Yahya Khan

Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan (4 February 1917 – 10 August 1980) was a Pakistani four-star general who served as the third president of Pakistan from 25 March 1969 to 20 December 1971, under martial law, and as the fifth commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army from 1966 to 1971. His presidency oversaw the civil war in East Pakistan and the secession of Bangladesh. He is viewed negatively in Bangladesh, where he is considered a chief architect of the 1971 genocide, and in Pakistan, where his failure to prevent the country's division is regarded as a national tragedy. ^{1 2}

Yahya Khan was born on 4 February 1917 in the town of Chakwal in Punjab, into a Qizilbash family from Peshawar, and claimed descent from the elite soldiers of the Persian conqueror Nader Shah. His father, Saadat Ali Khan, served in the Indian Imperial Police and retired as a deputy superintendent in 1938. Yahya studied at the Colonel Brown Cambridge School in Dehradun and then at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, where he graduated with a B.A., finishing first in his class. He also spoke Persian. ^{1 3}

He was commissioned into the British Indian Army in 1939 and fought in the Second World War in the Mediterranean theatre; captured by Axis forces in North Africa in June 1942, he escaped from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp at his third attempt. After partition he joined the Pakistan Army, helped organise the Staff College at Quetta, and became the army's youngest brigadier. He commanded the 7th Infantry Division in the 1965 war with India and played a vital role in Operation Grand Slam in Kashmir. President Ayub Khan appointed him commander-in-chief on 18 September 1966, superseding two senior officers. ¹

As nationwide protests against Ayub Khan's government grew, Ayub handed power to Yahya Khan in March 1969. Yahya declared martial law and suspended the constitution, issued the Legal Framework Order in July 1970, and held the country's first general election in December 1970, which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League won with a national majority. When Yahya barred the transfer of power, mass protests and civil disobedience followed in the east; on 25 March 1971 he ordered Operation Searchlight to suppress Bengali nationalism, the operation that began the genocide and the civil war. In December 1971 he ordered pre-emptive strikes against India, and the ensuing war ended with the surrender of Pakistani forces in the east and the secession of Bangladesh. Yahya resigned the army command and transferred the presidency to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on 20 December 1971. ¹

The succeeding Bhutto administration placed Yahya under house arrest, and he gave testimony to the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, which investigated Pakistan's military and political failures in 1971. Released in 1977 because of failing health, he stayed out of public life and wrote memoirs that remain unpublished. He died in Rawalpindi on 10 August 1980 and was buried in Peshawar; his funeral was marked by military honours. ^{1 2}

The English article's Personal life section has a subsection on religion, which states that he was nominally a Shia Muslim but non-practising, and quotes Srinath Raghavan that his promotion was remarkable because he was a Shia in a predominantly Sunni officer corps. The Arabic and Urdu articles name no school for him: their infoboxes give Islam generically, and the Urdu article records his Qizilbash family origin. The English article also reports that towards the end of his life he gradually stopped drinking alcohol as he became very religious. He married Fakhra Khan in 1945 and had a son and a daughter. ^{1 2 3}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. Yahya Khan is considered, along with his deputies Abdul Hamid Khan and Tikka Khan, a chief architect of the Bangladesh genocide, and Pakistani historians also regard his rule as one of the leading causes of the fall of Dhaka and the breakup of Pakistan. Against that, in the United States he has been appreciated for facilitating the American opening to China: President Richard Nixon sent him a handwritten letter stating that without his personal assistance the breakthrough in relations with the People's Republic of China would never have been accomplished. ¹

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