■HERO IN ONE HISTORY, TRAITOR IN ANOTHER — BUT WHAT DID HIS OATH SAY?■
His eyes… oh God.
Vast as the Gobi or the Sahara deserts.
No life.
No hope.
No current of living blood.
A strange fear rose in me — something I had never felt before in any pair of eyes.
I was on my way back to the “Eyrie” [ Eagle’s Nest]— my rooftop studio above the plaza in F-10 Markaz —
when “Foxy:, [my mustard-coloured Volkswagen], suddenly slowed of her own accord, creeping forward like a cautious turtle.
After decades of companionship I knew her moods and habits.
I drew a deep breath,
searching for the familiar fragrance of a seasoned robe,
and strained to catch the soft chiming of brass bells.
Nothing.
No scent.
No sound.
A question flared across my mind — and then my eyes met the figure on the roadside.
Five-foot-ten, wearing a navy-blue robe hung with bells of every size, blue jeans tied above the knees and joggers on his feet. He did not move. His bells did not move.
“BāBā-Tāl” [ the Bell-man], stood silently on the footpath.
He simply looked at me.
His eyes — oh God.
Vast as the Gobi or the Sahara.
No life. No hope. No visible current of living blood.
A strange fear rose in me, something I had never felt before in a pair of eyes.
For a moment, I felt I was not looking at a man, but at history itself.
And somehow, without his saying the name, I knew whose story had brought him there.
He looked at me and uttered four lines that have stayed with me ever since:
“The one who breaks the trust placed in his hands has already broken his own soul.” BāBā-Tāl took a breath.
“Loyalty is a mirror; once cracked by betrayal, it never reflects the same face again.
He who turns his back on the land that fed him walks forever with the shadow of his own oath behind him.
A uniform is not a cloth — it is a covenant written in blood and honour.”
Those words returned to me with force when the old debate about 20 August 1971 was raised once more.
On 20 August 1971, at Masroor Air Base near Karachi, Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas was preparing to fly a T-33 trainer when his instructor, Flight Lieutenant Mati-ur-Rehman, entered the aircraft and attempted to take control. The aircraft was turned towards India. Minhas fought to regain control. The aircraft crashed near Thatta before it could cross the border, and both men died.
Pakistan later awarded Rashid Minhas the Nishan-i-Haider, its highest military gallantry award.
Bangladesh remembers Mati-ur-Rehman differently.
Bangladeshi historical accounts describe him as a freedom fighter who attempted to escape with the aircraft and join the liberation struggle. Bangladesh later honoured him with Bir Sreshtho, its highest military award.
I acknowledge that history.
I do not need to erase another nation’s memory in order to state my own judgment.
Because I am not writing from Dhaka.
I am not writing from Islamabad.
I am writing from the standpoint of the act itself.
So let us return to the morning of 20 August 1971.
What country existed then?
Pakistan.
What territory was the aircraft taking off from?
Pakistan.
Whose Air Force owned the aircraft?
Pakistan.
Whose uniform was Mati-ur-Rehman wearing?
Pakistan’s.
Whose officer was he?
Pakistan’s.
And whose oath had he sworn?
Pakistan’s.
That last question is the one that cannot be pushed aside by the later map.
The military oath was not a decorative sentence. It was the foundation of the trust under which an officer received his commission, his authority and the command of military equipment.
He had not publicly resigned his commission before the attempt.
He had not been formally released from his military obligations.
He was still a serving officer.
And while still serving, he attempted to take a Pakistani military aircraft towards India.
That is the point at which I ask history to stop moving the goalposts.
Do not begin with the Bangladesh that came later.
Begin with the world that existed when the act occurred.
A later state may give a later meaning to a man’s action.
A later generation may build a monument.
A later government may award a medal.
A later national narrative may call the same man a hero.
But none of those later developments changes the identity of the state to which he owed allegiance at the moment he acted.
A map can change.
A state can be born.
A border can move.
But the date of a deed does not move with it.
This is not a question of whether a man had political grievances. Of course he could have had them.
It is not a question of whether people in East Pakistan were suffering, whether political injustice existed, or whether history later produced a new nation.
Those are enormous historical questions.
This article asks a narrower one:
What does a serving officer become when he turns the authority entrusted to him by his own state against that state?
My answer is simple.
He becomes a betrayer of the trust placed in him.
And when that betrayal is directed against the state to which he has sworn allegiance, the word history has always used for such conduct is treason.
Benedict Arnold remains the classic American example. While still a Continental Army general, he secretly negotiated to surrender West Point to the British. Vidkun Quisling became synonymous with collaboration against Norway.
The lesson is uncomfortable but simple:
A man may become a hero to the side he joins after betraying the side he served.
Two national memories can therefore produce two different portraits of the same man.
But different portraits do not change the deed.
And this is where another question enters the room.
Can a later honour erase an earlier oath?
History itself tells us that monuments, reputations and even judicial judgments are not necessarily beyond reconsideration.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not merely a political leader. He became the founding figure of Bangladesh and was celebrated as the Father of the Nation. Yet after the political upheaval of August 2024, statues and murals bearing his image were demolished in different places.
I do not present the destruction of those statues as justice.
I present it as a reminder:
Political memory is not made of stone.
Then consider Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
He was convicted, hanged and buried in 1979.
Decades later, Pakistan’s Supreme Court revisited the case and concluded that the proceedings that led to his conviction and execution did not meet the requirements of a fair trial and due process. The Court nevertheless recognised that it had no legal mechanism simply to erase the final judgment.
A dead man could not return to the courtroom.
The rope could not be undone.
The grave could not be reopened.
Yet history could still examine the process by which he had been judged.
So I ask:
If a monument can be reconsidered, if a national narrative can change, and if the fairness of a historic judicial proceeding can be examined decades later, why should a medal be beyond historical scrutiny?
I am not claiming that Pakistan can legally cancel a Bangladeshi state award.
It cannot.
Nor am I demanding that Bangladesh surrender its national memory.
I am making a different argument.
No medal can compel another nation to accept its recipient as a hero.
Bangladesh may preserve its memory.
Pakistan may preserve its own.
And a writer may examine both without becoming the spokesman of either government.
That is where I stand.
Not beneath the flag of a political party.
Not in the courtroom of nationalism.
But before the evidence of one morning.
The land was Pakistani.
The aircraft was Pakistani.
The uniform was Pakistani.
The commission was Pakistani.
The oath was to Pakistan.
And the aircraft was being taken towards India.
Those facts do not become different because history later acquired another flag.
The moral principle is older than all our modern borders.
The Qur’an says:
“Do not betray your trusts knowingly.”
— Al-Anfal 8:27
And:
“Indeed, Allah does not love the treacherous.”
— Al-Anfal 8:58
And:
“Fulfil the covenant. Surely the covenant will be questioned.”
— Al-Isra 17:34
The Holy Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] warned that for every betrayer a flag will be fixed on the Day of Resurrection, and it will be announced:
“This is the betrayal of so-and-so.” Among the signs of pure hypocrisy he listed the man who, when entrusted, betrays, and when he makes a covenant, proves treacherous.
Western political tradition speaks in the same register.
A man who breaks his word and betrays the trust of his country stands lower than the dust he walks upon. The uniform is not mere cloth; it is a covenant written in blood and honour. Once that covenant is broken from within, no later political narrative can restore the original trust.
Those who insist on calling Mati-ur-Rehman a hero must answer a simple question of sequence. Did he first resign his commission, return his uniform, and publicly transfer his allegiance before attempting to take a Pakistani military aircraft across the border? The historical record shows he did not. He remained under the oath, under the authority, and inside the aircraft of the Pakistan Air Force until the moment the struggle for control ended in the crash near Thatta.
The land that fed him, trained him, and commissioned him was still Pakistan on that August morning. The oath he had sworn was still binding. The aircraft he tried to remove still belonged to the force he served. These are not matters of later interpretation. They are the facts of the day.
The principle is simple:
A trust is a trust. An oath is an oath.
BāBā-Tāl had remained silent beside me.
His bells were still.
Then he whispered:
“Bacha!”
I looked at him.
Those desert eyes no longer frightened me.
They were asking a question.
“ If an oath is sworn before God and country, who has the authority to erase it from history?”
I had no answer.
Perhaps that is why history keeps reopening its graves.
Perhaps that is why statues fall.
Perhaps that is why courts revisit old judgments.
Perhaps that is why nations continue arguing about men who have been dead for generations.
Because history is not merely a list of people we admire.
History is also the record of promises made — and the moment people chose either to keep them or break them.
So let us return one final time to that morning.
Not to Bangladesh today.
Not to Pakistan today.
Not to a later medal.
Not to a later monument.
Not to a later national story.
Return to 20 August 1971.
Look at the uniform.
Look at the aircraft.
Look at the oath.
Look at the direction of flight.
Then ask the simplest question:
Whose officer was he when he acted?
If the answer is Pakistan, the conclusion does not require political rhetoric.
He broke the oath of the state he was still serving.
He turned the authority entrusted to him against that state.
He attempted to take its military aircraft towards India.
By the standards of that state, under the oath he had sworn, the act was treasonous.
The later birth of Bangladesh may explain why another nation remembers Mati-ur-Rehman differently.
It does not erase the oath.
It does not change the aircraft.
It does not change the date.
And it does not change the deed.
History may redraw the map. It cannot redraw the morning.
A medal may outlive a man.
A monument may outlive a government.
A national story may outlive a generation.
But none of them can alter the moment in which the deed was committed.
And this is why I leave my verdict here — not as a politician, not as an advocate for one capital against another, but as a writer examining the act:
Mati-ur-Rehman was a Pakistani officer under oath on 20 August 1971. He broke that oath. From the historical and legal standpoint of the state he was still serving, his act was treason.
History may give him another name elsewhere.
I cannot.
And perhaps BāBā-Tāl, would leave us with only one final warning:
The greatest danger to a country is not always the man who attacks it openly. Sometimes it is the shadow that first teaches the young to call the attack heroism.
*●□●□POETEARS□●□●* [Coined by T. Hejazi — Where poetry becomes tears, and tears become poetry]
The map may change beneath a nation’s feet,
The medals fade, the monuments retreat;
But deeds remain when every flag has flown,
And history judges what the heart has known.
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