Malicious narrative of 1971 war must now be brought to reckoning

[Pksecurity]

Hussain Saqib

Left-leaning media men, intellectuals and politicians were made to believe that India-funded insurgency against the “imperialism” of Punjab was a genuine home-grown revolutionary movement. This enticed the poets like Faiz and Jalib to sing praises of “freedom-fighters”. Unaware of the tactics of War of Perceptions used by India, he and others unwittingly fell for this and subsequent narratives developed by RAW.


Until a few months ago when Indian prime minister Modi proudly, albeit shamelessly, admitted India’s role in dismemberment of Pakistan, it was intellectually fashionable to strengthen the narrative that Pakistan Army while fighting the insurgents killed millions of Bengalis and raped as many women. It was next to blasphemy to raise a finger at the insurgents who, as it has now transpired, were trained commandos of Indian army. Left-leaning media men, intellectuals and politicians were made to believe that India-funded insurgency against the “imperialism” of Punjab was a genuine home-grown revolutionary movement. This enticed the poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz to sing praises of “freedom-fighters”. Unaware of the tactics of War of Perceptions used by India, he unwittingly, along with others of his ilk, fell for this and subsequent narratives developed by RAW.

Pakistani intellectuals or their off-springs proudly received civil awards for helping the enemy in its task to break up Pakistan. Although Modi’s admission to the India’s crime has punctured the balloon of the fake eulogies these intellectuals have been writing for “Bengali Freedom Fighters” (read: Indian army), they have no remorse for the role they played for Pakistan’s enemies. They were not prepared to accept the facts that insurgency in East Pakistan was funded by India and the Mukti Bahini predominantly composed of Indian army soldiers some of them of Bengali descent who had deserted from Pakistan army. They even rejected the fact that Pakistan Army, small in numbers and short on logistic resources fought the enemy with gallantry.

Now that Indian prime minister has himself admitted India’s role in breakup of Pakistan, it would be appropriate to revisit the history and put to rest the narrative, developed with visible malice, by India and promoted by Bangladesh of Sheikh Mujib and his ruling dynasty. There was recently an exceptionally good research work done by an Indian Bengali scholar Sarmila Bose.

Her book, Dead Reckoning, says that one of the bloodiest wars in the past half-century has been "dominated by the narrative of the victorious side" - Bangladeshi nationalists who won independence in 1971 from Pakistan and that both sides in the conflict "are still imprisoned by wartime partisan myths". The introduction of her book does not entirely exonerate Pakistani troops from committing atrocities during Bangladesh's bloody struggle for freedom. Following is the summary of what she found about the debacle of East Pakistan.

In the terrible violence of a fratricidal war, the victims were from every ethnic and religious group and from both sides of the political divide and so were the perpetrators. Both sides had legitimate political arguments and their idealistic followers, along with those who indulged in opportunism, expediency and inhumanity.

Many Bengalis - supposed to be fighting for freedom and dignity - committed appalling atrocities. And many Pakistani army officers, carrying out a military action against a political rebellion, turned out to be fine men doing their best to fight an unconventional war within the conventions of warfare. Pakistani army has been "demonized" by the pro-liberation side and accused of "monstrous actions regardless of the evidence", while Bengali people have been depicted as "victims". "This has led to a tendency to deny, minimize or justify violence and brutalities perpetrated by pro-liberation Bengalis."

Dr Bose went through published documentary evidence, travelled to remote areas of Bangladesh to interview elderly villagers and journeyed to Pakistan to question retired army officers. Her book says the Bengali nationalist rebellion in what was then East Pakistan "turned into xenophobic violence against non-Bengalis" especially against West Pakistanis and mainly Urdu-speaking people who migrated to East Pakistan from India at the time of partition who were known as Biharis.

Dr Bose also examines the widely reported suggestion that three million Bengalis were killed by the Pakistani army. These figures are sacrosanct in Bangladesh, where the overwhelming majority of people continue to honor and respect those who died in the liberation struggle. Describing the three million figure as a "gigantic rumor", she says it is "not based on any accounting or survey on the ground".

"Claims of the dead in various incidents wildly exceeding anything that can be reasonably supported by evidence on the ground - 'killing fields' and 'mass graves' were claimed to be everywhere, but none was forensically exhumed and examined in a transparent manner."

Malicious narrative of 1971 war must now be brought to reckoning   | The Passive Voices

 

[GR!FF!N]

It was next to blasphemy

we don't believe in "Blasphemy",which means it is next to "Nothing".

By the way,if someone wants to know who Sharmila Bose is....

Bose is more Pakistani than Jinnah the Quaid

Her book is massively criticized by critics all over world for not including eye witness accounts.

The burden of remembrance | The Daily Star

 

[Pksecurity]

we don't believe in "Blasphemy",which means it is next to "Nothing".

By the way,if someone wants to know who Sharmila Bose is....

Bose is more Pakistani than Jinnah the Quaid

Her book is massively criticized by critics all over world for not including eye witness accounts.

The burden of remembrance | The Daily Star

By that standard, Faiz and Jalib and also Hamid Mir and his dad are more Indians than Gandhi. But Bose based her work on the established research practices. She didn't write the book in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to support certain narrative; she wrote and published it in the West putting her intellectual accomplishments at risk.

 

[GR!FF!N]

By that standard, Faiz and Jalib and also Hamid Mir and his dad are more Indians than Gandhi. But Bose based her work on the established research practices. She didn't write the book in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to support certain narrative; she wrote and published it in the West putting her intellectual accomplishments at risk.

and Eastern as well as western critics are bashing her regularly for publishing a book on "Genocide" with "Biased and flawed research" and to make a "historical revisionism".

Sarmila Bose and bad arithmetic

Book, film greeted with fury among Bengalis - Al Jazeera English

<i>Dead Reckoning</i>: Disappearing stories and evidence


her "Methods"................

Having portrayed the Pakistan military as a benevolent force, Ms. Bose then attempts to discredit a handful of accounts of rape victims as a way of casting doubt on the rapes committed during the 1971 genocide.
She begins by trying to cast doubt on an eyewitness, named Rabeya Khatun, whom she dismisses as illiterate, to rape at Rajarbag. Ms. Bose then dismisses accounts of two other corroborating witnesses because their testimony was similar to Ms. Khatun's and they, too, were illiterate. Ms. Bose declares the witness's testimony not credible because, "the language is not what would be used either by illiterate sweepers or by educated Bengalis in everyday conversation."

She then finds refuge in the account of a Pakistani Lt. Col. Taj who, unsurprisingly, "categorically denied that any molestation of women had taken place at Rajarbag by his men." Ms. Bose then informs us Lt. Col. Taj was not actually present at Rajarbag after the first night of military action. Yet, she felt the need to inject him as a fact witness.

night of military action. Yet, she felt the need to inject him as a fact witness. Then, she dismisses Ms. Khatun's account as "highly dubious," declaring "until and unless other, credible witnesses come forward, the hellish account attributed to one illiterate woman simply will not suffice."

Dismissing witnesses simply on the grounds of illiteracy is a serious methodological fallacy. Eyewitnesses do not need to read or write to know what constitutes sexual violence. The Pakistan military did not discriminate between illiterate and literate classes in its campaign of killings and rape against Bangladeshis.

Ms. Bose then tries to cast doubt on the account of rape victim Ferdousi Priyabhashini, an educated woman and well-known sculptor. Ms. Bose's argument here is somewhat muddled, but it appears that she is claiming that Mrs. Priyabhashini was less of a rape victim and more of a willing participant.

Ms. Bose writes: "It is highly unusual for someone of her background to admit to having been a rape victim, especially in the conservative societies like Bangladesh." Ms. Bose goes on, "According to her own account, in 1971, Ferdousi Priyabhashini was a mature woman, a divorced mother of three, working for many years."

After a muddled discussion of Ms. Priyabhashini's account of rape by Pakistani soldiers, Ms. Bose concludes that there is an "inconsistency" in Ms. Priyabha-shini's account because she feared she would be killed by the freedom fighters. Ms. Bose declares: "Only those who were perceived to have willingly fraternised with the Pakistani regime were at risk of the wrath of freedom fighters, not victims of the regime." It appears Ms. Bose is asserting that since Ms. Priyabhashini feared for her life, she must have consented to having sex with Pakistani soldiers.

In the legal sense, rape is an act of sexual intercourse carried out "against a person's will by means of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the person or another." The calculated rationale of the act of war-time rape constitutes a political act, and an attack on the collective political identity of the group of females under attack, not necessarily on their individual identities. Rape during genocides is not exclusively an attack on the body -- it is an attack on the "body politic." Its primary goal is not to maim or kill a person (though that does, in fact, happen, in great numbers) but to control an entire socio-political process by crippling it.

Put another way, during genocides, rape has been used as a weapon of social control and cultural destruction, of devaluation and commodification.

Genocidal rape is not rape out of control, it is rape under control. All existing evidence points to the fact that the Pakistani military specifically targeted Bengali women and girls. This targeting was not a by-product of war, but a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. The historic Akayesu trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established that rape constitutes an act of genocide, and an egregious violation of international law, when it is committed to destroy a targeted group. Given the scale and systematic way in which Bangladeshi women and girls were subjected to rape and sexual violence in 1971, even a rudimentary understanding of the effect of rape on the victim casts doubt on Ms. Bose's argument.

Ms. Bose goes on to try to cast doubt on the account of Akhtaruzzaman Mandal -- a freedom fighter who accompanied Indian soldiers as they took control of a Pakistani position. There, Mr. Mandal states, he saw the corpse of a Pakistani captain lying beside a dead Bengali woman who showed signs of rape. Mr. Mandal also states that four naked women were discovered locked in a building, and one of the women was six months pregnant. Another 16 women were also discovered locked in an adjacent high school, some showing signs of torture.

In discounting Mr. Mandal's account, Ms. Bose writes that she interviewed Pakistani officers who told her that the dead captain was "humane" and had only recently arrived at the location. She accuses Mr. Mandal of "character assassination of an officer who had died defending his country, and therefore, cannot speak in his own defence."

Ms. Bose, once again, is ready to accept the word of the Pakistani soldiers, the perpetrators of rape. However, there are many cases of rapists in this world who appear to be "humane" to those who know them.

In critiquing accounts of seven rape victims describes in Neelima Ibrahim's book Ami Birangona Bolchhi, Ms. Bose notes that four of the seven women were abducted by Bengalis and one by a Bihari before being handed over to the Pakistan army. Some of the women were raped by their initial abductors before being handed over to the Pakistan army, to be held in barracks and raped again. Ms. Bose neglects to mention that those who abducted the women were local collaborators, razakars, working with the Pakistani military. Nonetheless, she makes the bizarre observation that since the razakars had already raped the women, "for the majority of these women, therefore, even if the Pakistan army had done nothing, they would still be rape victims."

The point, of course, is that the Pakistani army had done something -- they had raped these women. Whether their initial abductors had also raped the women does not make the Pakistani army any less complicit in their rapes.

Forum

 

[Apprentice]

Pakistan's Army's violence allegedly started on the 25th of March

But Awami league's terrorism started even before that

Even before the 25th of March numerous Biharis and pro-Pakistan bengalis were viciously murdered in collaboration with Hindu bengalis. Many such Bihari/Bengali survivors wish the Pakistani army had intervened even before the 25th

 

[Rajaraja Chola]

By that standard, Faiz and Jalib and also Hamid Mir and his dad are more Indians than Gandhi. But Bose based her work on the established research practices. She didn't write the book in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to support certain narrative; she wrote and published it in the West putting her intellectual accomplishments at risk.

Lol. Sharmila Bose has been criticized for her unprofessional research work and any writer or academician has ever supported her in those fantasy book of hers. She has been debunked enough in this forum lot of times. Its quite boring to do that again.

Good night