Author: Subir Bhaumik
Publication:
Date: April 29, 2011
URL: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011429174141565122.html
A new book and film recently released downplaying
Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh have caused outrage among Bengalis.
Two Bengali women - one from India, the other
from Bangladesh - are now embroiled in a fierce controversy across the two
countries for writing a book and producing a film that has upset Bengali nationalists
and Indian officials, but given some cause of relief to the Pakistani military.
Dead Reckoning, written by Indian researcher
Sarmila Bose, questions the historical narratives of the 1971 civil war that
broke up Pakistan, but Bengali nationalist groups describe her as "an
apologist for Pakistan's brutal military".
Meherjaan, directed by Bangladeshi film-maker
Rubaiyat Hossain, is about the love of a Bengali woman for a Pakistani Baloch
soldier in the backdrop of the 1971 war - but feminist groups in Bangladesh
allege that the film "distorts the historical context of the liberation
war".
Challenging narratives
Both the book and the film have hit the market
at a time when Bangladesh's Awami League-led government has set up special
tribunals for trying the "war criminals" of 1971.
The Awami League led Bangladesh's struggle
for secession from Pakistan after the Pakistani military regime refused to
hand over power to it even after it won a majority in Pakistan national assembly
elections in 1970.
Shamsul Arefin, a war crimes trial official,
told this writer that though Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army
are the ones to be actually tried, names of Pakistani soldiers and officers
are likely to crop up with regard to massacres, mass rapes and arson during
the trial.
"That will expose the real character
of the Pakistani army which is now seen in the West as a key ally in the war
against terror. So Pakistan's intelligence is desperate to scuttle the war
crimes trials in Bangladesh," says Arefin, who served in the Pakistan
army, then joined the Bengali Mukti Fauj (Freedom Force) during the civil
war and finally served in the Bangladesh army.
"We have reasons to believe that there
is a concerted campaign by Pakistani intelligence to disrupt and dilute our
War Crimes Trial. I will not be surprised if they are commissioning projects
to distort the realities of our liberation war," Arefin told this writer.
That's a rather strong charge but Sarmila
Bose promptly dismisses.
"I am only trying to question the existing
narratives of the 1971 war in view of data I have gathered while working for
the book," Sarmila Bose told the audience at the Woodrow Wilson Centre
in US, where the book was launched.
The entire book launch programme is available
on the Internet.
Suspect data
Bose, a Bengali herself, is a grand daughter
of India's independence war hero Subhas Chandra Bose, and is a senior research
fellow at Oxford.
Her brothers, Sugato and Sumantra Bose, teach
history and politics at Harvard and London School of Economics.
"I am only pointing to obvious exaggerations
about the number of people killed or number of women raped by the Pakistan
army. A war narrative is always the narrative of the victors, and 1971 was
no different," Sarmila Bose said at the launch.
But some of her data is clearly suspect.
Dead Reckoning suggests there were only 20,000
Pakistani troops at the beginning of the civil war in East Pakistan, and that
rose to 34,000 towards the end of the war.
"Bangladeshi narratives claim 400,000
women were raped by Pakistani troops during the civil war between March and
December 1971, but how can 34,000 soldiers rape so many women in eight months,"
contends Sarmila Bose.
Indian historian Jayanta Ray, whose 1968 book
Nationalism on Trial predicted the breakup of Pakistan, is furious at how
an Oxford researcher like Bose could get basic facts wrong.
"Records indicate that just over 93,000
Pakistani soldiers surrendered to the Indian army in December 1971. They were
all handed back to Pakistan. That's thrice the number Bose suggests, so is
she fudging figures deliberately to prove that the number of rapes were much
lower than suggested?" Professor Ray told this writer.
Bangladesh's anti-fundamentalist campaigner
Shahriyar Kabir says that Red Cross officials in 1971 testified to treating
nearly 200,000 rape victims.
"Many more women did not report for treatment
out of shame and embarrassment," Kabir told this writer. "They bore
their indignities silently."
A Calcutta-based Bengali channel, Mahua TV,
ran a full hour discussion on the book, bringing together Bengalis from India
and Bangladesh last Sunday.
Hundreds of listeners from both sides of the
border called in to join the author-bashing.
The channel's executive editor, Subir Chakroborty,
says Sarmila Bose's mother, Krishna Bose, a former member of Indian parliament,
refused to join the panel.
"She told us her views on the liberation
war were already known to everybody, so we put up in front of our cameras
her newspaper article on the Bangladesh war. That was very sympathetic to
the victims of 1971," Chakroborty said.
Allegations of bias
While Bangladeshis and Indian Bengalis are
upset with Bose for "playing down the Pakistani atrocities", Indian
officials are angry with her contention that "India was the only aggressor
in 1971".
"We intervened militarily only after
all possibilities of stopping the bloodbath failed. And when our forces entered
East Pakistan, the Bengalis complained why we have been so late," says
former chief of India's eastern fleet, Vice-Admiral Bimalendu Guha.
"How can she call us an aggressor," fumes Guha. "The Bengalis
actually wanted us to intervene earlier to save themselves."
Former chief-of-staff of India's eastern army,
Lieutenant General J.R. Mukherjee, goes a step further, who said:
Professor Ray alleges that Bose is biased
in use of sources.
"Her sources are primarily Pakistani.
She has interviewed many Pakistani officers, but not those who were fighting
them," says Professor Ray.
Particularly upset with Sarmila Bose are Bangladesh's
vast numbers of "freedom fighters" - men from various walks of life
who joined the "Mukti Fauj" to fight the Pakistanis in 1971.
"How can a Bengali, and that too from
the family of one of our greatest leader like Subhas Bose, write such a horrible
account that tries to defend Pakistan's brutal army. This is simply unacceptable,"
said Haroon Habib, a "freedom fighter" who later rose to head the
country's government-sponsored news agency, Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS).
No bookseller has so far put Dead Reckoning
on their shelves in Bangladesh.
Even in Calcutta and other Bengali-dominated
cities in India, the book is not to be seen.
"Bengalis across the border will only
have hate for her," says Bimal Pramanik, a "freedom fighter"
who now lives in India and runs a centre for research on India-Bangladesh
relations. "She is untruthful and with a purpose."
Sarmila Bose denies all charges flung at her
and says she has only "tried to correct the course of contemporary history".
A claim few will endorse in Bangladesh or Indian Bengal.
Stereotypes versus truth
Rubaiyat Hossain's Meherjaan is innocuous
by comparison, but it has generated as much angst in a country which prides
its Bengali heritage and where the atrocities of the Pakistan army is still
recent memory.
Bangladesh's official history says nearly
three million Bengalis - Hindus, Muslims and Christians - died in the 1971
civil war, and nearly half a million women were raped.
"I liked the movie, but since I am a
freedom fighter and scores of my friends disliked the film, I decided to withdraw
it from cinema halls in Bangladesh," says Habibur Rehman Khan, the distributor
of Meherjaan.
That means the film will make no money, despite
a a cast of stars from India, like Jaya Bachan and Victor Banerji - both Bengalis,
but big in Bollywood.
Bangladeshi feminist groups say the film trivialises
the atrocities on women by the Pakistani army when it runs the story of Meher,
a Bengali girl who falls in love with a Pakistani soldier, and is then humiliated
by her family when this is discovered.
"I was raped several times by Pakistani
soldiers, and I cannot stand this soft corner for Pakistanis in the film,"
said sculptor Ferdous Priyabashini.
Rubaiyat Hossain is candid about her woes.
"I tried to break out of the stereotype
of the Bengali hero versus Pakistani brute in the backdrop of the 1971 war,
and that is what my countrymen are so upset with," she said.
"What she thinks is stereotype is actually
the truth. The Pakistanis killed us like flies and raped our women like beasts.
They even massacred our intellectuals just before they surrendered,"
said Awami League's minister Jehangir Kabir Nanak.
Unlike Japan or Germany apologising for their
military excesses during the Second World War, Pakistan has not apologised
for the atrocities of its army in 1971.
Many liberal Pakistanis, including cricket
hero Imran Khan, want Islamabad to do so and bury the bad blood of 1971.
But the Pakistan army top brass refuses to
oblige.
Until that happens, neither Dead Reckoning
nor Meherjaan will find admirers in Bangladesh - or in Indian Bengal.
