Concert for Bangladesh

Part II

By Jayantha Somasundaram
(Continued from December 17)

The Bangladesh Armed Forces, the Mukti Bahini, was created in April 1971 under Colonel Muhammad Ataul Goni Osmani who had served as Lieutenant Colonel with the British Indian Army during World War II. The Mukti Bahini included regular units like the East Bengal Regiment which had been established in February 1948, and it functioned under the Bangladesh government in exile. Initially their numbers and impact was not significant, but as the Pakistan Army’s Bengali soldiers defected to the rebels, and Indian arms reached the Mukti Bahini, their military capability grew. Osmani was subsequently promoted General by the Provisional Government.

By July General Osmani had evolved a comprehensive strategy. He aimed at establishing military control over Mymensingh, an area about 120km north of Dacca, enabling the Provisional Government to obtain diplomatic recognition of Bangladesh. The objective being that by establishing military and political control in a part of Bangladesh, there was the possibility it would lead to foreign military intervention which would liberate all of the country.

This strategy would be supplemented by a guerrilla campaign throughout Bangladesh with the objective of inflicting heavy Pakistani casualties, crippling their army’s mobility by destroying bridges, fuel supplies, storage facilities, railways and river transport. The expectation being that this would result in Pakistani military detachments being fragmented and isolated across Bangladesh, thus reducing their capability.

In pursuit of this objective the country was divided into eleven sectors, each under a military commander. New recruits received up to five weeks training in camps across the Indian border. In August they were blowing up ships in Chittagong and other ports and by September the Mukti Bahini numbered eight infantry battalions and three artillery batteries. They were grouped in three conventional brigades which were supplemented by an estimated 100,000 guerrillas.

The Razakars

The Pakistan Army in Bangladesh was assisted by Razakars (meaning volunteers in Urdu), pro-Pakistan Bengalis and Urdu-speakers in the East, Al Badr, Bihari Muslim migrants from India and Al Shams, drawn from anti-Bangladesh Islamist parties and communities. As the intensity of the conflict grew, five more battalions of the Pakistan Army were deployed to Bangladesh. But by then the Bahini’s military capability had grown to the point where they were able to temporarily secure airfields at Lalmonirhat in the country’s extreme north, long enough to land arms, ammunition and supplies from India.

Liberal opinion in the North Atlantic Community was sympathetic to the plight of the Bengalis. Among them were Senator Edward Kennedy, artists George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and writers Victoria Ocampo and André Malraux. In Sri Lanka a concert to raise funds as well as express solidarity was held at the Ramakrishna Hall, Wellawatte which featured renowned singers Amaradeva and Nanda Malini.

“Edward Kennedy returned from a visit to the refugee camps in August, hailing India’s ‘way of compassion.’ That same month, a concert in New York City’s Madison Square Gardens, in support of Bangladesh, organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, directed the countercultural energies of the nineteen-sixties to a new cause. Nixon, however, put his faith in the proverbial American indifference to foreign affairs: “Biafra stirred up a few Catholics. But you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan they’re just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems,” wrote Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker, quoting Nixon (September 16, 2013).

The events in Bangladesh resulted in the first major benefit concert in history at an international level. The project was the brainchild of Bengali maestro, sitarist Ravi Shankar, who in early 1971 brought the tragedy of Bangladesh to the attention of former Beatles guitarist George Harrison and Klaus Voormann the German artist, musician, and record producer. Called ‘The Concert for Bangladesh’, it was held on August 1, 1971, with the aim of raising funds for Bangladeshi refugees.

Bob Dylan

Two of the artistes Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan had Bengali heritage. Performing alongside them were the idols of the seventies: Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band Badfinger.

The Concert was attended by a record crowd of 40,000 and ticket sales raised $250,000 for relief to be carried out in Bangladesh by UNICEF. Later, with revenue received from the record album and the film, around $12 million was sent to Bangladesh.

George Harrison who introduced the concert invited Ravi Shankar on sitar, accompanied by Ali Akbar Khan on the sarod, tabla player Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty on tamboura to present the initial oriental music segment. After explaining the purpose of the concert, they performed a traditional dhun titled ‘Bangla Dhun’.

To thunderous applause from the New York crowd, George Harrison began the occidental part of the concert with ‘Wah-Wah’, his Beatles hit song ‘Something’ and the gospel-rocker ‘Awaiting on You All’. On stage he was accompanied by a band, comprising Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner and eighteen others, backed by Phil Spector’s All Things Must Pass rock orchestra.

They were followed by Billy Preston, who sang his hit ‘That’s the Way God Planned It’ and Ringo Starr with ‘It Don’t Come Easy’.

Then came the icon of his generation, Bob Dylan. Accompanied only by George Harrison and Leon Russell with Ringo Starr on tambourine, he gave the audience his decade-defining songs from the 1960s: ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh – It Takes a Train to Cry’, ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ and ‘Just Like a Woman’.

And finally George Harrison led the finale of ‘Hear Me Lord’ and his hit, ‘My Sweet Lord’, and the closing ballad he wrote for The Concert, ‘Bangla Desh’. But the ripples from The Concert went further and wider when George Harrison’s ‘Bangla Desh’ hit the pop charts. This was followed by a three-record box set of the concert and the documentary motion picture released by Apple Records.

According to Phil Spector, an American record producer, musician, and songwriter, “It was magical. That’s the only way to describe it, because nobody had ever seen anything like that before, that amount of star power… all in two hours onstage at one time.”

Farida Majid, a Bangladeshi poet, translator, and academic, summed up what had happened: the “warmth, care and goodwill” of The Concert “echoed all over the world.” It also blazed the trail for subsequent rock charity benefits, like the 1985 Live Aid and Farm Aid to the Concert for New York City and Live 8 in the twenty-first century. The last word, as it were, on The Concert came from George Harrison, who in 1992 said, “The money we raised was secondary. The main thing was, we spread the word and helped get the war ended… What we did show was that musicians and people are more humane than politicians.”

(To be continued)