Author: IANS
Publication: NewKerala.com
Date: December 18, 2008
URL: http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-61389.html
India's role in the formation of Bangladesh
and the two nation theory is under the spotlight here with the Jamaat-e-Islami
chief saying that Indians have always been 'hostile' towards Bangladeshis
and historians dismissing his views as 'seditious'.
"The Indians do not like us Bangladeshis because we are Muslims,"
Motiur Rahman Nizami, chief of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, said Tuesday
in a discussion being held in the run-up to the Dec 29 parliamentary poll.
Nizami also appealed to the voters to elect
the alliance led by Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chief Khaleda Zia,
with whom he and the Islamists shared power during 2001-06.
"Indian soldiers plundered our country
indiscriminately during the War of Independence," he said, referring
to India's role in Bangladesh's emergence in December 1971.
A war with Pakistan on both fronts in December
that year led to 5,000 Indian soldiers and numerous Bangladeshis being killed
before 93,000 Pakistani officers and men surrendered to the Indian forces.
"[They] took away not only the arms and
ammunition abandoned by the Pakistani troops, but also stripped our factories
down to the nuts and bolts and robbed educational institutions of their laboratory
equipment and decamped with even bags of blood from the blood banks,"
Nizami was quoted as saying in the New Age newspaper.
He justified Pakistan founding father Mohammed
Ali Jinnah's two-nation theory that projected the Muslims and Hindus of undivided
India as two separate nations.
"The hostile attitude demonstrated by
India towards Bangladesh through the past 37 years also proves that the two-nation
theory was absolutely right," said Nizami, whose party was banned along
with several Islamist outfits in the years immediately after independence
for their "collaboration" with the Pakistani authorities in killing
unarmed civilians.
The Islamists returned to the political mainstream
was during the military regime of slain president Ziaur Rahman, who founded
the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Nizami's questioning of India's role and reiteration
of the two nation theory was lambasted as "seditious" and "a
trick to get media coverage ahead of the elections", The Daily Star said,
quoting the views of four historians.
Historians Serajul Islam Choudhury, Anwar
Hossain, Imtiaz Ahmed and B.K. Jahangir told the paper that Nizami was trying
to "rewrite" the history of South Asia and of Bangladesh and hoped
that this would be rejected by the electorate on Dec 29.
They termed Nizami's remarks an "audacious"
and a "tendentiously wrong reading of history" because Bangladesh
was "not liberated based on the two-nation theory but Bengali nationalism".
Historian Anwar Hossain said: "I am inclined
to believe that Mr Nizami is trying to retrieve a theory that has long lost
its logical, political and historical basis."
Another historian Serajul Islam Choudhury
described Nizami's statement as amounting to an act of sedition.
"Had the two-nation theory been right,
Bangladesh would not have been founded. Foundation of Bangladesh buried the
two-nation theory back in 1971," he said, adding that Jinnah had himself
categorically cancelled his own theory.
