Author: Srinath Raghavan
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 30, 2011
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-dhaka-debacle/824484/0
Introduction: A Disturbing misrepresentation
of the 1971 war
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of
the creation of Bangladesh. Four decades on, the history of the 1971 conflict
and war remains controversial in Bangladesh. These disputes are neither merely
academic nor purely historical. Rather, they have a real contemporary political
resonance. The hubbub over the initiation of war crimes trials against collaborators
with the Pakistan army testifies to this link between the past and the present.
Sarmila Bose's book is relevant to many of these debates.
Bose's basic contention is unexceptionable.
The 1971 conflict was not only about the Pakistani army's repression of the
Bengalis. There was a wider mosaic of civil conflict, wherein some Bengalis
killed other Bengalis, Bengalis and Biharis killed each other, and Bengali
Muslims killed Bengali Hindus. But Bose's treatment is deeply problematic.
For all her claims to "non-partisan analysis", the book is marred
by a strong bias against the dominant current of Bangladeshi nationalism in
1971. The hallmark of this movement, she writes, was "violent xenophobic
expression of a narrow ethno-linguistic 'Bengali' nationalism". Except
when it targeted the Hindus, she claims, the Pakistan army committed only
"political killings". By contrast, the "killing of non-Bengalis
- Biharis and West Pakistanis - by Bengalis was clearly 'genocide'".
It is impossible to review the entire catalogue
of evasions, obfuscations, omissions and methodological errors that suffuses
the book. I will discuss only a couple of major technical historical flaws.
The book examines a number of "case studies" of violence. The contextual
framing of most of these is either skewed or missing, resulting in systematic
misrepresentation of events. Consider Bose's treatment of the killing of Bengalis
by the Pakistan army in March 1971. Yahya Khan was keen only on "returning
the country to democracy". But the movement led by Mujibur Rahman was
violent and armed. The major clashes with the army were actually provoked
by the Bengalis.
This is seriously misleading. There is ample
evidence to show that the army junta sought to preserve a major role for itself
in any future dispensation. By February 20, 1971, the military had begun planning
for a crackdown, if Mujib remained unrelenting on his six-point programme.
By the end of the month, East Pakistan was beginning to be reinforced by two
divisions of the Pakistan army. This was the trigger for popular calls among
the Bengalis for resistance. The ostentatious parading with dummy rifles and
sticks for a few days hardly counts as training for war.
But this is precisely what Bose would have
us believe. Commenting on the testimony of a Dhaka University student who
partook in these so-called preparations and was later caught up in the army's
brutal assault on the university halls, Bose writes: "Having trained
to wage war, he was apparently surprised and offended that the enemy had actually
attacked!" This propensity to blame the victim pervades the book.
Take another example, her account of the massacre
of Bihari jute mill workers in Khulna. Her claim that "several thousand
Biharis" were killed by Bengalis in a single incident is dubious. More
importantly, her attempt to pass off these (and other) reprehensible killings
of Biharis as driven solely by ethnic hatred - the basis of her claim about
"genocide" by Bengali nationalists - is utterly tendentious. There
was a long history of tensions between Bihari and Bengali mill workers dating
to the late 1940s. The Biharis' support for West Pakistani owners during stand-offs
with workers, their participation in anti-Bengali riots in Khulna among other
jute mill towns, their consistent support for West Pakistani parties - all
created the ground for a deep political divide between the two communities
of workers. Once the Pakistan army's crackdown began, efforts to maintain
communal amity broke down and Biharis were the first victims of the Bengali
workers' insecurity and ire. The cycle of violence and revenge continued thereafter.
Bose strains to convey the impression that such violence was central to Bangladeshi
nationalism.
She conveniently elides the fact that Mujib
(and others) repeatedly averred that the Biharis and non-Muslims "are
our sacred trust".
Equally problematic is Bose's consistent effort
to present the Bengalis in negative light- even when her own evidence suggests
otherwise. For instance, she quotes a recorded army intercept during the operation
against the university, which shows that the army deliberately killed anyone
it encountered. The intercept also shows that the army's immediate estimate
of dead was around 300. The university's own assessment of students killed
is 149. But Bose goes on to condescendingly observe that Bangladesh has never
carried out a scientific exhumation of the graves because, "It is possible
that a dig would reveal fewer bodies than the numbers claimed by the Bangladeshis."
By contrast, despite irrefutable evidence
of the Pakistan army's murderous approach to dealing with the Bengalis, Bose
tries to exonerate it of any institutional culpability. The massacre of a
large group of Hindu refugees at Chuknagar is presented as the handiwork of
a mysterious group of soldiers, "a band of twenty-five to thirty men
brought lasting disgrace to an entire army". The torture and killing
of young rebels by the army is condoned by the assertion that "whatever
their methods", they were only picking up active militants. Bose rhetorically
asks whether the army can be "castigated for thinking it was all right
to kill 'enemy combatants'… who had taken up arms to dismember their
country?" Clearly, legal and moral restraints on the conduct of war don't
matter at all to her. Nor is she interested in the widespread ethnic stereotyping
and dehumanisation of Bengali Muslims, which help explain the brutality with
which the army cracked down on them.
Bose makes an important point about the unreliability
of most figures of the dead. Yet, her own approach to numbers scarcely inspires
confidence. Take her assessment of the army's attack on Shankharipara in Dhaka.
Relying on interviews with two survivors, she claims that the earlier of figure
of 8,000 killed is absurdly high and that the soldiers had entered only one
house and shot a few residents. The number of dead, she concludes, is only
16. But Bose does not even mention two contemporary testimonies by American
citizens who visited the area immediately after the attacks. Both reported
shelling and the use of heavy armament by the army, and a much larger scale
of destruction. Surely, the author is underplaying the enormity of the incident.
Bose asserts that all Bangladeshi scholarship
on 1971 suffers from "multiple layers of partisanship and poor quality
and blatant selectivity in 'documentation'". Much the same can be said
of her own book. Far from advancing the cause of truth, it ends up muddying
the waters of scholarship.
- (Srinath Raghavan, senior fellow at Centre
for Policy Research, Delhi, is writing an international history of the Bangladesh
war)
