Writing the history of a war is a very challenging job for every historian because the line between fact and fiction about events and personalities tends to get blurred by the creators of those events and archival facts. That means historians have to show considerable sensitivity when they interpret facts on the basis of available evidence. Bose has left no stone unturned in collecting material facts to present a rich and challenging story of the 1971 war. She has personally interviewed “eyewitnesses” and her hard work is visible in bibliographical references from pages 199 to 230.
The author has contested the fact that the war was a nationalist war of liberation and takes the firm stand that it was a contest for political power between the Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of East Bengal and the military regime of Yahya Khan of West Pakistan.
She claims to be academically objective and a non-partisan narrator with a view to refuting, even rejecting, every formulation found in the war histories of 1971. If, on the one hand, the author characterises the conflict as a pure “political struggle for power”, on the other, she maintains that “India was an invader” and the partition of Pakistan took place because of armed intervention and aggression by India.
The author is very generous towards General Yahya Khan and very harsh towards Mujibur Rahman’s so-called electoral victories. She maintains that the military dictator “accepted [Bengalis’] economic grievances as legitimate, [and] replaced the ‘parity principle’ with elections based on ‘one person one vote’”.
The author slips badly, however, in her analysis of the elections in Pakistan in December 1970. The elections brought out a polarisation in Pakistan between east and west; Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League established its electoral supremacy in the east, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party won the elections in the west. The author approvingly quotes Sisson and Rose, “The election in essence, thus, involved two separate campaigns — one in the east, one in the west.”
Sheikh Mujib received 75 per cent of the votes cast in East Bengal, but in a “politically conscious electorate” such as East Bengal, “the voter turnout was … relatively low at 56 per cent”. If this is the electoral scene then “42 per cent of the total electorate in East Pakistan had spoken in favour of the Awami League”. On the basis of this electoral statistic, Bose rejects the notion that 1971 was a “war of liberation” and asserts that, “in fact, it is precisely because some people were fighting to secede from Pakistan and form the independent state of Bangladesh that there was a ‘civil war’ in Pakistan that year, culminating in an inter-state war between India and Pakistan”.
Also, because a section of the Bengali elite decided to take to arms to achieve its “political goal of power”, the Pakistan Army cannot be labelled enemy, occupying or invading forces, because it was obligatory on its part to defend the country’s territorial integrity.
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It is worth mentioning that in serious social science, an approach based on public statements by the political actors involved needs to be critically evaluated on the basis of intensive fieldwork. Although the author has done her homework quite seriously, she has thrown caution to the winds and, in the process, exposed herself to the charge of being a partisan scholar. For instance, she has gone the extra mile to show that during the war the Mukti Bahini committed atrocities against the non-Bengali Bihari settlers and Hindus. Can it be anyone’s case that excesses are not committed by mobs in disturbed social situations?
The author has also made every effort to absolve the Pakistani army and Generals like Tikka Khan and Amir Abdullah Kham Niazi of perpetrating atrocities against the civilian population during the war. The author maintains that the Mukti Bahini campaign was conducted along with “some disguised Indian involvement”. She appears to have forgotten the simple fact that in war, rumours, fictionalised statements and exaggerations are marketed as “reliable facts”.
The thrust of this study is to show that neither Mujib nor the Mukti Bahini had any legitimacy to project themselves as authentic claimants for the creation of a separate country because no “referendum” was held for this purpose. India took full advantage of the situation and engineered a war for partition of Pakistan. In her view, allegations made against the Pakistani establishment and the Army are generally motivated to paint them as the real villains of the piece.
Are there any takers for this “thesis”? Bose is not alone in this approach; she is following in the footsteps of all colonial historians who have condemned every nationalist struggle for freedom as phoney and spurious. She should have titled this study “India’s war against Pakistan in 1971”, just like another British historian, Neville Maxwell, who sold his book under the title India’s China War. Great scholars based in England think alike on issues of nationalism.
DEAD RECKONING: MEMORIES OF THE 1971 BANGLADESH WAR
Sarmila Bose
Hachette India; 237 pages; Rs 495