Ekattur-er Boiguli
A 1971 reading list
Over a decade ago, upon hearing about an upcoming trip to Dhaka, a friend invited me to an event. “Great, that’s about the same time Meherjaan will be released, and you must come to the premiere.”
“Meherjaan?”, I asked, not knowing anything about the big screen love story starring Jaya Bachchan and Victor Banerjee set in 1971. As it happened, family commitments meant I couldn’t attend the party. People who did attend, however, were probably not prepared for the backlash from the Bangla blogosphere. Director Rubaiyat Hossain had portrayed the ultimate effrontery: a Bengali girl falling in love with a Pakistani soldier. Didn’t she — both the eponymous character and the director — know that there was a war going on?
Of course, the sound and the fury around Meherjaan were mild compared to the reaction to Sarmila Bose’s Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War. Whereas the movie was fiction, the book was a piece of scholastic research. Bose, an Oxford academic, questioned the fundamental Bangladeshi narratives around the pre-planned, West Pakistan originated nature of the genocide — in fact, that a genocide happened at all.
Instead of meeting Bose’s assertions intellectually, many Bengali Studies scholars engaged in casual, social media attacks. The exceptions were Akhtaruzzaman Mandal, Nayanika Mookherjee, Dina Siddiqui, Afsan Chowdhury, Urvashi Butalia, and Naeem Mohaiemen. Mohaiemen’s essay The Economic and Political Weekly essay and follow-up response to Bose’s reply in the same journal by Mohaiemen, a Columbia anthropologist, is the most effective refutation of Bose’s thesis to date.[1]
In the past decade, a number of books have appeared on Bangladesh’s Liberation War. This essay covers three volumes focusing on the war from within the lense of conflict studies and great game manuevering — by Garry J Bass, Srinath Raghavan, and Salil Tripathi. Amid the ritual commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Victory Day, these books — both reading what they cover and discussing what they miss — are useful for a more nuanced understanding of the events that led to the country’s foundation.
Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive literature review on 1971. Some key books and work on particular aspects of the creation of Bangladesh — economic causes and consequences, refugee flows and communal and ethnic dimensions, gender violence — are not explored, mainly because these are not the focus of Bass, Raghavan, and Tripathi. However, in reviewing these three books, other relevant works on 1971 are also discussed.
Most reviews of non-fiction have an element of — the author covered XYZ, but missed ABC. For example, in his review of these new books in a subsequent essay for WDW Review (“The Ginger Merchant of History”) , Mohaiemen concludes that — “History’s ‘ginger merchant’ was far more crucial in the build up and conduct of this war than is acknowledged…”.[2]
Ginger merchant — adar byapari — is the proverbial Bengali small trader who is supposedly uninformed about the ocean liners that symbolise the global capital and everything that is dictated by it. In the context of 1971, Mohaiemen contends that “… the radical leftist guerilla, or the desperate peasant fighter are the ginger merchants who constituted turbulent street forces that made crucial differences to the fateful negotiations” that preceded the War.
What any review considers to be missing tells us as much about the reviewer as it does about what is being reviewed. This review is not immune from the tendency to state what might be missing from the books. Nonetheless, to keep the discussion focussed, I am going to explore two questions: what does the author propose to tell us that we wouldn’t have known from the existing literature; and does the author in fact manage to tell us what he proposes?
Arguably, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the creation of Bangladesh by Richard Sisson and Leo E Rose is the seminal work in English on Bangladesh’s Liberation War. The authors (from UCLA and Berkeley respectively when the book was published) seek to understand the motivations and calculations behind the decisions taken by key players of the twin crisis of 1971: the first involving the politicians and the military regime of Pakistan that led to the military crackdown in March; and the second one involving the Indian and Pakistani governments in the lead up to the direct war between the two countries in December.
The book is based on detailed interviews conducted in the late 1970s. The Indians interviewed included Indira Gandhi, her key ministers, and top bureaucrats in charge of managing the crisis. From the Pakistani side, all the key players in the Yahya Khan regime, including the general himself, as well as Lt Gen AAK Niazi and Maj Gen Rao Farman Ali were interviewed. But notably missing were ZA Bhutto, about to be hanged by the Zia-ul Huq regime, and Gen Tikka Khan, who was in jail at that time.
By that time, the other wing of the former Pakistan was also ruled by a military man named Zia. He wasn’t interviewed, but Gen MAG Osmani, his commander in Mukti Bahini, was. As was Kamal Hossain, a key aide to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in March 1971. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself was long dead, as was Tajuddin Ahmed. That is, even before the decade was over, some key players were already missing from explaining their motivations behind decisions in that fateful year.
This is a crucial point that we will return to.
Sisson and Rose faithfully reconstruct the events of the spring of 1971. They contend that while all three major players — Yahya, Bhutto, and Mujib — were committed to a peaceful end to martial law within the framework of a united Pakistan, each had a very different idea regarding the details, and each fundamentally misunderstood the other two. The generals particularly come off very poorly. Not just blinded by their racist anti-Bengali bias and condescending attitude towards politicians, they are shown as lacking any serious preparation for the negotiations after the 1970 elections resulted in a resounding Awami League victory. Most importantly, they seemed to completely misread Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s attitude towards the Six Points, believing that the Awami League chief would dump his electoral commitments for the lure of high offices.
As negotiations broke down, the generals decided to fight, believing they would win easily. Of course, the war did not play out as they thought. With India becoming inevitably ever intricately entangled, the Yahya regime is again shown to misread the situation, believing that it could match India on the battlefield while great powers would intervene swiftly. The Indian leadership, on the other hand, is shown to have had a much better grasp on reality, both with respect to the Bangladeshis’ lack of preparation to fight a long war as well as the great powers’ lack of willingness to do anything about another war while those in Vietnam and Biafra continued.
Being better informed and prepared, it is little surprise that India won in December. But the authors show that it was the Pakistanis who chose to start the fight, again, completely misreading the other side.
While much is missing in this telling — recall Mohaiemen’s “ginger merchants,” and the dead leaders, for example — the standard story of the blundering generals who were completely out of their depth is not challenged in the literature about 1971.
What, then, do Bass, Raghavan, and Tripathi tell us beyond this?
Let’s start with Garry J Bass’s The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a forgotten genocide. Instead of the actions of the protagonists of the erstwhile two-winged Pakistan in the lead up to the War, the Princeton professor’s focus is on how the US and Indian governments — “two of the world’s great democracies” — responded to the crisis. Published in 2013, Bass couldn’t have relied on original interviews to the same extent as Sisson and Rose. Instead, he bases his research on American archival material, particularly: the official reporting by Archer K Blood, the US Consul General in East Pakistan in 1971 — the eponymous telegram; and the White House tapes of conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
The American duo — supposed masterminds of grand strategies and cold, hard geopolitical calculations — come off poorly. It’s not that the powers-that-be in the White House were uninformed — they chose to discard the inconvenient facts that were forcefully, and heroically (in light of the personal and career toll it extracted), articulated by Blood and his colleagues. Instead, Nixon and Kissinger “knowingly broke US law” — Bass provides evidence thanks to the tapes — to help Pakistan carry out the atrocities.
Nor is it that they had limited options — according to Bass, the US had considerable sway over the Pakistani generals about the futility of using force instead of a political solution or starting an unwinnable war against India. The genocide and human tragedies of millions are the starting point, but the War ended in a disastrous outcome for the US from a realpolitik perspective: one of its key allies was dismembered by a Soviet-armed adversary. Why and how did the grandmasters of the great game let this happen? Was the military defeat of Pakistan a price America had to pay for its rapprochement with China?
Bass does discuss in detail the China connection — just as millions faced death in the killing fields and refugee camps of Bengal’s swamp, Kissinger used Pakistan as a covert transit to his secret negotiations to open up People’s Republic. Bass implicitly contends that the Nixon Administration could well have had its rapprochement with China while restraining the Pakistani generals. For example, Romania might have made an equally viable conduit. After all, Nicolae Ceausescu had not joined the Soviets in crushing the Prague Spring in 1968, so turning a Warsaw Pact country while opening up China would have been an even better triumph for Nixon and Kissinger!
Drawing on the tapes, Bass shows convincingly that they chose not to influence the Pakistanis, because Nixon and Kissinger behaved not as hard-hearted, coldly calculating, rational realist, but as hot-tempered, emotionally unstable men who let their racism — “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country”, that is Nixon on India — and misogyny — Nixon refers to the Indian Prime Minister as “the old bitch” — guide their decisions.
Nixon had a visceral dislike of Indians, preferring Pakistani generals for their supposed honesty and simplicity. In fact, goaded by Kissinger, Nixon pressured China to attack India at the dying days of the war — a dangerous escalation that might have threatened a nuclear war.
The occupant of the White House comes off in these pages as every bit vulgar and unhinged as its most recent former resident, and he receives deranged counsel from the supposed grandmaster of geopolitics who inspired the cinematic Dr Strangelove character. Bass is successful in puncturing the myth of statesmanship that Nixon and Kissinger built around themselves over the years. Of course, there is no way he could have predicted the Trump spectacle. But looking back at the Nixon Administration’s behaviour in the shadow of the Trump Administration, one has to wonder whether the supposed glory days of the rules-based order of Pax Americana had really been all that it is often made out to be?
It is telling that the subtitle of the Indian edition of the book is India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. In stark contrast with the Americans, the Indian Prime Minister and her close confidants are shown as “coldly calculating strategists, even if their actions served a humane cause”. That the government of Indira Gandhi handled a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable magnitude set in a political tinderbox consisting of communal tensions and simmering radicalism wrapped up in an international environment that were far from friendly is something that is well understood from Sisson and Rose. Bass adds to this by showing that India started preparing for war not as a last resort, but from the early days of the crackdown.
That India might have invaded Pakistan even if the latter hadn’t bombed Indian airfields on 3 December does not, of course, change the fact that India bore a tremendous humanitarian burden. A substantial literature on humanitarian intervention has emerged since the western involvement in the Balkans during the 1990s. Analysis of the Indian actions in 1971 in light of that literature would be an interesting read.
Equally interesting would be an analysis of the War in Bangladesh against the incipient globalisation, not just in the economic domain of multinational corporations and cross border trade and flows of hot money, but also in the sociopolitical sphere of the diaspora in the West of former imperial subjects, non-government organisations stepping in where the state didn’t exist and society failed to cope, new forms of politics based on individual rights challenging not just the heavy hand of the state but also age old social oppressions, and sociocultural trends such as the counterculture, rock music, and pop art that used novel audiovisual technologies to percolate and ricochet activists’ ideas and actions around the world.
Each of these trends played a part in Bangladesh, both before and after 1971. For example, the East Bengali diaspora in London was not only crucial for raising international awareness of the Bangladesh cause and the relief efforts for the refugees in India, but during the previous decade they provided an educational environment for people like Rehman Sobhan, Moudud Ahmed, Shafiq Rehman, Kamal Hossain, and Fazle Hasan Abed to hone their ideas. The last man would found the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) after the War, which would eventually go on to become the world’s largest NGO. Others in this group were crucial in the formative years of the country, working in the economic bureaucracy and policymaking, media, and politics under successive governments.
Back in 1971, international awareness was raised not just in the corridors of foreign ministries and embassies, but through novel use of popular media, activists targeted western public opinion directly. After all, the Concert for Bangladesh was the first benefit event of this kind in history! Bob Dylan or the Beatles, and Che Guevara or Chairman Mao for that matter, weren’t exactly unknown to the East Pakistani youth, and the spirit of the soixante-huitard was very much echoed in their own uprising from a couple of years earlier against the Ayub Khan regime.
It wasn’t just the famous and the glamorous who clamoured for an end to the atrocities in Bangladesh. Fascinating recent work by Rachel Stevens of Melbourne University, for example, shows that individuals in suburban Australia with little in common with the victims of the War spearheaded a groundswell of activism independent of the Australian government effort, foreshadowing anti-Apartheid movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the climate activism of our own time.[3]
Global trends of diaspora, NGO, pop culture, and citizen activism are mentioned by Srinath Raghavan, a New Delhi based scholar, in 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. The book might be considered a bit of a misnomer in the sense that Raghavan doesn’t delve into any of these global — that is, trends and developments not directly pertaining to, or above and beyond, nations and states — dimensions. Rather, notwithstanding the name, his focus is on the international — that is, matters concerning and actions of nation-states — context of 1971.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the idealism of Nehru-Nasser-Tito in the wake of the end of European empires had given away to “military or authoritarian rules” in most of the newly independent world. Most of these governments had little sympathy for the cause of Bangladesh. Meanwhile, by this time, the Cold War had “ceased to be a simple bipolar contest”, with many of the US allies chartering their own agenda in the developing world, while the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China faced each other off across the longest land border in the world. Against that international backdrop, Raghavan argues that “there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of an independent Bangladesh in 1971”.
I must confess that this thesis is intuitively quite appealing. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in his blockbuster book, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind:
“Every point in history is a crossroads. ….. Historians can speculate, but not provide any definitive answer. … constraints leave ample room for surprising developments, which do not seem bound by any deterministic laws.”
But does Raghavan actually make a persuasive case that “the creation of Bangladesh was the product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance”?
He didn’t have the option of original interviews that Sisson and Rose had. Nor did he have anything like the White House tapes. Relying mainly on Indian and Western archival sources as well as analysing the existing literature, Raghavan does point to a few possible forks in the road where a different path might have been taken. But not all of these alternatives appear equally plausible. Take, for example, the claim that “…if Bhutto had not worked with the military regime…. a united Pakistan could have been preserved”. While this may be true in a narrow sense, surely this is a bit of a non-starter, as we surmise from Sisson and Rose that Bhutto’s gambit all along was to egg the army on to a war in the East at the end of which he would rule the West.
A more compelling argument, echoing Bass, might be that if the Americans “had used .. economic leverage … Yahya … would have been forced to negotiate with Mujib”. Could the Americans really have influenced Pakistani actions though?
In the first dozen years of this century, under two very different presidents with very different foreign policy philosophies, America invaded an Arab country without the support of most of its allies and killed its dictator, then reluctantly bombed another Arab country at the urging of its allies and armed the rebels that killed its dictator, and did nothing while a popular uprising against yet another dictator in another Arab country descended into one of the worst wars of this young century. It is not at all clear that the US power made any difference for the better for the people of Iraq, Libya, and Syria. How can we be so confident that a forceful American stance would have been better for the people of Bangladesh?
Put differently, even if we agree that Kissinger and Nixon pursued a flawed and failed policy in 1971, it doesn’t necessarily and automatically mean that US action would have made a difference in the then East Pakistan. To make that case requires an analysis of East Pakistani and Bangladeshi politics, identifying the pro-American politicians and factions in Dhaka, and their realistic chances of wielding power. As it happens, we do know the foreign minister in the Bangladeshi government-in-exile, Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad, made overtures to the Americans. Mostaq was reputed to have represented the pro-West faction of the Awami League before the war. And as late as the 1970 election, the League was characterised by the Western media as the major pro-western party in either wing of Pakistan
That is, there were serious contenders of power in Dhaka for whom the US was also a potential partner, in spite of being the critiqued hegemon. If Americans made it clear to Yahya that they would work with the Awami League, would the general have bowed to pressure? And if he didn’t, might there have been some other general whom the Americans could have worked with?
Lt Gen Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, for example, presents a curious case. Reputed to be a hawk, he was the architect of the infamous Operation Searchlight — the military crackdown of 25-26 March. But arriving in Dhaka in the first week of March as the province’s military governor, he concluded that a military solution would not work. He returned to Rawalpindi, and would go on to serve Zia-ul-Huq and Benazir Bhutto as foreign minister during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Might a Yaqub regime have accommodated Sheikh Mujib under American pressure?
This is, of course, mere speculation. But this is the kind of speculation that needs to be explored and analysed if we are to conclude that the US could have exerted influence and delivered Bangladesh from hell in 1971.
Both Bass and Raghavan implicitly assert that the US could have influenced events for the better in 1971. But neither back up the assertion with any analysis of the pro-West factions in Pakistan.
Similarly intriguing, and ripe for detailed analysis, are the actions of the communist superpowers. Both Bass and Raghavan show how Nixon and Kissinger unsuccessfully pressured the Chinese in December to intervene on Pakistan’s side. In fact, Raghavan makes a compelling case that the Indians were reasonably confident that the Chinese would not intervene militarily. Of course, China was preoccupied with internal matters in 1971 — the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and Lin Biao’s aborted coup. But were there also factors at play in Dhaka?
When asked by the Indians about the official name of the new country, Tajuddin Ahmed replied the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Meanwhile, there is an echo of the People’s Liberation Army in Mukti Bahini. These are suggestive of Red China’s intellectual presence in Dhaka’s political milieu.
That is not to say that the Soviet Union was absent. And this leads to one of the most intriguing episodes of the War — the curious case of the Polish Resolution.
That is ZA Bhutto, representing Pakistan at the United Nations Security Council, on 15 December 1971. A great theatre, but the relevant matter for us is the piece of paper he tore up. It is supposed to be a draft resolution tabled by Poland which called for an immediate ceasefire and complete demilitarisation of East Pakistan followed by a UN administered election.
That is, with the Indian forces in the outskirts of Dhaka, the Soviet Union orchestrated a UN resolution that would have spared Pakistan an unconditional surrender and stopped India from installing the Tajuddin-led government in Dhaka. That Bhutto tore this up with theatrics for his own personal gain is implied by many, for good reasons. But why did the Soviets get Poland to move this resolution in the first place? Did they think their proxies would have a reasonable chance at the UN sponsored election? They would have had good reasons to — pro-Soviet panels swept the first student council elections in the post-liberation Bangladesh.
That is, could both China and the Soviet Union have been playing a long game in 1971? If so, how were their heavily factionalised local proxies placed for the revolution?
The East Pakistani left was completely swept aside by the Awami League’s 1970 election landslide. But before that, left activists were at the forefront of the anti-Ayub uprising of 1968-69. In Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power, Tariq Ali assessed that the uprising was likely to fail because there was no vanguard party. One can argue that the failure of the left in Bangladesh is essentially the failure of organisation. But what was behind the factionalism of the left? Ideological puritanism? International schisms? Petty personality clashes? Was the left’s class politics overshadowed by Bengali identity politics? Did the War present a second chance for the left?
All interesting questions and conjectures put forward by many over the years (for example, by Haider Akbar Khan Rono in his memoir). A history of Bangladeshi left deserves its own book. The relevant fact for us is that any incipient revolution in 1971 was nipped in the bud. Ultimately, it was Indian actions that made the crucial difference. And as Bass argues, Indian action was motivated at least in part by “a certain amount of fear of revolutionary [left] Bengalis” and the possibility of a tie-up with the Naxalites.
Raghavan adds to the literature by vividly showing the choice confronting the Indian decisionmakers about the timing and mechanism of its support to Bangladesh movement. Specifically, an option was contemplated around a swift, massive, and decisive strike at Dhaka before the onset of the monsoon whereby Bangladesh would be presented as a fait accompli to the world. Of course, Indian authorities had opted for the alternative of supporting the Mukti Bahini over months, possibly into 1972 had Pakistan not struck in December. But the Indians might have chosen differently, in which case the War could well have ended in nine weeks, not nine months.
According to Raghavan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman asked the senior Indian bureaucrat DP Dhar in January 1972 why Indians hadn’t intervened sooner. “The prolonged liberation war also created the cauldron in which the witches’ brew of post-independence politics came to a boil”— Raghavan concludes, an astute observation that is underappreciated in the literature.
Could the war be avoided in March 1971? Is there any unexplored perspective to answer that question?
Surely Sheikh Mujibur Rahman did not continue the parley with the Pakistanis till the end because he coveted the prime ministership of Pakistan. As the victor of a free and fair election, that position was his right. But Moudud Ahmed tells us that the office was offered to him by Ayub Khan. The Bengalie could have been the prime minister if he was ready to compromise on the Six Points. And this he couldn’t, and perhaps wouldn’t even if he could. Further, in any constitutional order based on the Six Points, the prime minister of Pakistan would have had such limited powers that it is questionable whether he would have even wanted the job.
What, then, was his end game?
It is possible to see the history of the two-winged Pakistan as one of continual erosion of West Pakistani power in face of emerging and assertive East Pakistani political leadership. Whereas in 1954, the central government could just dismiss Fazlul Huq’s government, to thwart HS Suhrawardy in 1958, a full blown martial law had to be implemented. Even a martial law was not enough in 1969 — a free and fair election had to be conceded in 1970. Might Sheikh Mujibur Rahman have concluded that in March 1971 there would have been a repeat of 1969, except this time round the endgame would be separation, mukti and shadhinota, in his own words? Might he have believed that once the parleys with Yahya and Bhutto produced nothing, like the round table conferences with Ayub two years earlier came to naught, Yahya would have been toppled and a new junta would have negotiated an honorable Pakistani exit?
“Only solution to the present crisis is a purely political one … there is no military solution” — wrote Yaqub Khan to Yahya on 5 March. What conversation did the military governor have with the Bengali leader? One notes that the Pakistan army also managed to arrest the Awami League chief’s constitutional advisor Dr Kamal Hossain. Were there elements in Rawalpindi with a faint hope for a negotiated settlement until the brutal reality of the crackdown took over?
Back to Raghavan, is he right about the liberation of Bangladesh not being inevitable? Well, in writing an international story, he overlooks what is perhaps the most unexpected development of the summer of 1971 — the rapid emergence of an armed resistance.
From the nationalist and radical colonels of Arab armies to the reactionaries who ruled Greece, the 1950s and the 1960s saw a global trend that Raghavan doesn’t mention at all — heavily politicised, ideologically indoctrinated mid-ranking army officers launching revolutions and toppling governments. Pakistan had been, indeed has continued to be, a major exception to this global development. While the army has formally or informally governed the country for decades, there has been no coup or rebellion of junior officers, March 1971 being the sole exception.
Clearly, the Bengali captains and majors of the Pakistan army were susceptible to the global trend of ‘free officers’ (Gamal Abdel Nasser’s term for his coterie). Within hours of the crackdown commencing in Dhaka, mid-ranking Bengali officers across the country rebelled with their men and arms.
The rebel units of uniformed soldiers formed the nucleus of the Mukti Bahini, alongside the mass participation of peasants and student activists to form guerrilla forces. Without the already-trained military men, India would have found it significantly more difficult to organise a long war. Indeed, without these rebel soldiers, it is quite possible that the political resistance would have collapsed.
It’s not just Raghavan who doesn’t explore this dimension of the War. This is a major omission in Bangladesh studies in general, particularly in light of the long shadow cast by the freedom fighter officers.
And yet, political power in the newborn country did not initially emanate from the barrel of a gun. Many a country has been born through a violent conflict. And in many other cases a charismatic leader had assumed power with some form of popular mandate. It is hard to think of a case where the armed men voluntarily lowered their guns and did not assume a seat at the table of power once victory was achieved, deferring to a leader who chose to remain absent from the battlefield. Except Bangladesh, that is.
The choices made in March 1971, the rebellions of Bengali officers, and the radical zeitgeist of the time — all these created the maelstrom of the 1970s Bangladesh politics where there were no rights upheld, and no wrong acknowledged. None of these has been analysed in any depth in the literature on 1971 and beyond, which leads to the next book in the trio.
Naeem Mohaiemen wrote that some may have expected the Colonel in Salil Tripathi’s The Colonel who would not repent: the Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy to be a “Marquezian Pakistani officer.” Having previously read the essay whence the book started, I knew better. The Colonel here is the then Major Farooq Rahman who took control of the country’s tanks and led the pre-dawn putsch on 15 August 1975 that saw Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family, including his pre-teen son, gruesomely murdered. Farooq was unrepentant a decade after the massacre when Tripathi met him.
Judging from the title, I expected Tripathi to cover the role of the army officers in 1971 and beyond. I was disappointed.
From one perspective, it’s clear why Bass and Raghavan don’t give space to the Bangladeshi voice. The former sets out to compare and contrast the US and Indian responses to the War, relying on previously unused White House material. The latter explicitly wants to cover international dimensions to the War. Of course, they didn’t cover the Bangladeshi perspective — even though their arguments would have been strengthened by detailed discussion of the Bengali leader, the left, or the armed resistance.
Nonetheless, it is also true that the Bangladeshi voice is largely silent in the English literature on 1971. Indeed, there is a paucity of books in English on post-War Bangladesh in general. Tripathi is a welcome corrective.
A veteran journalist who spent years with the Far Eastern Economic Review, Tripathi interviewed many members of Dhaka’s Anglophone society for the book, though, crucially he did not do any interviews in Bangla. Coming from the very social milieu — what used to be called staunchly and unabashedly pro-1971 once upon a time — of the people he talked to, I grew up listening to many of the stories he lyrically recounts. Making these available in English is, I suppose, useful. Missing though are the voices of a wider spectrum of the society, and any in depth analysis.
It is self-evidently important to narrate the lived experience of people from a wide spectrum of the society, far wider than that considered by Tripathi.
This essay is titled consciously after Jahanara Imam’s Ekattur-er dinguli. As I write this, on my desk are the following memoirs: Brave of Heart by Habibul Alam (a Bengali guerrilla), The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh by Archer K Blood (the American diplomat), Surrender at Dacca by JFR Jacob (the Indian general), and The Separation of East Pakistan by Hassan Zaheer (a Pakistani bureaucrat).
One thing that stands out from this collection of memoirs is that they reflect memories of people who may represent a wide range of political views and personal identities, but they all come from a narrow class of affluent, urban, Anglicised part of the society. It is important to explore the non-literate majority’s memory of 1971, work that Afsan Chowdhury has quietly been doing for many decades.
There is a certain imperative to do this kind of history — people with lived experience of East Pakistan will not be around for much longer. For that to work, however, one wouldn’t necessarily begin in 1971. Instead, it might be useful to start by asking what one did or where one was when Ayub Khan resigned in 1969. Then one could be asked about the economic opportunities that opened up for their families after 1947 partition. How did these contrast with the lack of opportunity in the 1960s? Thus could 1971 be properly put in its context.
When listened to properly, a much more messy and convoluted story might emerge than what we get from Tripathi.
As Mohaiemen wrote at the end of a family anecdote in his review essay on Bose’s book:
“Every Bangladeshi family carries many such contradictions within themselves. Contradictions of impulse, afterthought, hesitation and bravery.”
Of course, precisely because memories vary, by themselves the narrative stories such as this can shed only so much light on their own. The operative words here are — on their own. The 1971 memoirs, and memories, present a treasure trove of material that is yet to be parsed and interpreted for thorough analysis of, for example, what compelled and constrained the blind spots within the negotiations, revolutionary stratagems and bad alliances of the left, and the motivations and protocols of the rebel officers.
Widening the set of interviewees to include the less privileged classes who might not be as fluent in English, again by itself, would not necessarily help with that analysis.
What would help?
A first step would be to move beyond reporting the memories to contextualising them. Three recent examples, by Yasmin Saikia, Nayanika Mookherjee, and Anam Zakaria come to mind.
Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 by Saikia, a professor of history at Arizona State University, breaks from the conventional memory of the violence in 1971 as one between an occupation army and a defiant resistance by showing that women were violated by both sides, and the violations were wilfully not remembered after the War.
Mookherjee, an anthropologist at Durham University, contextualises the memories of the survivors of war crimes within the complex and shifting post-War Bangladeshi politics in The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Exploring what constitutes healing and closure in practice, she concludes that there is no easy answer.
In 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, Zakaria, a Pakistani oral historian, juxtaposes the state narratives around the events of 1971 against the lived experiences of a range of individuals, including some of the same individuals that Tripathi interviewed. In addition, she had also met others from both the erstwhile wings of Pakistan, civilians and military men (and their wives). What emerges from her telling is a nuanced story that is poignantly sympathetic to the survivors of the War, without losing the complexities involved.
Moving from oral history, better use could be made of archival materials from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Much of the official archival records from Pakistan might not be forthcoming in near future, and there might not be much by way of the Bangladeshi official archives. There is, however, enough material that can be analysed using various social studies methods.
Tazeen Murshid’s The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal Muslim discourses, 1871-1977 is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of the intellectual, social, cultural and political evolution that emerged over the course of the century to the 1970s. One striking feature of the Columbia academic’s book is that unlike anyone else of her ideological tradition — the same that Tripathi relies on — she claims no inevitable march of history to the glory days of the early 1970s. In fact, her story ends in 1977, not only after the birth of Bangladesh, but also the setbacks suffered by secularism and liberal values in the first half-decade of independence.
Murshid’s is a multi-disciplinary approach that relies on theoretical frameworks of social sciences other than history. Interesting and valuable perspectives can emerge and insights can be gleaned from using such frameworks.
For example, using the neoclassical realist framework of international relations, Shafiqur Rahman argues, contra Raghavan, that “not only the separation of the two halves of Pakistan was highly predisposed but also a violent parting was highly likely”.[4] More importantly, the author shows the “pitfalls of memoirs and interviews to construct a narrative plot of historical events while neglecting critical role of structural conditions” in his discussion of Sisson and Rose. For that point alone, the Portland-based researcher should expand this article into a book.
More generally, theoretical frameworks around military involvement in politics or revolutionary movements can be used to understand the role of the army officers or the left in 1971, and the consequences thereof. A genuinely global history of 1971 —one that links the Bangladeshi struggle with the diaspora communities, citizens’ activism in the West, NGOs, and counterculture zeitgeist of the era —could be a fascinating read. And if the Chinese archives could be accessed, perhaps some genuinely ground breaking discoveries could come to light.
At the 50th anniversary of the War, there is no shortage of books that could be written about 1971. Meanwhile, what about the books by Bass, Raghavan, and Tripathi? Judged in terms of what they set out to do, the first one is a success, the latter two perhaps less so. But insofaras they all make the reader think about 1971 and many unexplored elements in the existing literature — they are all successful.
Books Reviewed
● The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide by Garry J Bass, Alfred A Knopf, 2013.
● 1971: a Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by Srinath Raghavan, Harvard, 2013.
● The Colonel who would not Repent: the Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy by Salil Tripathi, Yale, 2014.
Other books
● Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War by Sarmila Bose, C Hurst & Co, 2011.
● War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh by Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, University of California, 1991.
● Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Random House, 2015.
● Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power by Tariq Ali, William Morrow, 1970.
● Shatabdi Periye by Haider Akbar Khan Rono, Tarafdar Publishers, 2005.
● Ekattur-er Dinguli by Jahanara Imam, Shondhani Publisers, 1986.
● Brave of Heart by Habibul Alam, 2006.
● The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh by Archer K Blood, 2002.
● Surrender at Dacca by JFR Jacob, UPL, 1997.
● The Separation of East Pakistan: the Rise and Realisation of Bengali Muslim Nationalism by Hassan Zaheer, UPL, 2001.
● Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 by Yasmin Saikia, Duke University, 2011.
● The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 by Nayanika Mookherjee, Duke University, 2015.
● 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India by Anam Zakaria, Penguin Random House, 2019.
● The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal Muslim discourses, 1871-1977 by Tazeen Murshid, Oxford, 1996.
[1] Naeem Mohaiemen, “Flying blind: waiting for a real reckoning on 1971”, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011.
[2] Naeem Mohaiemen, “The Ginger Merchant of History (Standing in the shadow of “Giants”)”, Witte de With Review, Sediments, Nov. 2016. Reprinted in WdW Review: Arts, Culture and Journalism in Revolt, Vol. 1 (2013 – 2016), 2017.
[3] Rachel Stevens, “Humanitarianism from the Suburbs: Australian refugee relief and activism during the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 2019.
[4] Shafiqur Rahman, Doomed to separate: a neoclassical realist perspective of the third India-Pakistan War of 1971 and independence of Bangladesh, Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, 2017.
Previously published as a series in the Dhaka Tribune.