پاکستان دنیا میں بچوں کے حقوق کے حوالے سے موجود بین الاقوامی معاہدوں کا دستخطی ہے مگر جب ان پر عمل درآمد کی بات آتی ہے تو پاکستان کا نام سب سے آخر میں آتا ہے
Naeem Mohaiemen
بچے ۔۔۔ ہمارے معاشرے کا ایک مظلوم طبقہ
Part VII: Conclusion
This is the final segment of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971″ by Naeem Mohaiemen. Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI Blind spots of 1971 | If not for a singular focus on the unresolved issues related to genocide, we could have by now probed elsewhere for a more complicated unpacking of 1971, some of which would have been productively jarring to the conventional narrative. Among many unresolved issues within the war is the rise of Bengali nationalism, and the failure to maintain it as a fully inclusive framework. While Bengali Hindus were a crucial part of the dynamic and the depiction of the 1971 struggle, the reality is that the Awami League, as well as other political elites, were mainly led by Bengali Muslims. While the process has been gradual, one of the ways this has hardened further in recent years is through the continued reduction of the country’s Hindu population, aided by the “Vested Property Act,” a holdover of the communal “Enemy Property Act” enacted after the 1965 IndiaPakistan war. Successive Bangladesh governments, and allied powerful individuals, have used this Act to grab Hindu property using a combination of court action, bribery, and […]
Part VI: Understanding Brinksmanship
This is the sixth of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971″ by Naeem Mohaiemen. Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V The complex events leading from post-1970 election negotiations to the March 1971 military crackdown remain a historical gray area with many unanswered questions. How did Mujib struggle to balance leadership of an increasingly frustrated Bengali population with conflicting tendencies and an electoral mandate of being leader of “all Pakistan?” What were the tensions between the League’s middle class leadership and the radical students who raised the flag of Bangladesh on campus? What was the available space for those who saw war as inevitable but did not fully accept Mujib’s leadership? In fact, at what point did war become truly inevitable? All this is especially obscured because many key Bengali participants were killed in the 1970s. The cataclysmic 1970 cyclone and the botched relief effort, which altered the League’s election results, is a key starting point for the impending collapse. In fact, the delay in giving cyclone relief, and the unacceptable time lag before Yahya visited the disaster zone, turned it into a campaigning platform for Sheikh Mujib. The image of the unfeeling West Pakistan side was […]
Part V: Debating Genocide
This is the fifth of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971″ by Naeem Mohaiemen. Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV Beyond “settled” facts, histories produced in 1971 were burdened with the propaganda impulse in a struggle that played out both domestically and internationally and included superpower proxy rivalries. One document in particular that embodies the state narrative is the Government of Pakistan’s White Paper on the Crisis in East Pakistan, August 1971. The white paper was produced to prepare the ground for arguing at the United Nations (as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto subsequently did) that the Bengalis had severely provoked the army with acts of violence, that the army had to step in to protect Bihari lives and property and the unitary republic, and that the entire conflagration was due to Indian interference. Several other white papers published during the war, including reports from the International Rescue Committee, (28) multiple hearings of the U.S. Senate (29) , the U.S. House of Representatives, (30) and the Geneva Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurists (31) presented a completely different picture. All these reports had problems of access and possible bias, but at the least they acted as a counterbalance […]
Part IV: Sentimental Fog
This is the fourth of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971″ by Naeem Mohaiemen. Part I | Part II | Part III The Indian recollection of 1971, particularly in West Bengal, plays a role in shaping the way the story of the war was presented on the world stage. The West Bengal intellectual class operated within a vision focused on the Indian role and a glorified narrative of Bengali freedom fighters. On the other hand, Bangladeshis saw not only the heights of 1971, but also the crushing setbacks afterwards. The manhunts against Maoists in 1973, the manmade famine of 1974, the massacre of Mujib in 1975, the counter-coups until 1977, the second assassination in 1981, and all the manipulations and setbacks that came in between and afterward served as a reality check. Faced with our own brutal self-rule, it became difficult to believe in a fully sanitized history of 1971. West Bengal’s sentimental altruism started during the war. Consider the “Bangladeshi” songs being broadcast from Swadhin Bangla Betar radio in Kolkata. Many of these were written by Indian Bengalis. Their loving and (post-1947) forgiving view of their “brothers across the border” comes through in the lyrics: the iconic “Shono ekti Mujiborer” […]
Part III: Two Wings Without A Body
This is the third of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971″ by Naeem Mohaiemen. Part I | Part II Partition resulted in the creation of two Pakistans, and from the beginning relationships between the two wings were strained and distant. At many key junctures after 1947, the attitude of the central state toward East Pakistan was not only that this was a troublesome province, but that this was a disloyal part of the Muslim body politic. Several key confrontations, including the Agartala conspiracy case against Sheikh Mujib and several Bengali army officers, highlight that the West Pakistan government was on hair-trigger alert about the loyalty of the Bengali population. Mujib’s declared and public position that the Kashmir crisis needed to be solved through negotiations with India further deepened the suspicions of the Pakistani military bureaucracy. West Pakistani hostility, racism, and religious intolerance towards East Pakistan is a key element in understanding the violence of the war. In her recent book on post-1947 Pakistan, Saadia Toor states that “the attitude of West Pakistani elite towards the Bengalis also became increasingly more racialized over time.” (9) Toor has summarized these tendencies that were prevalent in everyday conversations: There […]
Part II: Fluctuating witnesses
This is the second of a multi-part series “Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971” by Naeem Mohaiemen. The first segment is here. In 1993, I began an oral history project on the war through the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Although oral history work on 1971 was still relatively new at that time, an element of rote repetition had already crept into people’s stories. (3) While there was not yet a Liberation War Museum, there were some “known” sources and books. These would lead people to interview the same person who had already been on record multiple times (a masters thesis, another magazine article, an anniversary television show). Everyone seemed to have a similar story of crossing the border, always aided by the kindly, bearded villager who would say, “Apa, apnara jan, ami thaki, aro lok ashbe” (Sister, you go, I’ll stay, there are many more coming). Whether that story was a collective legend (of the self-sacrificing noble villager) mingled with actual memories was difficult to parse. The stories of 1971, from these exhausted voices, would later remind me of Amitava Kumar’s interviews after the Gujarat riots of 2002: “I saw from the way in which he recited the details […]
Part I: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971
I remained in the (insane asylum) for six months in 1973. What drove me mad? Well, I felt the collective guilt of the Army action which at worst should have stopped by late April 1971. —Colonel Nadir Ali, Pakistan Army, “A Khaki Dissident on 1971,” Viewpoint, December 17, 2010 Our fathers committed a deadly mistake, a crime—they made Bengal into Pakistan. We did not want to stay sons of slaves, so we created Bangladesh. Now, let us imagine Bangladesh never became independent, we were still East Pakistan. What would we see around us? We would see the flag with moon and stars, we would hear ‘Pak Sar Zamin Sad Bad’, Urdu would be spoken everywhere, the cinema hall would be showing ‘Bahana’ and ‘Banjaran,’ the president would be some Punjabi, the army—from major to brigadier to general—would be filled with Pathans and Punjabis, the millionares would all be Pakistani, the roads would be filled with laughing Sindhis in their jeeps. Those who roar around in Pajeros today—they would be standing on the roadside shaking in front of those same jeeps. The Adamjis, Dauds, Bawanis, and Kabuliwalas would run this country. We would be happy to lick the dust off their feet. […]
