@ Bangladeshis : Dude as much as I appreciate what you guys are saying here, where are you guys in real life ? The only Bangladeshis that I've heard on the Television or met (2 to be exact) or had conversations with over the internet (apart from PDF !), they went 'Apology, ApOlOgY, APOLOGY !', as if, in '71, I was prowling the streets of Dhaka or elsewhere in BD with a machete in one hand and a Pakistani flag in the other !
Secondly, I don't buy the whole - 3 million figure and hundreds of thousands of raped ! I know that our army can be decadent, corrupt and incompetent but two things they aren't are 'Rapists' and 'Butchers', I've had the pleasure of meeting many Jawans and knowing a few Officers ! Even in Balochistan, the so-called atrocities, are committed by the FC which comes under the Provincial Government and has an element of 'ethnic conflict to it'. Having said that some of your grievances were very genuine; there was grave economic disparity between the two wings, extra efforts should have been made to bring the Bengalis in line with the rest of Pakistan by offsetting whatever advantage those of us who could understand Urdu (mainly the Punjab and the Urdu-Speaking community) enjoyed and you should have been made to understand lovingly as to 'why Jinnah wanted Urdu and not another language' as the 'National Language of Pakistan' and not through the iron-hand that the Government practised in the 50s !
Thirdly, I don't want a reunification of Pakistan and Bangladesh and I'm sure neither do you ! Jinnah, as much as I love him, was wrong ! He was wrong in assuming that we - Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent - are capable to transcend these utterly 'mundane' differences of 'caste, colour, ethnicity and language' because if we were, irrespective of whether there was Bhutto on this side or Mujib on that side, we - the People, wouldn't have turned on each other the way we did !
Pakistan Zindabad, Bangladeshi Zindabad and Bharat Zindabad !
Well, propaganda here runs very deep brother. When I was a kid I used to play muktijuddho
with my little brother. Heck I didn't even know that BD was part of PAK. For BAL history of the
world starts at 1971 with a slight flashback of 1952 in vacuum. BAL's official policy is to refer to PAK as occupying power as if BD was independent before. Today's gen is oblivious to history and don't show much interest (even I am part of this gen). It will take time for such a widely circulated propaganda to get extinct. But ultimately truth prevails and maybe your children may not find their Bangladeshi counterparts asking for apology.