Towards 1971 I: A Personal Journey [Part 1 of 6]

Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without

destroying our romance with nationalism.

~Yasmin Saikia

During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in

the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department and cooling ourselves down with hand-fans.

But on cool autumn nights, blackouts were rather enjoyable, and we would ask Ammi to sing. ‘Aa ja

sanam, madhur chandni mein hum,’ a Raj kapoor and Nargis number, apt for a moonlit night in the

veranda, was her favorite. That was also the song that she and her favorite nephew (her eldest brother’s

first son) used to sing at Eid dinners as a duet. The whole family adored him. He was brilliant and a high

achiever. Every kid in the family, to this day, is compared to him: Those that do well in their studies are

likened to him and those that don’t are chided to try to be like him. I never got to meet my cousin.

One day in 1978, my Mamu was told that his son, my mother’s favorite nephew, a 28-year-old major with

the Pakistan Army, had committed suicide. Mamu never believed that his son committed suicide. His son

had told him that he had taken on his superior for some financial malfeasance. My Mamu believed it was

for this reason that he was murdered. The story that I grew up with was that the alleged suicide note had a

blood stain on it and that Mamu had taken the matter to court, where the judge had said that it was not a

suicide. The forensic investigation on his remains was never completed. Some military high-up threatened

my Mamu with an offer to arrange for him to meet his dead son. Mamu stopped pursuing the matter, but

his grief lingered and the story lived on in my family.

Despite the scar left on my family by the Pakistan Army, I, like so many kids, was fascinated by soldiery,

even as I heard my father swear at the TV every night, as he watched General Zia on the TV screen. My

brothers and I used to stage elaborate battles between two armies of toy soldiers separated by a Ludo

board or an old desk calendar, and lob stones at the other side. Sometimes the artillery included lit

matchsticks that had to land on, or sufficiently near, the enemy soldier for it to be counted as a fatal hit.

That game of ours, in its indoor manifestations by the windowsill, ended when the curtain caught fire, but

the war fantasy continued in other games. My brother and I would line up two chairs, one in front of the

other, and throw a heavy blanket over them. This tent would sometimes be a helicopter, and at other

times a tank, firing and dropping bombs at the imaginary enemy.

I grew up in 80’s with a heady dose of nationalist songs valorizing soldiers and military. Pakistan was

heavily involved in the Afghan war at that time. All the same, war seemed distant to me— something that

happened in the past or happens far away. My father would sometimes tell us the story of blackouts in

Lahore when he was a young man. He told us of seeing flashes at the distant horizon and hearing sounds

of gunfire. Our favorite story was about Dad sleeping on the roof and smoking a cigarette during a

blackout and being visited by army men who respectfully asked him not to smoke.

The war of 1971, unlike the 1965 war, was not mentioned much in popular

culture. This was perhaps due to the shame associated with Pakistan being defeated and dismembered at

the hands of India. When remembered, it was always as a war between India and Pakistan and an episode

in the continuing saga of antagonism between the two nation-states. The Bangladeshis themselves are

simply forgotten, except as betrayers of Pakistan, collaborators with India against Pakistan, or at best, as

victims of India’s plot who were duped or brainwashed by the enemy. There was not much understanding

or recognition of the fact that Bangladeshis were once Pakistanis, and explanations such as the ‘betrayal

by Bengalis’ or ‘Indian designs’ only work as convenient frameworks to stunt any meaningful reflection on

why it is that East Pakistanis are now Bangladeshis. A discussion of Pakistan’s own conduct is simply not

on the table. A search inward stops at the nationalist complaint of soobaiyat[provincialism] breaking up

Pakistan, which in turn takes one back to Indian designs and affirms Pakistan’s raison d’être. Silence

ensues, and endures.

What little public conversation about 1971 exists in Pakistan is saturated by nation-state-centered

commentaries and that too of the zealous nationalist variety. Western commentators are assumed (and

not without cause) to be tainted with Orientalism, West-centric chauvinism, racism, and Islamophobia,

and both Indian and Bangladeshi commentators with their own nationalist partisan bias. So, what to do?

Genocide and mass rape are serious charges leveled against Pakistan that simply can’t be brushed aside by

taking an identity-centric view that operates on an insider-outsider binary. This is a view that dispenses

with all outsiders, and labels dissenters within as furthering outsider agendas. The near total dearth of

dissent on the 1971 war –with admirable exceptions from the Communist Party of Pakistan, and some

poets and writers such as Faiz, Jalib, and Eqbal Ahmad— in the face of a national and popular culture

crowded with militarist nationalism and anti-India jingoism makes it that much harder to find one’s

bearings and begin a search for a narrative outside the official history and collective memory.

The ‘foreign hand’ continues to deflect our attention elsewhere. A friend of mine who

works for the Pakistani Army, when asked for his opinion on whether Baluchistan will eventually become

another Bangladesh since it has been treated like East Pakistan was prior to its liberation, coolly remarked

that there are many countries involved in fermenting separatist trouble in Balochistan, but not to worry,

“hum ne wahan sab pakar liye hain” [We have apprehended/captured all of them.] Indeed, many have

been apprehended, and some released as dead bodies on the roads bearing torture marks, something that

Justice Raja Fayyaz, a Pakistan Supreme Court Judge, aptly described as “a reign of terror like

Gestapo.” Power, blind to its own violence, projects its own inability to speak any language other than

force on those at the receiving end of the imperial stick. This demeaning view of people and how to deal

with a political conflict is captured in a Pakistan Rangers’ officer’s comment to Human Rights Watch

regarding the Okara Uprising, that “It’s nothing we cannot deal with. These people only understand the

language of the stick.”

During the people’s movement (popularly referred to as the Lawyer’s Movement) to oust General Pervez

Musharraf in 2007, I started taking issue with the Pakistan Army’s heavy involvement in the socio-

political life of Pakistan and its heavy-handedness in dealing with its citizenry. This dissent awakened me

to the need to develop a social conscience that does not let my elderly uncle’s (and my mother’s) grief over

losing his young son and being forced to abandon his search into the causes and circumstances of his

son’s death, fade from memory. It also offered me a line of inquiry with which to probe the murky events

in Pakistan’s history, such as the Balochistan issue. With such unraveling of the official narrative, it

becomes somewhat possible to think of the 1971 war outside the tropes of Bengali betrayal and Indian

designs, which, in turn, is sorely needed to understand and examine the present state of Pakistan and how

we got here.

The pillage of East Pakistan and its bloody birth into Bangladesh offers an illuminating case to see the

history of Pakistan’s centralizing state and society’s narrowing vision of what Pakistan is, the dominance

of Pakistan’s Armed forces over the state and society and its repression of contending visions of Pakistan

and Pakistan’s constituent parts. No meaningful public exploration, either in the roots of the East

Pakistan conflict or the conduct of war was undertaken in Pakistan, and that has grave consequences. In

Sepoy’s words, “the complaints of Swat, of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, of Balochistan for justice, for

recognition are echoes of the cries of Dhaka.”

In this the 40th anniversary year of Bangladesh’s liberation and the war of 1971, two historians, Sarmila

Bose and Yasmin Saikia, have published their studies of the war of 1971 and how it is remembered,

focused primarily on Bangladesh. Neither book offers a narrative of the Bangla Language Movement that

sprang up in East Pakistan almost immediately after Pakistan’s independence. In the posts that follow this

one in the coming week, I will offer a reading of the Bangla Language Movement as gleaned from Saadia

Toor’s new book, to elucidate the relationship between East and West Pakistan, and then review Bose and

Saikia’s books to discuss the events of 1971 and probe issues of history and memory.  

Towards 1971 II: The Making of a Tragedy [Part 2 of 6]

Painted on a wall inside my old school.

Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The

civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital,

their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and

technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this basis, the Muslims of the

Indo-Pak Subcontinent understand themselves to be a separate nation. This was also the reason why

two societies, that is, the Hindu society and the Muslim society, came into being in the Subcontinent. Sir

Syed Ahmed Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal stressed that Muslims are not a a faction but a

separate nation. When with the beautiful efforts of these elders, Muslims came to believe firmly that

Congress, established by an Englishman Allen Hume, is an anti-Muslim Hindu organization, they put

forth a demand for a separate homeland for themselves. Foundational Principles of the Ideology of

Pakistan: 1. The Muslims of the Subcontinent constitute one nation. 2. The Muslims will live freely in

accordance with the eternal principles of Islam. 3. The Muslims of the Subcontinent need a free country

to retain/maintain their separate/distinct national existence, so that they can make religious, societal,

political, cultural, and economic progress. Truth is weary of bodies without soul / The living God is the

God of the living.

Bengal played a crucial role in the Pakistan movement, but within a little over two decades after the

creation of Pakistan, a political movement with broad popular support in East Bengal turned secessionist

and sounded the death knell for the State of Pakistan as it had existed. This parting of ways of the

erstwhile East and West Pakistan, as Philip Oldenburg has persuasively argued, “cannot be called

inevitable unless one considers forces centered in West Pakistan which pushed the country apart.”

Different conceptions and models of the state animated ideas of Pakistan in the two so-called wings of

Pakistan. The West Pakistani model of the state, in Philip Oldenburg’s words, “saw the state of Pakistan as

inseparable from the Muslim nation of the Indian subcontinent, a nation locked in combat with the

Hindus,” and Urdu formed a central plank of this narrative. To the East Pakistanis/Bengalis, the creation

of Pakistan meant the escape of the majority from the economic, intellectual/educational, and political

domination of Hindus. The fact that Muhajir and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan imposed its own

vision of the state of Pakistan on East Pakistan to the detriment of all other visions is central to the

making of the second partition.1

East Pakistan/East Bengal had more than half of the population of Pakistan, was

demographically its largest province, and had a vibrant history of activism and political awareness. The

Muslim League and the West Pakistani elites construed Bengal as a threat, since in a democracy, Bengal

would have dominated Pakistani politics. “The Muslim League thus tried its best to contain East Bengal

and deny its rightful representation in the nation-state both at a symbolic level (in the ‘imagined

community’ of the nation) and at the level of the state (that is, political representation, recruitment into

the bureaucracy and the military, and access to economic resources),” writes Saadia Toor, in her

book, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jinnah had re-organized the Muslim League into a centralized political party, and

the centralizing drive of Jinnah’s leadership continued and cemented his control over both the party and

state after independence with, among other things, his retention of the colonial office of Governor

General, and abandonment of the idea of a federal state with a weak center and strong provinces. The

vertically integrated and centralized state structure—one that did not include many Bengalis at higher

echelons– involved unification of the civil services under its aegis and a highly powerful civil and military

bureaucracy that acted as the shadow government of Pakistan at the expense of elected officials. Through

this vertical integration of the State and the non-representation of Bengalis in the center, what was set in

motion was a clash between a Bengali middle class seeking equal representation and, in Toor’s words, “an

increasingly fascist ruling party at the center dominated by not just the (predominantly Punjabi and

Muhajir) West Pakistani ruling elite but also the Bengali Ashraf.”

The earlier Hindu-Urdu language controversy informed the stubbornness with which Bengali linguistic

demands were met. The Hindi-Urdu controversy, Toor writes, “had resulted in the breaking up of the

shared and syncretic literary tradition represented by a single language (Urdu/Hindustani) into (Muslim)

Urdu and (Hindu) Hindi under pressure from Hindu nationalist forces.” Thus Urdu had become a

cornerstone of the ethnic nationalism of the North Indian Muslims whose “ideology of Muslim

nationalism […] underpinned the demand for Pakistan.” Urdu’s stature in the Muslim nationalist

narrative had become even more heightened due to the fact that many of the landmark monuments of the

Indo-Islamic history, on the basis of which the separate nation-hood of Indian Muslims was asserted,

were now in the state of India. The declining status of Urdu in the Post-Independence India further

exacerbated the sense of siege that proponents of Urdu felt, and Hindi being declared the national

language of India prompted Urdu’s proponents in Pakistan to harden their stance for Urdu as Pakistan’s

national language. Last but not the least, the Bangla-Urdu language controversy heightened anxieties of

Muslim nationalists of the geographically non-contiguous “wings” of Pakistan that perhaps there was also

a cultural non-contiguity.

With Bangla not appearing on coins, stamps, and official forms, the status of Bangla language became a

contentious issue almost immediately after the creation of the state of Pakistan. The demand that Bangla

be the national language was buttressed by the fact that a majority of Pakistanis spoke Bangla, albeit

mostly in East Pakistan, while Urdu was the first language of just 5 percent of Pakistanis, whatever the

claims of the latter being a lingua franca of Indian Muslims and central to their cultural identity.

However, in November 1947 Urdu was proposed as the medium of instruction and recommended as the

national language in the National Education Conference. Even when Urdu’s use as the medium of

education was left to the discretion of provincial governments, thanks to the strong opposition of the

Bengali participants, the federal Minister of Education continued to make statements that Urdu should be

the national language of Pakistan. On December 5th 1947, a street demonstration protested the

conference. The State responded by invoking the very colonial-era law prohibiting public assembly that

Bengalis had fought against on the road to decolonization. The resulting clash between the protesters and

the Police only fueled Bengali resentment towards the Muslim League government.

The East Bengal Language Committee (EBLC) was set up in 1949 to pursue the possibility of writing

Bangla in the Arabic script to make it more of an “Islamic language.” This would purge it of its Hindi

influence and help it to shed its Sanskrit past, thus bringing it “into harmony and accord with the genius

and culture of the people of East Bangal in particular and Pakistan in general.” (EBLC, 1949:2) The

committee, despite its retrograde assertions of Bangla being a non-Muslim language, did not agree to the

proposed change to Urdu script. But this was too little, too late, and did not allay the popular Bengali fear

that the state will impose Urdu on them. In the aftermath of the massacre of tens of protestors on

February 21, 1952, remembered as Ekushey, the government did declare Bangla as the second national

language, but the West Pakistani elite’s anxieties over Bengal’s demographic majority remained and

would lead to the declaration of emergency rule and the unification of West Pakistan into one

administrative unit by executive order.

The Bangla script and vocabulary was seen to be too close to Sanskrit and therefore Hinduism. This was

consistent with the West Pakistani view that Bengalis were ‘Hindu-like’ and under the influence of

Hindus. This identification of Bengalis and Bengali culture with Hindus, Hinduism, and thus with India,

became the reigning paradigm with which all things Bengali would be considered. As Toor shows, two

tropes were deployed to conceptualize and represent East Pakistan: East Bangal as a problem province

rife with Hindus and Communist subversives working to destroy Muslim Pakistan; and Bengali culture,

language, and people as ‘Hindu-like’ and under heavy influence of Hinduism, and therefore, not Pakistani

enough. As Raj Kumar Chakravarti, a Hindu Congressman from East Bangal noted in a 1952 Constituent

Assembly Debate, “whenever there is trouble in Pakistan, it is attributed by the people to ‘the enemies of

the State’ and, by insinuations, the Hindus are regarded as these enemies.” The paranoia about Indians

“dressed differently” crossing into East Bengal to sow discord had manifested into scapegoating. As Toor

puts it, “This chain of significance (dressed ‘differently’ = Hindu = Indian) also relied on and reinforced

the idea that to be a Hindu was not to be Pakistani.” Toor quotes Shri Dhirendra Natth Dutta, an

opposition member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, whose complaint to the Speaker of the House

captures the deleterious impact of the aforesaid state discourses: “If we put on Loongi, poor Muslim

clothes in Eastern Bengal, it is said we disguise ourselves. If we put on Dhoti then it is said that we have

come from West Bengal. There is such a sense of mistrust and this has been engineered under the

Government of Pakistan.”

Jinnah himself was, of course, one of the sources and proponent of this paradigm, as is evident from his

March 1948 address in Dhaka on his first official tour to the province in the wake of the initial agitations

of the Bengali Language Movement, wherein he terms the proponents of Bangla language to be “enemies

of Pakistan” and thus seditious: “Let me make it clear to you that the State language of Pakistan is going to

be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan.”2

Three days later Jinnah would go on to affirm Urdu as the language that “embodies the best that is in

Islamic culture and Muslim tradition and is nearest to the language used in other Islamic countries.” He

also located the demand for Bengali language rights in the infamous “foreign hand.” In Jinnah’s words,

“Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still Muslims, have set about actively encouraging

provincialism in the hope of weakening Pakistan, and thereby facilitating the re-absorption of this

province into the Indian Dominion.” […] “[T]he recent language controversy … is only one of the many

subtle ways whereby the position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province.” In

short, the Bengali demands were not genuine but were the nefarious handy work of “our enemies” whose

ranks were peopled mostly by Hindus. The Bangla Language Movement, in this view, was a Hindu/Indian

conspiracy.

The colonial/Orientalist historiography at the heart of the two nation theory that posited Muslims and

Hindus of India as not only historically separate and distinct, but also fundamentally different, is manifest

in Jinnah’s conflations: Bengal’s Hindus (“Our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there are still

Muslims”) with Indians (“position of provincialism is being sedulously injected into this province”), Urdu

language with Islamic culture, any attempts to dislodge Urdu’s dominance as sedition to the nation at the

behest of the Hindu enemy across the border. These conflations will burst forth in all their murderous

glory in 1971 with the genocidal attack on Hindus and ‘Hindu-like’ Bengalis.  

——— 1. Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan

Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733. [↩] 2. Quoted in Oldenburg, 1985. [↩]  

Towards 1971 III: A Few Good Pakistani Men [Part 3 of 6]

I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies.

-Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.1

The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971

Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and

Pakistan or the Cold War context of the conflict, though they are not completely ignored. Her stated aims

are to study and scrutinize how the war of 1971 is remembered, perhaps to illuminate what is willingly

forgotten. Growing up in West Bengal, India, Sarmila Bose was familiar with a particular narrative about

the conflict: “Our Bengali brethren …once again fight for freedom” from their fellow countrymen from

West Pakistan, who “seemed for some inexplicable reason intent on killing them all.” India had played the

role of “white knight to the beleaguered Bangladeshis.” The latter claim she deftly dismantles.2 During her

research, realizing that something was off, she militated against this narrative (and her Bengali

informants). As Naeem Mohaiemen points out in his incisive review of her book, “her fury was of

the naïf making a late discovery. What animates Dead Reckoning therefore is that palpable rage.” Having

grown up with my own nationalist blinders, I empathize with the rage that comes with the realization that

one has let oneself be duped. But Bose’s research and her book, perhaps still guided by the force of the

nationalist narratives, “goes so far to the other side as to create a new set of biases, even more

problematic.”3

Bose makes much of her neutrality, balance, and objectivity, and so do the Pakistan Army officers she

interviewed and some of the Pakistani reviewers of her book. She writes that “it would be impossible to

humanize the conflict without emotional empathy for the subject,” but her empathy seems to be reserved

only for the Pakistan Army and the victims of pro-liberation Bengalis. The Bangladeshi voices that she

presents either exonerate the Pakistan Army of Bangladeshi allegations of wrongdoing or expose the lies

in Bangladeshi national narrative. Of course, not all allegations would be correct and there are

fabrications and lies in epics of nationalism. It is her lax critical standards in accepting her Pakistani

sources with which to debunk them, and her constant and consistent berating of her Bangladeshi subjects,

that cast a cloud of doubt on her scholarly enterprise.

Reserving others’ voices for making the most objectionable assertions about

Bengalis, Bose deploys two Bengali voices to note something seemingly inherent or innate to

Bangladeshis. “The Bengalis are noted for a negative and destructive attitude […] they also have a

tendency to put the blame on others” says one. The second voice chimes in, “in this attitude I see a

similarity in all Bengalis […] to court suffering in order to nurse self-pity by way of emotional

satisfaction.” This bizarre passage reflects a pattern in her book: hammering Bangladeshi “attitude” and

culture of victimhood, their penchant for complaining too much (and that too using the wrong

statistics!), and a tendency to exaggerate. All of this is presented without the objective scholar dwelling

over the injustices meted out by West Pakistan on the East. One of her many assertions that clearly

demonstrates her decontextualized reading of events, lack of empathy for Bengalis, and uncritical

acceptance of Pakistani sources, is her approving mention of a Pakistan Army official who took part in the

abysmal, late, and bungled effort at providing relief to those affected by the Bhola cyclone in 1970 – one

that killed, displaced, and affected hundreds of thousands. The aforesaid officer, Lt Gen. Ghulam Mustafa,

notes that “even as they [the Pakistan Army] worked, Bengalis watched from the sidelines and complained

that nothing was being done.” That this delay in and mismanagement of relief emblematized (West)

Pakistan’s attitude and lack of sympathy for its citizens in the East, and is, in fact, in line with how East

Pakistan was marginalized from the get-go, is not commented upon.

With respect to Bangladeshi history’s singular focus on exploitation by West Pakistan in the pre-liberation

era, and colonialism being the only language with which to remember the Pakistan period, Yasmin Saikia,

in her book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, offers a valuable insight.

She writes that “the intimacy of the Other (Pakistan and Pakistanis) as well as the fear of remembering so

engulfs the Bangladeshis today that they have willfully lost the segment of pre-1971 history.” This

insightful and sympathetic reading of a silence is contrasted by Bose’s denial of Pakistan’s colonial

relationship with East Bengal by a reasoning that suggests that Bangladeshis’ perceived grievances were

due to its historically being an economic backwater and not because of systematically sustained

inequality. The disparity between Bengalis and others in government and military jobs, in Bose’s

reckoning is different from discrimination, which she defines as lack/denial of equal opportunity. The

state’s privileging of Urdu, its machinery being disproportionately manned by West Pakistanis, or the

racist attitude of the West Pakistani elites and civil society towards Bengalis who were considered not

Pakistani enough, had, it seems, nothing to do with the disparity and Bengali grievances. A longer view of

history is conveniently outside of the time line of her project, but if that is the case, why resort to

essentialisms of Bengladeshi attitudes, calling it a culture of complaint, exaggerations, and victimhood, or

characterizing Bangladeshis as “a swarm of [angry/excited] honey bees?” Divorced from the power

relations between East and West Pakistan, the conclusions she draws stoop to charging Bangladeshis with

innate violence (though chaotic and unorganized; you see, they can’t do anything right!), false bravado,

and a penchant for lying, exaggerating, and complaining.

Bose gives scant attention to how the memory of the pre-1971 history shaped the events of 1971 and

continues to shape how 1971 is remembered. She describes the demolition of Shahid Minar by the

Pakistan Army as “a pointless waste of time and resources,” an act of vandalism “that added fuel to

Bengali rage,” and finds “no military reason to demolish a memorial to the language movement of the

1950s.” But there was a point. The demolition of Shahid Minar [Martyr’s Tower] marked the

commencement of the military operation–dubbed “Operation Searchlight”– to crush the budding Bengali

uprising; an act of destruction that symbolized Pakistan’s attitude to Bengali history, and was a signal to

the people of what is to come with the intended effect of demoralizing them. It is also the kind of move

that almost always backfires, as it did in 1971. The Shahid Minar was a memorial to

the Ekushey massacre; it commemorated a movement that lasted five years; and marked a milestone in

the struggle of the people of East Pakistan against (West) Pakistan’s colonial exploitation, dominance,

systemic discrimination, and mission civilisatrice. But deliberation on these contexts do not fit

with Bose’s gleeful debunking crusade; and such a decontextualized reading of events produces

distortions that pervade her book.

A League of Extraordinary Pakistani Gentlemen

Most of Bose’s Pakistani interviewees were retired Army officials. Initially she did not have much success,

but with the efforts of her Pakistani and American friends she was able to get a foot in the door and

impress her interviewees. The interviewees connected her with their fellow veterans of the 1971 war, and

they thus formed the close-knit network of Pakistani Army officials that informed her and whose word she

seldom seems to doubt or find flaws in. Bose’s focus on complicating the Bangladeshi national narrative at

the cost of what amounts to legitimating a militarist Pakistani nationalism is unhelpful. This lack of

concern for the official Pakistani narrative, and willed ignorance of Pakistan’s political history is captured

in her laudatory remark about General Yahya Khan, the martial law administrator of Pakistan in 1971,

being “the only military ruler who actually kept his word on returning the country to democracy one year

after taking power.” No reflection is on offer regarding the fact that a defeated and discredited army had

no legitimacy left to continue ruling a country that was in open revolt even in its Western wing since

1968.4 And as for the act of handing over power to democratic rule, C.M Naim’s words are worth bearing

in mind:

Yahya Khan resigned, but in his last act helped perpetuate one-man rule and disregard for constitutional

processes by transferring power not to the duly elected National Assembly but to Mr. Z. A. Bhutto, whom

he personally appointed as Chief Martial Law Administrator.

Bose’s Pakistani interlocutors, these gentle military men, “unlike the Bangladeshi

… had no hatred towards their former countrymen.” What she does not dwell on is how, in Yasmin

Saikia’s words, “the rhetoric of Bengalis as brothers occupied the same space as the representation of

them as ‘betrayers’ and ‘Indian-like,’ that is, the Other or ‘Hindu-like.’” On the other hand, having

brushed aside the injustices of the Pakistan period and exalted the Pakistan Army’s conduct during the

war, Bose contends that Bangladeshis have an unwarranted visceral hatred of the Pakistan Army which

was created through Bangladeshi war-time propaganda. For the ethnicization of Bangladeshi society, she

blames “political alchemists,” Bangladeshi nationalism, and Mujib’s “campaign of hatred.” (or is it the

Bengalis’ innate penchant for excitement and violence?) What she does not comment upon is the

dominant power, namely the Pakistan state, which produced not only this ethnicization through its

racialized discourses, imperial practices, and colonial exploitation, but also the Bangladeshi nationalism

with its own parochialisms, inequalities, and hatreds, in a dialectical opposition to it.

Jalal Alamgir and Bina D’Costa remind us that “a deeply racist agenda accompanied the war crimes,” and

the East Pakistani population was considered “ethnically sub-par:” from Yahya Khan’s genocidal language

(as reported by Asia Times: “Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands”5) to Ayub

Khan’s racial language (“East Bengalis … probably belong to the very original Indian races … they have

been and still are under considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence…they have all the inhibitions

of downtrodden races”6), to Jinnah’s viewof the Bangla Language Movement being a plan to break up

Pakistan and absorb it back into the Indian Dominion by “our enemies, among whom I regret to say, there

are still some Muslims.” C. M. Naim’s survey of the press coverage of 1971 shows that racialized othering

was pervasive in the West Pakistani literate society, and that the charge of treason was

“leveled…unequivocally against all the Hindus of East Bengal.” And indeed this should be noted, for the

ire of the Pakistan Army fell most brutally on the Hindus of East Bengal who were deemed always already

Indians or closet-Indians, and in any case, traitors working for and with India in weaving a secessionist

conspiracy in East Pakistan. Bose too notes that during the 1971 war, “Hindu men appear to have been

more likely to be presumed to be insurgents solely on the basis of their religion.” This othering and

racialized language was pervasive in the officer cadre as well. Oldenburg mentions Salik’s book Witness to

Surrender, where he writes about officers chatting in the Officer’s Mess on the afternoon of March 26,

1971 and one Captain Chaudhury says, “The Bengalis have been sorted out well and proper—at least for a

generation.” One Major Malik chimes in with the familiar colonial bile “Yes, they only know the language

of force. Their history says so.”7

The Language of Force

The Pakistanis believed that the war would be quickly

won as Bengalis being “weak and unmartial, and cowardly” would quit their rebellion. This “myth of

power” over Bengalis held sway over rank and file Pakistani soldiers, whose ignorance about Bengali

society, language, people and even body language, and the martial “manliness of bravado” made for a

destructive brew. At checkpoints, young Bengali men were forced to remove their lungis [sarongs] in front

of their elderly and womenfolk to see whether they were circumcised and thus Muslim. One can imagine

what befell those that failed this racialized test of religion so familiar to South Asian history.

General Niazi, whom Bose notes as a dissenter (perhaps to maintain her self-perception of being

“balanced” or whatnot), did not object to the war or Pakistan’s military action but that “it should have

been conducted differently:” “instead of wholesale attack, the rebels’ so-called strong points might have

been smoked out …” She documents one ‘smoking out’ attempted at Jinjirawhere a blockade was set up to

encounter the rebels as they escaped the assault from the other direction, but, “what they had not

expected, however, was when the firing started, the civilians started to run as well.” (How easy it seems to

be able to place people in one’s own categories of choice: civilians or rebels. What about rebel-civilian or

civilian-rebel?) Then, she takes her informer on his word that the kind soldiers fired over civilians’ heads

only to induce them to run in the direction of the assault. This she explains with the fog of war argument

whereby soldiers have to make split second and difficult decisions, and bad things happen, and that can’t

be helped. She does not entertain the possibility that the Pakistanis did not expect the civilians to escape

the assault from one direction into the line of fire from the other because the civilians either did not enter

the inhuman calculus of war; or were considered fair game or “collateral damage,” in today’s parlance,

whose lives didn’t matter enough to merit a change of course; or perhaps the population were considered

the support system of rebels or future/potential insurgents and thus, being a “terrorist population,” a

legitimate target.

This “smoking out” is evident literally in another incident Bose discusses wherein during the assault on

Dhaka, Pakistani soldiers set fire to a slum by throwing ‘a powder-like substance’ on the slum and then

firing on it (this burning down of dwellings seems to be a widely used tactic by Pakistan army as Bose

mentions it in many incidents but without much deliberation and reflection on its systematic use) and

shot at people as they fled the inferno. Bose notes this incident rather briefly as an example of the discord

within Pakistan army on the level of rank and file soldiers that she quickly counters with the example of

Pakistani soldiers giving water to a survivor of an attempted execution earlier by another set of Pakistani

soldiers. You see, there were bad soldiers but there were good soldiers too, hence the Pakistan Army’s

conduct cannot be denounced as all bad by people whose villages were burned to the ground, their men

lined up and shot, their women raped. Even when Bose mentions that after the assault on a village called

Satiachora on the road to Tangail from Dhaka, soldiers, “some half a dozen” bad apples as she would have

it, “went hut to hut in the village, setting them on fire and killing anything that moved,” she ensures that

the reader is left with the silver lining that “the soldiers did not harm women in anyway.”

Bose presents a superb reconstruction of the massacre at Thanpara, a village on the India-East Pakistan

border remembered as ‘the village of widows.’ She tells the story of Pakistan army’s horrendous massacre

where all the men whom the commanding officer deemed Indians and/or Hindus (always already

assumed to be Indians and Indian agents), were “rounded up together and shot. Their bodies were

stacked in a pile and set alight.” The in-coming Pakistani soldiers were on foot, and proceeded “through

the villages along the side of the road, destroying everything they came across,” burning villages with a

substance that set huts on fire when they shot. Bose mentions General Mitha, (for the second time as “the

legendary founder of the Special Services Group (SSG) of commandos in the Pakistan army”) who saw

from air that ‘‘in many of the villages near the road, almost all the huts were burnt and there was not a

soul in these villages.” (One wonders what became of the unharmed women and children.) She

masterfully teases out how the commanding officer was playing god not only when he shot all the Bengali

men in batches with the subsequent batch stacking up and setting fire to the previous before being shot,

but more so when he spared a young boy’s life whom the officer did not believe to be a Bengali. After the

massacre of the first batch of men, the captain took the second batch back to the academy where they

were shot. (The survivor recalled that the Captain’s higher officials thanked the Captain for having done a

good job.) Bose mentions the soldier who helped the boy get a pardon and that some soldiers had tears

rolling down their cheeks as the massacre unfolded. That may be, and there is much good in

representations that humanize soldiers, but what needs to be highlighted is the fact that they still went

along and assisted in the cruelty that so troubles them, moves them to tears, and, at least in some cases,

haunts them for the rest of their lives. One explanation for that may be the militarist nationalism that

idolizes the military and puts the defense of a nation—always deemed under siege from enemies without

and within— at the forefront of national self-hood. Another explanation is the very institution of military

that has at its core obedience, hierarchy, and killing which is writ large when it is unrestrained by public

scrutiny and accountability.

What is unforgivable, however, is Bose’s pointing out the “eerie similarity between what happened in

Thanpara and the military action in Dhaka university a couple of weeks before, in the way a few villagers

were kept in reserve to stack the dead bodies before being lined up and shot next to the corpses they had

just been made to carry,” and then in the same paragraph falling back to the “few bad apples” apologia as

she gently chides the Pakistan military to hold those “one or two companies of a single regiment” to

account, that have brought ill repute to “an entire army” and “a whole nation.” (A comparison with her

vicious denunciations of the lack of accounting of the pro-Bangladesh perpetrators of violence and the

Bangladeshi national denial of its own atrocities is instructive.)

Bose states that due to the small number of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, “many young officers were

left to shoulder responsibilities, in terms of territory or decision-making, that they never would have had

to bear in peace-time or conventional wars.” These young officers would include those that played god in

the Bangladeshi countryside and urban areas, and the likes of the aforementioned Captain Chaudhurys

and Major Maliks of Pakistan Army celebrating the ‘sorting out’ of the Bengalis. If the absence of any

accountability on the part of Pakistani state and military of its conduct in East Pakistan is not sufficient

evidence of indifference to and a systemic legitimation of indiscriminate violence, then, short of some

master document sanctioning a general and wonton attack on the populace, one is left to wonder what is.

1. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Columbia University Press,

June, 2011, p97 [↩]

2. For India’s role in exacerbating the conflict, see Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Notes on South Asia in Crisis,’ Bulletin

of Concern Asian Scholars, Winter, 1972. Available online at

http://www.bitsonline.net/eqbal/articles_by_eqbal_view_9C3140B3.htm [↩]

3. Naeem Mohaiemen, “Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971,” Economic & Political

Weekly, vol xlvi no 36, September 3, 2011. [↩]

4. “In truth, the threat to the Army’s predominance has always come from its own people. The only time

the old Pakistan was genuinely united was during the 1969 uprising from below that saw students and

workers in Dhaka and Karachi, Chittagong and Lahore, topple the dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub

Khan. The Army never forgave its Bengali citizens this act of treachery, and embarked on a bloodbath

when they proceeded to elect the leaders of their choice. It is worth stressing the point, glossed over in

so many recent accounts, that the Army which demands such vast sums to preserve the state actually

provoked its break-up in 1971.” Tariq Ali, “The Colour Khaki,” New Left Review, January – February

2003. http://newleftreview.org/A2429 [↩]

5. Quoted in Jalal Alamgir, Bina D’Costa “The 1971 Genocide: War Crimes and Political Crimes,”

Economic & Political Weekly, 2011 vol xlvi no 13, March 26, 2011. [↩]

6. Quoted in Philip Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan

Crisis of 1971,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Aug., 1985), pp. 711-733. [↩]

7. Oldenburg, “A Place Insufficiently Imagined”: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971,”

1985. [↩]

Towards 1971 IV: The Enemy Within [Part 4 of 6]

Marshaling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of

empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extra-territorial control. This

requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in

opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation.

Angana P. Chatterji, “The Militarized Zone,” Kashmir– The Case for Freedom

After all, there is little wiggle room in the binaries inscribed onto nationalism or colonialism by current

historiography: one resists or perishes; one is either a hero or a traitor.

Sepoy, “The Middle Man”

My uncle’s sister moved from Indore, India to Dhaka when she got married to a man who had migrated to

Dhaka during the 1947 partition of India. That would make her and her husband, in Bangladeshi parlance,

Biharis, a catch-all pejorative term for those that migrated to East Pakistan during the Partition from

various regions in India. Her husband, Shafiq Bhai (pseudonym), built a successful business in Dhaka and

was a wealthy man. One evening during the war of 1971, they were visited by Pakistani soldiers. Rumors

spread that Shafiq Bhai was collaborating with the Pakistani army. My uncle’s family maintains that

accusation to be untrue. In any event, armed men came for Shafiq Bhai and took him and his two adult

sons with them. They shot dead all three of them. Then their house was firebombed, killing one of their

younger sons and injuring two daughters. From then on, a Bengali friend of Shafiq Bhai’s murdered son

guarded the rest of the family, and helped them migrate to India. After they emigrated, their home was

looted. After the end of war they came back and married their daughter to the Bengali man who had

helped them.

Responding to a question about the pardoning of the collaborators, Bangladeshi journalist Syed Ashfaqul

Haque, says that “if the war criminals were tried a third of the population would be eliminated.” Of

course, he’s only referring to the Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army as war criminals, and

not the Biharis who were not pardoned but were killed, hounded out, or herded into camps where they

have stayed in abysmal conditions for four decades as stateless persons, and whose attackers are not

counted among war criminals but among war heroes.

Yasmin Saikia, in her book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, argues

that the Bangladeshi nation-state has a vested interest in preserving a certain memory of the past in order

to continue to legitimize itself. As is the case with Pakistan, forgetting the episodes and stories that

complicate the official history is a part of the process by which the state creates and sustains collective

memory to keep its raison d’être fresh. The official Bangladeshi narrative rests upon a singular focus on

Bengali victimhood and Pakistani oppression: The Bangladeshis are the oppressed, who fought valiantly

and ultimately triumphed in liberating their nation from the Pakistani colonial boot. The dead consist of

only victims of the Pakistan Army and its death squads. Collaborators include only opportunists and

monsters but not political actors acting out a legitimate political viewpoint. In Saikia’s words, “the

Bengalis claim 1971 and the trauma of violence as an exclusive experience. Public memory is replete with

stories of the suffering of Bengali people, but there is no space to remember the experience of other

groups.”

"Captured Biharis, who had allegedly collaborated with the occupying forces of West Pakistan in Bangladesh, are

executed. " Source: 1971, Horst Faas & Michel Laurent

Biharis, as Eqbal Ahmad explains, “had to move two or three times since 1946 to escape massacres in

India, and had finally found haven in Pakistan to which they remained loyal.” They were murdered by

Bengalis in East Pakistan by the thousands, for being Urdu-speaking migrants, supporters of a united

Pakistan, and being favored by West Pakistan. While the Pakistan military did nothing to stop the

massacres of Biharis as they unfolded, it later on highlighted these massacres, inflated the number of

dead, and used them as war propaganda to legitimate its own military assault (something that Sarmila

Bose makes no mention of in her book). Such massacres occurred just before the Pakistan military’s

assault on East Pakistan when the Awami League briefly held some level of control over East Pakistan.

During the Pakistan military’s counter-insurgency and war of attrition too, there were massacres of

Biharis and also revenge massacres by Biharis against Bengalis. The third round of bloody massacres of

Biharis occurred in 1972 when Bangladesh had come into being!

The Pakistan Army recruited East Pakistanis as civilian militias, popularly referred to as razakars/rajakars

that had two wings, al-Badr and al-Shams. The former included college and madrassa-educated youth and

carried out special operations, and the latter were charged with protection of bridges and roads.1 They also

worked as death squads. Yasmin Saikia notes that “During the war, the West Pakistani government had

called upon men to subjugate the rebels in the east, and in turn, these men attacked the vulnerable to

display power. Violence spawned and the nationalist Bengalis heeding to the call of their leaders turned

against their supposed enemy – Pakistanis and Biharis – in their midst.” Sarmila Bose, however, takes it

for granted that the “Razakar forces were recruited from among loyalist Bengali.” Indeed there were those

that took the pro-united-Pakistan stance and fought for it. General Abu Lais, a Bengali man who now lives

in Pakistan, is one such man that Saikia mentions in her book. Lais’ father, who had once fought for the

creation of Pakistan, did not approve of its break-up and was tortured and killed by Mukti Bahini, the pro-

liberation militia, for his political position as well as for information regarding his son’s whereabouts

which he did not divulge. Lais’ father himself was neither a pro-Pakistan militant, nor aiding the Pakistan

Military. He simply refused to aid the Bangladeshi liberation fighters. However, all those who actively

helped the Pakistan army, or as in the case of Lais’ father, did not aid the Bengali liberation cause, seem to

be collapsed into one enemy category, that of ‘collaborators.’

Amitava Kumar in his essay, “A collaborator in Kashmir,” illustrates how an occupation turns people into

collaborators by reflecting on Tabassum Guru’s 1994 statement A Wife’s Appeal for Justice: “you must

understand the situation in Kashmir, every man, woman and child has some information on the

movement even if they are not involved. By making people into informers they turn brother against

brother, wife against husband and children against parents.” Both positions – one that considers

collaborators to be necessarily loyalists and the other that considers those perceived to be loyalists as

necessarily collaborators with the Pakistan army– overstate the agency of the individual and downplay the

power dynamics. There were those that informed on fellow Bengalis; those that actively provided aid to

Pakistan military; those that were recruited into its militias; those that worked for Pakistani forces; those

that gave them rations; and those that were opportunists and performed all or some of the above to make

hay while the Pakistani sun, it needs to be kept in mind, was scorching everything that stood in its path.

Those that collaborated or were perceived as collaborators were and still are

marked as the enemy. For West Pakistani civilians living in East Pakistan at the time, their being from

West Pakistan was reason enough for Mukti Bahini and pre-liberation Bengalis to target them. Then there

were Bengali collaborators who have largely not been held to account in post liberation Bangladesh for the

violence they unleashed, while the violence unleashed by pro-liberation Bengalis on those that were, or

were suspected to be, collaborators is unacknowledged and continues through camp life and

discrimination, as in the case of Biharis who are always already deemed the collaborators. Saikia

highlights the important point that “The rajakar Other is not an easily identifiable category but generally

pro-Pakistan Bengalis and ordinary Urdu-speaking people, who are commonly referred to as Bihari due to

their affinity with Urdu-speaking Pakistanis, are, by and large, deemed rajakars.”

"Overcrowding - Geneva Camp" Source: Shafiur Rahman's photostream

The Pakistan Army, barricaded and well-armed as it was, was a tougher target for Bangladeshi nationalist

violence, consequently making Biharis a more convenient and likely target. Biharis, being Urdu speakers,

had enjoyed an edge over Bengalis in terms of employment (in either Pakistani administration or private

businesses) and patronage. This accounted for Bengali socio-economic resentments for Biharis. Being

immigrants, Biharis were not landed people and mostly worked in the business sector, resulting in their

being clustered in urban spaces with ghetto-like conditions. Having suffered through migration and

relocation to Bengal at the time of Partition, many of them had sympathies for the idea of Pakistan, as

opposed to ethno-linguistic Bengali nationalism which by the time of the war had little room to

accommodate them within its fold. Differences in language and economic conditions, and Biharis’

perceived natural loyalty to Pakistan, transformed Biharis into an outcast community that the

Bangladeshi nationalists targeted for violence and pogroms, most often in towns where Bengalis and

Biharis often lived together as neighbors. After the war, many Biharis became “stateless refugees,” some

of whom were repatriated to West Pakistan, but most were not and stayed in camps abandoned by the

West Pakistan and kept, in Saikia’s words, “in a state of exception, and by controlling their lives and

deaths the state of Bangladesh has transformed them into bodies for killing and destruction.”

The lack of recognition of Biharis’ misery in Bangladeshi society and the abundant anti-Bihari rhetoric

legitimizes the continuance of systemic and routine violence against them. In his review of Sarmila Bose’s

book, Mohaiemen shortchanges the Biharis by saying that the “[t]he issue of repatriation for the ‘Biharis’

or ‘Stranded Pakistanis’ is also largely settled through their relative assimilation over 40 years, and the

court verdict (shamefully late) which gave them full voting rights ahead of the 2008 elections. What

remains unsettled is war crimes trials for the Bengalis who were involved in death squads, with the

support of the Pakistan army.” Indeed, his discussion of the domestic politics involved in prosecuting

Bangladeshi collaborators is illuminating and the granting of voting rights to stateless Biharis is a big step

in the right direction, but the former is hardly the only issue that remains unsettled and the latter “largely

settled.” This, again, is a silencing of Biharis. In June 2008, the children of Biharis born after 1971 were

granted citizenship rights, but their parents and elders still fester in the state of statelessness. Four

decades of camp-life, and living as socio-economic and political pariahs stripped of rights does not go

away with a stroke of the pen. Neither should the issue be considered “largely settled” without

recognition, apology, and reparations for the crimes done against them – the absence of which, in itself, is

continual violence.

See Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, 2011 [↩]

Towards 1971 V: Women and the War of 1971 [Part 5 of 6]

[...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the

suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men.

Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches”

All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating impact on

women, including rapes, exile, displacement, camp-life, loss of family, social ostracization and financial

insecurity and the consequent exploitation, and the subsequent silencing of their voices. “Women’s

vulnerabilities” Bina D’ Costa reminds us, “increase with the intensity of conflicts” and “rape of the

enemy’s women is often strategically used to terrorise the enemy population.” D’ Costa refers to Ruth

Seifert’s “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” to make the crucial point that “rather than considering

rape as an aggressive manifestation of sexuality, it must be understood as a sexual manifestation of

aggression.” The abuse of women serves as a communication between men of the opposing sides that

signals one’s triumph and the failure of the other to defend their women whose destruction is conceived as

the destruction of the enemy’s cultural identity.

Deepak Mehta’s essay, “Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim

Pakistani Publics in Bombay,”1 discusses the battle of hate literature between Hindu and Muslim

publicists in the early 20th century Bombay (and the continued hate propaganda around the Babri

Mosque demolition), as documented in the colonial archive. It demonstrates the existence of a strong

sexual undercurrent in this hate literature, and notes that “in their comments about women, in particular

prostitutes, Hindu and Muslim participants found common ground” and based on “a combined assertion

of masculinity and their religious community, both Hindus and Muslims imagined each other’s woman as

sexually available or worthy of domestication.” Such rhetoric, and conception of women, not only lays the

foundation of violence on enemy women, but also, stricter policing of the women of one’s “own side.” The

contest of militarized masculinity also translates in the feminizing of enemy men2, as is evident in the

forced undressing of Bangladeshi men at Pakistani-controlled checkpoints during the war of 1971.

The racialized discourse that constructed Bengalis as Hindu (and Hindu-like), polluting and destroying

the nation from within, made the purging of the Bengali population essential to restoring the nation to its

original purity. In the words of Saikia “Muslim Pakistani (read: Pure) men assumed that the sacrifice of

the Hindu women was necessary to undo the malaise.” Nominated as masculine agents of the state, West

Pakistani men forced their idea and vision of Pakistan onto the East Pakistani population. Rape and

sexual violence are used as a weapon of war against women to spread terror, and in this regard the war of

1971 was no exception.

Bangladeshi women were raped by Pakistani soldiers on their ‘scorched earth’ operations in villages and

campaign of intimidation and terror whereby they would attack villages, loot, and rape women who

caught their fancy, sometimes tipped off by their collaborators or by those with a personal score to

settle. Firdousi Priyabhasani’s story, included in Saikia’s book, makes clear that Bangladeshi women were

raped as a means of interrogation and kept in bunkers to be raped by rank and file Pakistani soldiers.

Prabhasani, even after being gang raped, was shown the bunker as a threat. Scholar Bina D’

Costa mentions Geoffery Davis, a medical student who worked in Bangladesh for a few months with

International Planned Parenthood, who relayed stories of women taken to ‘rape camps’ where “women

considered pretty were kept for the officers, while the rest were distributed among the ranks. The women

did not get enough to eat, and when they fell ill, many died in the camps. A large number of survivors

would never be able to bear children due to psychological and physical abuse.”

The denial of sexual violence done by the Pakistan Army and their goons is pervasive in Post-war

Pakistan. That the Pakistan army spared women is a consistent theme throughout Bose’s book, which

Yasmin Saikia’s book, Women, War, and the making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, makes clear was

indeed not the case. But even if one momentarily allows for the possibility that women and children were

not harmed in Pakistan’s dirty little colonial war while their men-folk were shot dead, what becomes of

the surviving women?

Sarmila Bose, in her effort to complicate (if one were to be generous) the argument that the Pakistan army

used rape as a weapon of war that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of women, asserts in

her earlier paper that “Voluntary liaisons between local women and army personnel and the prostitution

that invariably accompanies the deployment of soldiers need to be excluded, to focus on the crime of rape

(including comfort women), regardless of the religion, ethnicity or politics of the victims or the

perpetrators.”

“Voluntary liaison” – that soldiers had girl-friends in East Pakistan or had wives there that many left

behind or discarded— is a standard euphemism used in Pakistan to deny sexual violence. The power

differential/dynamics in a war zone/occupation/counterinsurgency and the production and maintenance

of that differential by violence cannot be discounted even in “voluntary liaisons” and prostitution.

Domestic violence, migration, and smuggling/human trafficking, as D’ Costa points out, are the biggest

threats to women during and after the conflict. Villages razed, men killed, live-stock looted, crops

destroyed; it is this violence that accounts for the increased vulnerability of women and makes them

available for “voluntary liaisons.” Indeed, women report a general breakdown in community during the

1971 war, resulting in a loss of humanity which made them even more vulnerable, not just from armed

political actors but from their neighbors, many of whom brutalized them, sold them, or delivered them to

thePakistan Army for sexual exploitation, and extorted them in myriad ways.

The impact on vulnerable and targeted minorities such as Bengali Hindu, and Bihari women was

particularly acute, and indeed the gendered terror unleashed by the Pakistani soldiers and

their razakars devastated them. As is the case with other conflicts, so too in Bangladeshi narratives of the

war, the mention of rapes and violence on women seems to be phrased in terms that only highlight the

rapes that “they” carried out on “our women.” Not only does this silence the women of vulnerable non-

Bengali communities, such as Biharis, that both the Pakistan Army and the pro-liberation Bengalis

violated (much of it in anti-Bihari pogroms after liberation), it also serves to further stigmatize these

marginalized communities, and thus doubles the violence on these women.

***

Mirroring the Pakistan state’s purging of the nation’s body politic of the Hindu through violence on

women, post-liberation Bangladesh went on its own purging campaign. This one was also enacted on

women’s bodies by making sure that, in the words of Sheikh Mujib, the then-Prime Minister of

Bangladesh, “none of the babies who carry the blood of the Pakistanis will be allowed to remain in

Bangladesh.” He is also reported to have said, “Please send away the children who do not have their

father’s identity. They should be raised as human beings with honour. Besides, I do not want to keep those

polluted blood in this country.” This meant abortion and adaptation — in many cases regardless of and at

the cost of, women’s choice.

The silencing of Bangladeshi women’s voices in post-liberation Bangladesh matches the denial in Pakistan

of its violence on women. Saikia found that “documents of survivors, case histories of birangonas [war-

heroines], pictures, police reports, medical records, family documents have been destroyed, erased, lost,

and removed from archival storehouses.” This cultural, political, and epistemic silence, as Saikia shows, is

instrumental to the production of official histories in the service of nation-making. Surveying the

Bangladeshi literature produced about the war, Saikia finds “the war of 1971 is a well-told tale of liberation

in Bangladesh” largely told in four genres, namely, the euphoric narratives of male mukti jodhas

[liberation war-heroes], thana [district] reports, documents of war crimes with names and pictures of war

criminals that focus on razakars and those that collaborated with the Pakistan Army, and novels and

other writings on civil society.

Birangona [brave women] is the only way women’s experience of the war is remembered. Initially used by

Sheikh Mujib, the first prime minister of independent Bangladesh, the term birangona acknowledged the

women who were violated, but such labeling marked women who came to be increasingly seen as fallen or

loose women, and the social stigma of rape compelled women to hide their experience. What birangona

narratives do exist are doctored and engineered by their sponsors, and in Saikia’s words, become

external, almost pornographic stories about women’s loss of honor. Not surprisingly birangonas, although

projected as female heroes, are also viewed as being complicit in the crime of rape.

This, then, justified denying women their voice and the nation forgetting their experience and suppressing

their memory from history. This renders them absent as agents and subjects of history.

Saikia shows how the violence visited on women continues in the silence that the nation-making process

has imposed. A unity between Bengali woman, land, and nation is forged in the liberation-war centered

Bangladeshi narratives, whereby the rape of the Bengali woman “stood for the rape of Bangladesh.” Thus

the raped woman, even as her voice is systematically silenced and her story purged from collective

memory, becomes a rallying cry for a secular ethnic Bengali nationalism to call for revenge against

Pakistanis and their razakar collaborators who are still at large in Bangladesh and identified as

“fundamentalists.” This Saikia calls out as “the national male heroes using rape as a weapon, once again …

to make gains for themselves.”

Yasmin Saikia’s book is an important intervention in

the discourse around 1971. It examines and demonstrates clearly the brutality of war as experienced by

various marginalised groups, especially women, and the ongoing routine violence of the silencing of their

voices. Saikia documents women’s voices and highlights their agency and the multiplicities of their role in

the conflict. The book includes not only the narratives of women upon whom violence was visited by men

— Pakistani and Bangladeshi, pro-liberation and pro-Pakistan — but also of the women who fought as

rebels against the Pakistan army and the discrimination they endured during and after the war at the

hands of their fellow Bangladeshis, and of the women who worked as care-givers and social workers to

‘rehabilitate’ the survivors of rape and aided in the the nascent patriarchal state’s abortion and adoption

programs. Silenced by processes of nation-making, the voices and stories of women’s experience of the

1971 war must be heard.

1. Deepak Mehta, “Words that Wound: Archiving Hate in the Making of Hindu-Indian and Muslim

Pakistani Publics in Bombay” published in Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda

Khan, London and New Delhi: Routledge, 2009 [↩]

2. e.g. Abu Gharib [↩]

Towards 1971 VI: Conclusion: Unexceptional Violence [Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors]

That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out

that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make

it one of the most lethal conflicts of all time.” Is that so? Numerous scholars have concluded that the

figure of three million is exaggerated and incorrect. Sarmila Bose contends that “it is possible to estimate

with reasonable confidence that 50,000 – 100,000 people perished in the conflict in East Pakistan in

1971, including combatants and non-combatants, Bengalis and non-Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims,

Indians and Pakistanis.” The Bangla Academy’s district surveys, conducted between 1996 and 2001,

Naeem Mohaiemen mentions, also found the figure to be much lower. However, the importance of

establishing statistically sound estimate of casualties and other war-crimes notwithstanding, as Sarmila

Bose points out, there is no magical number of dead that needs to be hit before one can refer to a mass

killing with the historically charged label of genocide.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of

1948 states that:

genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,

ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c)

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in

whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly

transferring children of the group to another group.

It is the definition with which Bose contends that the Pakistan Army’s violence in Bangladesh cannot be

termed as genocide of Bengalis, but Bengali violence on Biharis can be. Bose claims that since Pakistan

Army could not differentiate among Bengalis as to who was pro-liberation and who was pro-Pakistan, that

it used “proxies” or “profiling” to target people of a certain occupation (police), or political affiliation

(membership of Awami League), age (adult), gender (in Bose’s reckoning male, but not female!), and

religion (Hindu) and therefore engaged in “political killing.” She does not accord the same logic of

profiling to the killings of Biharis, which she contends had to do with the narrow ethno-linguistic

nationalism and xenophobia of Bengalis.

Bose does state that the killings of Bengali Hindus simply for being Hindus “could be [my emphasis]

termed genocidal by their nature” but then mentions that the Pakistan Army left many unharmed, as if

that somehow dilutes the genocidal nature of violence unleashed upon Hindus. She mentions that Hindus

were attacked, looted, and hounded by Bengalis too, which is apparently the case from the evidence she

presents. However, the war being waged by Pakistanis on Hindu ‘subversives’ and their ‘Hindu-like’

accomplices in Bengal is surely the overarching concern, and a key factor even in Bengali violence on

Hindus since that is the broader context that animated the violence in Bangladesh in 1971. That India

encouraged the migration of Hindu refugees from Bengal who were imagined as future “good citizens,”

(but not Muslim refugees) also went into the making of Hindu exodus, which she correctly names as

‘ethnic cleansing’ of Hindus, but one that went hand in hand with the genocidal attack on Hindus.

Saikia, too, contends, that “it is not possible to establish that the Bangladesh case was genocide.” Violence

in East Pakistan was not produced in death factories but as passionate episodes of violence responding to

a previous outbreak of violence. This violence happened between and within communities. The

perpetrators were driven by a multitude of motives ranging from group interest, politics, revenge, greed,

and opportunism. Saikia advances another term, “Politicide,” whereby “political issues lead to mass

murder of communal victims,” as an alternative to genocide. Since the violence in 1971 was carried out on

groups based on political terms, Saikia posits:

This was distinct from the violence committed by Nazis against Jews. Jews were not a political or military

threat to Germany. They were killed solely because of their ethnoreligious identity.

(However, it seems that this methodology remains locked in a frame that takes the Nazi Holocaust as the

standard with which every atrocity is compared to determine its station on the morbid hierarchy of

misery.)

Remembering the dead as numbers is dehumanizing, and terminological labels have an effect of

exceptionalizing violence and evil. Rather than being tied up with what terminology best describes the

violence of 1971, Saikia brings our attention to the fact that common people committed atrocities as they

took sides with ethnic or political groups and that “it is almost impossible to distinguish victims from

perpetrators.” Pakistani military administrators, Indian politicians, Bengali leaders, and those following

the aforesaid classes

reduced their enemies into abstract numbers and demographic units, categorizing us andthem. The

abstraction of humans to fit ethnic, religious, and national labels opened the space for a cold, inhuman

purpose for one human being to violate another human being. Bounded communities saw themselves as

enemies of other bounded communities.

A diverse population was reduced to mere labels – such as Hindu, ‘Hindu-like’ Bengali, Indian agent,

Bihari, razakar and collaborator – and violence unleashed.

***

Perhaps the most important insight to emerge from a critical

examination of the 1971 war and the consequent partition, is the need to recognize and affirm our shared

humanity with the Other, which breaks down in times of conflict. Unable to see the Other except through

de-contextualized and homogenized social identities, we are then left with no other vocabularies than the

ones coughed up by ideologies of war. We reduce each other to mere labels as the contest for power plays

out and the society brutalized. Saikia writes about Pakistani military officials like Amin and Alam who

refused to see themselves as perpetrators of violence, and explained away their violence as normal. They

considered themselves to have been merely performing their duty to “clean Pakistan of the betrayers, the

Bengalis.”

Saikia also documents dissenting, and repentant officers as well, to posit neither “a banal idea that

perpetrators and victims deserve similar understanding,” nor that the perpetrators’ taking responsibility

of their acts exonerates them of their crimes. She does so to point out that the concept

of insaniyat [humanity] gives us a vantage point from which to understand the complexities of violence,

women’s suffering, and perpetrators’ obligations. She writes about Sahubzada Yaqub Khan, the chief

commander of the Pakistan Army in the Eastern wing who sent telegrams to high command that a

military solution was not acceptable and resigned after having failed to convince Yahya Khan to halt the

military operation. She discusses her interaction withColonel Nadir Ali, who went through a psychological

breakdown during the war:

His state of madness freed him, and he stopped playing the role of a soldier. Later, after regaining his

equilibrium, he was able to recognize his and his ‘enemies’’ humanity and fill the empty space wracked by

violence to develop speech and tell the story of war in his own language, Punjabi.

She seeks out the lower cadre jawans and rank and file soldiers like Malik, who described himself as a

“troubled soul” for the violence he saw his fellow soldiers commit, for not having done anything to stop his

higher official from raping a woman as he stood guard at the door, and for looting Bengali villages to

obtain food provisions for his company.

Whether or not there can be closure to what happened that fateful year in East Pakistan, and whether or

not some form of reconciliation can occur between Bangladesh and Pakistan is a separate matter. What

needs to happen first and foremost is the acknowledgement of violence and recognition of the pain and

misery of those that suffered. It is the narratives of the repenting perpetrators and their recognition of

guilt that can bring some solace to the victims. Saikia highlights the case of men like Malik and Nadir Ali,

who “being haunted by the memory of the Other” tell their crimes, and by that speech-act

deliver a justice to their victims that no tribunal, state, or court of law can deliver, and in that same

gesture they make us aware that their existence as human rests on the Other. The perpetrator realizes that

he owes his life as a human to another, his victim, whom he tried to destroy. This is the story that history

cannot speak, the truth lies with the survivors – perpetrators and victims – who let us enter a murky

world of memories and show us the possibility of moving beyond it towards closure.

The denial of their own violence exists in the three sub-continental nation-states – a willed collective

amnesia regarding 1971 that is constructed through nationalist narratives, be it the Bengali betrayal for

Pakistan, the innocent victim-warrior mukti-jodha for Bangladesh, or the savior, white knight

triumphalism for India. But if we are to break the cycle of violence, a space needs to be opened up for

people like Mohammad, a Pakistani soldier who sought Saikia out to tell her his story, and how he was

told that Bengalis had killed a large number of Biharis and was sent to raze a Bengali town. Mohammad

pleads that “it is important that Pakistan and Bangladesh governments must talk. I am ready to testify to

my victims in Bangladesh and seek their understanding and forgiveness.”

Will we let them speak? Will we listen?

***

Sepoy pointed out that “The Bengal question cleaved Pakistan into two. This second Partition gave rise to

the first outright embrace of the process of Islamization under the leadership of Zulfiqar Ali

Bhutto.” Bhutto gained unrestrained power over Pakistan in the aftermath of the war of 1971 that

nevertheless was no match for his megalomania. He turned Pakistan away from the ambit of South Asian

politics and towards the Middle East. In efforts to please the Saudi regime and bolster his own flagging

legitimacy, Bhutto pandered to its Pakistani Islamist allies and declared Ahmadis non-Muslim. He

unleashed the disgraced Pakistan military on Baluchistan in 1974 in a campaign that earned the butcher

of Bengal, General Tikka Khan, the epithet Butcher of Baluchistan, and gave the Pakistan military a

second lease on life. Bhutto’s pet, General Zia, in due time, overthrew his ever authoritarian government

in a military coup, and went on to enhance, build on, and focus the processes of Islamizing the state —

what Sepoy calls theSunnification of Pakistan.

The Sunnification of the state and society of Pakistan dovetailed with America’s Jihad on the “godless

communists” and the “evil empire,” and is evident in and constructed through (among other deplorable

policies and actions) not only the introduction of blasphemy laws to criminalize Ahmadiyyat in Pakistan

but also by supporting and enabling anti-Shia militias to crush Iran’s imagined allies among the Pakistani

Shia as part of both America’s and Saudi Arabia’s not so cold war with Iran. These developments

accompanied decrees to police women. And so it was that, in Saadia Toor’s words,

within the discourse of the regime, the terms momin (‘pious Muslim’) or mard-i-momin (‘pious Muslim

man’) became synonymous with the normative citizen, with predictable implications for women and non-

Muslims. Accordingly, the new legal/constitutional regime distinguished between Muslims and non-

Muslims, between women and men, and between Muslim women and Muslim men, with pious Muslim

(Sunni) male emerging as the only true subject of rights and privileges and all others being relegated to

the status of second class citizens.”1

The military junta, unaccountable to the civilian government, is the shadow government of Pakistan with

tentacles deep in Pakistan’s culture, politics, and economy. Its commercial empire, what scholar Ayesha

Siddiqa has dubbed ‘Milbus,’2 is maintained at the cost of education, healthcare, basic rights, and a

democratic society. Erasure of inconvenient episodes of history from memory is vital to this mutually re-

enforcing relationship between steadily escalating militarization and a narrowing vision of what the State

of Pakistan is and can be.

———

1. Toor, 2011, p136 [↩]

2. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Pluto Press, 2007 [↩]