian General Jagjit Singh Aurora today symbolize the victory of unarmed people against an army which has the habit of occupying its own country.

The full scale military operation against the people of Bangladesh started in the spring of 1971 for all practical purposes. The military regime in Islamabad had refused to accept the people’s verdict in the elections of 1970 and hand over political power to the people. The Pakistani military believed, and justifiably, that South Asia was an outpost for the “civilized” world. It was just a former colony for Europe… and the United States. They expected no one to come to the aid of dwarfish, dark-complexioned Bengalis who had been immeasurably influenced by Hindi culture. For them, it was justified to kill and maim anybody whose culture had been influenced by Hindu culture. They had no right to live on the Land of the Pure. It was like Islam had been revealed only in 1947. Hence ‘Butcher’ Tikka Khan thought himself justified in unleashing his soldiers on the mostly unarmed population. They tortured, maimed and killed whoever they could lay their hands on. Dark complexioned women received special treatment. They were raped before they were tortured. They were left alive to remember that they were carrying Punjabi embryos inside them.

At last, all that butchery finally awoke one soul in France; Andre Malraux. Malraux was one of the leading intellectuals of Europe who in the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, had called for, and helped form and actually commanded, an international brigade of Western intellectuals and common people to fight in defense of democracy. Intellectuals needed to practically take part in efforts to save the world. In 1971 again, it was Malraux who saw the danger and made a similar call. Earlier Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has called for a round table of intellectuals. Malraux responded by saying, “que les paroles ne servent à rien, que seule l’action est efficace.”
A little over a hundred of young French boys and former officers responded to Malraux’s call. One of them was a very young man; Bernard-Henri Levy who later emerged as the leading European philosopher. However, the proposed International Brigade never came into existence. Malraux was too old to put his ideas into practice and constitute the brigade. Also Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not know what to do with such a brigade although she was using the name and fame of Andre Malraux to the fullest. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi implicitly vetoed the proposal for all practical purposes. But, Malraux had already inspired young Bernard-Henri Levy. Levy was already burning with passion to do something practical and Malraux’s appeal only showed him the light. Bernard-Henri Levy happened to be the only one who could make it to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He was one-man international brigade. Only he saw that a bigger-than-Spanish-Civil-War was being fought in Bengal.

Bernard-Henri Levy had grown under the influence of revolutionary 1960s. At the age of 18, Bernard-Henri Levy had been admitted in the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure of the Rue d’Ulm in Paris. ENS had produced intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Raymond Aron. These are the names that shaped and defined modern Western thought as Levy is shaping our age. (Levy’s struggle is real uphill as there are few great spirits in the early part of the 21st century.) At the same time, ENS also produced a vibrant Maoist movement in 1960s/70s. They were burning with passion to do something, change the world, create a New Man… They were ready to burn their bourgeois, reactionary books, at least symbolically. At the ENS, Bernard-Henri Levy came under all these influences more directly. Still he was different from his generation.
Bernard-Henri Levy was already into his third year at the ENS, when he responded to Andre Malraux’s call on September 17. 1971 to join the International Brigade on the pattern of the one the European intellectuals had created in the 1930s. It was an effort to revive the spirit of 1930s. According to contemporary witnesses, Bernard-Henri Levy was different from his colleagues at the ENS as he was fired with a desire to change the world rather than reinterpret one more time. Although the idea of Malraux collapsed, Levy decided still to go ahead. Several decades later, reminiscing about those days, he told me: “il y a quelque chose d’un peu ridicule, en ce temps-là, à pretendre changer le destin de l’Humanité sans sortir de sa chambre ou, en tout cas, de cette France riche, prospère et, au fond, sans risques; je trouve même un peu immorale cette façon, comme on dit en Français, de “faire la revolution en chambre”. Et je me dis qu’un revolutionnaire, un vrai, se doit d’aller “au contact des choses mêmes” (grand slogan, by the way, de l’Ecole philosophique qu’on appelle “la phénoménologie” et qui est tres importante dans ces années), qu’il se doit d’aller là où l’Histoire, avec un Grand H, se passe vraiment (n’oublie pas que c’est un temps où il y a consensus pour dire que l’Europe est morte, que c’est du Tiers-Monde que tout va repartir et que le seul espoir de voir les choses changer est de voir la périphérie monter à l’assaut du Centre et le régénérer) et je me dis, donc, qu’il faut quitter l’Europe (c’est une grande tradition, let’s say, romantique en France; c’est un peu l’image de Rimbaud partant au Harrar; et ce fut aussi le cas d’autres grands Normaliens qui, comme Paul Nizan, le camarade de Sartre, a disparu un beau jour, en 1925, pour partir à Aden). Bref : je me dis “mes camarades sont des petit-bourgeois; le seul qui va franchir le pas et prendre au pied de la lettre notre commun programme de changer le monde, le seul sérieux, ce sera moi – et je le ferai en allant là où les vraies choses se passent, au bout du monde, loin de l’Europe…” He still did not have a recognizable name. No one could at that time guess how much Levy would influence the modern discourse. The Levy era was starting.

Biafra War and Bengal’s war of independence were the first two biggest massacres after the Second World War. Both took place outside Europe. Young Bernard-Henri Levy accepted to go to Bengal also because there was a strong Maoist movement ‘Naxalites’ in Bengal. He was later to discover that there was not much in common between the Maoist students in Paris and Maoist guerrillas in the jungles of Bengal in spite of some similarities. Fascinated to share his brotherhood with the Naxalites, he ignored their criminal side at that time and took it as godsend.

Accompanied by his girl-friend Isabelle Doutreluigne, Bernard-Henri Levy left Paris for his fight of life on October 2, 1971. He was representing French daily Combat. His first stopover was Islamabad where he interviewed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who, like Mujibur Rehman in erstwhile East Pakistan, was also a contender of power but was denied power by the military regime. After a brief stopover, he heads to New Delhi, via Dubai. From New Delhi, he immediately went to East Bengal, leaving Isabelle Doutreluigne behind in Kolkta. In the following months, he moved to and from East Bengal.

In East Bengal, he took part in many battles. Followig a Mukti Bahni unit led by Akim Mukerjee, who is still alive and a general practitioner, he took part in the fall of Satkhira in the District Khulna, in the southwest of the emerging nation. In December, he was in Jessore just before the Indian troops entered the war and led to the final victory. On December 4, according to military archives I had access to, he found himself in the middle of the battle of Besantar where the Mukti Bahni, with the help of the Indian troops, pushed the Pakistani troops back.

The Maoist and journalist in Bernard-Henri Levy remained alive even during the war. He continuously looked for Naxalite leader Mohammad Toha. After eight-day long search around Chittagong, he succeeded in interviewing him during the height of war. This is here he caught malaria which left everlasting effects on him. Politically, this was cardinal mistake he made and ultimately led to his expulsion from the country.

On December 5, the journalist in Bernard-Henri Levy awoke and he convinced General Aurora (see Times of India, december 11, page 9) to let him be embedded with the advancing army. He travelled with the Indian army from west to East and entered Dhakka with one of the first units of the Indian army. In Dhakka, he re-finds Akim Mukerjee’s Mukti Bahni unit and participates (Mukerjee’s private archives) in liberating R. A. Bazaar, where the Pakistan army had set up the most despicable torture cells.
After playing a part in the liberation of East Bengal, which emerged as Bangladesh on that day, Bernard-Henri Levy relaxed. He returned to Kolkata where Isabelle Doutreluigne was waiting for him. The two decided to go to Kashmir where they spent a couple of weeks. Isabelle Doutreluigne who was expecting at that time, returned to France while Bernard-Henri Levy returned to Bangladesh on January 25 1972.

This is when the second phase of philosopher-revolutionary Bernard-Henri Levy started. In Dakka, he met Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. Rehman was quite impressed with the young Bernard-Henri Levy who happened to have fought his nation’s war of independence in spite of being from Ecole Normal Superieure. It was Cold War period and the world was largely more sympathetic towards Pakistan and its army and ignored the crimes of the Pakistan army. Shaikh Mujibur Rehman quite understood that Bernard-Henri Levy had sacrificed a future in his own country. He offered him to work in the Ministry of Economy and Planning which he accepted immediately. He worked there till mid-June 1972. After the independence of Bangladesh, Levy wanted to take part in its nation-building.

In Dhakka, Bernard-Henri Levy shared the small house of a Muslim family which had two girls and three boys. He became the sixth. The neighborhood of Gulshan, like most neighborhoods in those days in Dhakka, remained flooded, with overflowing rivers when not with rains. However, he spent most of his time in the office, working as a Bangladeshi bureaucrat rather than as an imported consultant. He had frequent access to Mujibur Rehman.During these meetings, he suggested to Mujibur Rehman to call tens of thousands of young and not so young women who had been raped and left alone by the soldiers of Pakistan army and their Islamist collaborators in al-Shams and al-Badr (the armed wings of the Jamat-i-Islami), as “Birangona” or “national heroines”. In societies as Bangladesh, raped women live terrible lives. Their families demonize them as they live with the stigma of rape. They are no more than dead women living.

During his stint in Bangladesh, according to some accounts, Bernard-Henri Levy also tried to convince Home Minister A. H. M. Qamaruzzaman to bring the collaborators of the Pakistani military in al-Shams and al-Badr to justice. Unfortunately, the new government ignored it. Politics overshadowed justice.
BHL tried to convince Mujibur Rehman of counting the deaths and destruction of the war and build a War Memorial to honor the sons of the young nation. Looking for international recognition and safeguarding the young nation’s independence took all his time in the early years of independence before he was assassinated by his own army. The project remained suspended.

As June 1972 started, Bernard-Henri Levy ran out of luck. On the very first day, Home Minister A. H. M. Qamaruzzaman received an anonymous denunciation pronouncing him as pro-Chinese. In south Asia, that has always meant pro-Pakistan. Bernard-Henri Levy had committed two cardinal sins since he came to South Asia; visited Kashmir with Isabelle Doutreluigne and interviewed Naxalite Mohammad Taha, who was against the independence of Bangladesh. This was enough for Home Minister A. H. M. Qamaruzzaman who gave him 48 hours to leave Bangladesh. All his contribution to the independence of Bangladesh, however symbolic, was ignored. Thus came to an end the first fight of Bernard-Henri Levy who waged many others in the decades to come. Much of what Levy did in Bengal in 1971-72 still lives as Bangladesh happens to be one of few Muslim countries where the forces of democracy are successfully fighting the forces of darkness. Bangladesh gives hope; to me and many others like me in the Muslim world.
In addition to fighting the first war of his life, Bernard-Henri Levy was reporting for the important daily newspaper, Combat, of the time. At the same time, he was writing his university theses, under the supervision of economist Charles Bettelheim. Bernard-Henri Levy never wrote the theses. However, he wrote Les Indes Rouges, a witness to the struggle of the people of Bangladesh. There are few accounts of the heroic struggle of the Bengali Muslims against oppression and Les Indes Rouges is the best account of those days I have come across. If nowhere else, Levy’s work lives in the shape of Les Indes Rouges.

Arif Jamal is journalist (New York Times, Radio France International) and specialist in India-Pakistan relations and their impact on the international political/strategic system. His specialities include global jihad, Kashmir jihad, Afghan jihad, Pakistan army, Islamist education (madrassah system), Islamist/jihadist politics and groups. He is author of “Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir” (Melville House Publishing, New York, 2009).

Photo 1 : General Gen Niazi, Commander of the Pakistani Forces in East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh) signing the surrender document for Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora. (c) D.R.
Photo 2 : Bangladesh 1971. (c) D.R.