Icarus
RETIRED MOD
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I enever knew you don't know how to find the citation from wikipedia. So I'll do it the hard way although it kills my valuable time.Finding citation off Wikipedia is not difficult at all, but the fact that you do that does not reflect too well on your study. Its not about pulling random articles that support your point of view, its about having the requisite study to be able to engage in literary debate. Vinod was not comfortable with Sarmila Bose, so I offered him Sisson and Rose's research.
Now to the rebuttal.
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’”.
Indeed it is because whereas Pakistan Army was hunting down insurgents and rebels, the Bengali crowds were lynching West Pakistanis and Biharis in the street. Whereas the Pakistani troops proceed to hunt specific people down who endangered peace and created disharmony. The Bengali crowds looked for the most vulnerable, random individuals and targeted them. Women, Children and Men, were all killed with equal ferocity.
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.
That is absolutely correct because from the time the election result was announced in December 1970 and the Bhutto-Mujib deadlock ensued, to 25th March 1971. Bengali Mobs continued to murder with impunity, conduct armed marches, attack civil infrastructure and military personnel but the Army remained confined to their barracks.
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.
Incorrect, the first East Bengal Unit to rebel was 2EBR at Joydevpur and they rebelled in April. The timeline given in the article is incorrect.
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.Contextual Error, in an interview the same person previously stated that they were ready to fight and die whereas he deserted at the first fired shot and then said that the Pakistan Army was ruthless for attacking a University. This casts serious shadows on the accuracy of the entire article.
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.
Firstly the figure of thousands of jute workers is actually quite strained, the 15,000 figure is of identified casualties and locals claim that the number was almost a hundred thousand but for the sake of accuracy, the book sticks with the figure that was produced on paper by the East Pakistan government functionaries. Secondly, the writer has denied that the killings were the result of ethnic hatred and then gone on to state that ethnic hatred had prevailed for over 30 years.
She conveniently elides the fact that Mujib (and others) repeatedly averred that the Biharis and non-Muslims “are our sacred trust”.
His word was useless because the situation was out of Mujib's control, by 7th March he was still engaged in dialogue for premiership but the people had already rebelled and booed down Mujib for not declaring independence. We see how his word has stood the test of time and Biharis are still treated as sub-humans in Bangladesh.
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.”As the writer she is entitled to her observation and her point is quite pertinent that if the Bangladeshi authorities know of a mass grave in the Dhaka University ground, why don't they exhume the dead, document them and give them a decent burial?
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.
Now this is just pleading for a bone, the Army killed insurgents and the critic wants sympathy for it? They were insurgents, they were engaged in warfare against the state and that is what happens with insurgents when emergency has been declared, they are tracked down and killed. Anyone who expects otherwise does not have the balls for an insurgency.
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.I wonder who these mysterious American citizens without names that can be quoted were, seeing as all American Citizens had been either evacuated or had taken refuge in the American Consulate which had been blockaded by a Bengali Mob. I'd appreciate a link to who these people were and if they were asked to participate in Ms. Bose's research.
Bose asserts that all Bangladeshi scholarship on 1971 suffers from “multiple layers of partisanship and poor quality and blatant in ‘documeschntation’”. Much the same can be said of her own book. Far from advancing the cause of truth, it ends up muddying the waters of oselectivitylarship.
The critic has them self done a pretty shoddy job by offering no statistics or testimonies in response to Ms. Bose.
Her visit to Bangladesh is inconsequential, like I said she didn't include the witness's accounts and throughout the book she followed a partisan and selective approach. I already provided the article where she lobbied for arming Pakistan with F16 back in 2005. So it is obvious that she has an agenda and biased in her approach. I'd appreciate if you continue referring more neutral sources hereon and not someone controversial like Bose.
I debunked your article paragraph by paragraph, your move and for the record I also quoted Sisson and Rose.
Also, writing one article in favour of Pakistan's claim does not specify one's allegiance, If I make posts that support India's stance on a matter, it does not mean that I am somehow traitorous towards my country and inclined towards yours.
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