Very well argued,
@Nilgiri, as always. The thing is, you cannot break every occurrence in history down to the level of the atoms that constituted it. You cannot now take into account the standing of every individual Pakistani, every individual Bangladeshi (at that time, East Pakistani) and every individual Indian, and their personal thoughts, feelings and emotions. That is only a superbly argued defence. The facts remain as they are, ugly and unsuitable for gilding. At this point of time, we can only acknowledge them mutely - no point getting into a frenzy about them, that can happen only by forcing ourselves to repeat those extreme emotions - and try to move on. You and I both know that some Bangladeshis behaved like animals; that does not mean that all Bangladeshis are animals, or that all Bangladeshis behave like animals. You and I both know that some Pakistanis behaved like animals; that, similarly, does not mean that all Pakistanis, etc., etc.
I was curious to know why I'd been tagged, so went back and read the last two pages. There were absurdities, there were crudities, there were the usual swines - why is it that a large percentage of these turn out to be right wing Indians? just go back a few posts and you will what I mean - and there were hugely embarrassed individuals asking that things be taken on board, and that we should all move on.
As to that, as to moving on, I know where I was during that period - a helpless onlooker. I just erased a very emotion-laden paragraph because it doesn't help to pick at old scabs; let the past stay there. I don't know where you were, and I'm not asking. It doesn't matter any more. Not at the individual level, that you raised with such consummate and such misplaced skill. It wasn't about intellect at the time, it was raw emotion. And it's all gone, all the emotion, and that is why we can look at it through the deliberately abstracted vision of a Sarmila Bose, whose mother Krishna was so much a part of the volunteer movement at the camps. And so we get these fine arguments about the impossibility of defining a nation as a bloc.
If we are to move on, how do we do that other than by moving on?
" 'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not pause for an answer."
It's up to you. If you keep justifying your hatred of a whole country with these pieces, then it is difficult to read your passages here without outrage, or at the least, resentment.
The answer to your question is 'yes'. Since you have been to Bangladesh so many times, you will have noticed that the Bangladeshi Hindu is a cowed, subservient minority, even the intellectually advanced fraction of the remnants who stayed back as doctors, teachers, lawyers. And they were considered to be the evil geniuses of the Agartala Conspiracy Case, and were deliberately hunted down in very specific campaigns. There is no doubt about this among those who were involved in the hunting down, and it is all on record. Do not insult me or anybody else by asking for citations; when you can quote a publicity seeker from a family that numbers Sugato Bose as her elder sibling and Sumantra as her younger, I can make this glancing allusion with legitimacy, without anything more than a reminder of Anthony Mascarenhas. You want credibility? You will get credibility; ask her mother. She was there in the camps, she was there meeting the bedraggled remains that crawled out, and she knows who were whipped and beaten, and the difference between them and those others who were whipped and inflamed with the need for immediate revenge. The difference was as stark as has been said; the Hindu minority that came across, 90% or more from the villages, almost none surviving the pogroms in the towns or the cities, whether it was the Razakar or the sepoy at the other end, had no fight left in them. It was the Muslims who fought, who found their way out of those camps and into the waiting hands of the Mukti Bahini, and their laughable .303 rifles and home-made bombs.
Do not misuse your intellect.
Because not all Hindus were cleansed. Because there was not enough time.
One of the biggest arguments that we have against the 3 million number is that it was stupid; nobody could have raped, and murdered those numbers with the available strength that was supposed to be doing the raping and killing. Of the 10 million that came across the borders, out of a population of between 65 to 70 million, the vast bulk were Hindus; all of them left the camps and it is believed that the overwhelming bulk returned to Bangladesh. It is those that have bred those who live there now, just as the entire population grew from 65 to 160 million.
Bangladesh happened in hot blood, mostly, leaving aside the Tikka Khans; Sindh is on-going, and as cold-blooded as is possible.
Precisely.
Please read below.
I am quite sick of these uber-intellects and their rationalisation of the past.