The figure of 3 million(30 lacs) killed by Pak Army is exaggerated and superfluous, not plausible at all, and so is the story of rapes and torture to quite an extent.
A figure of 50,000 to 1 lac killed in the 71 war is the figure quoted by Sarmilla Bose, a neutral perspective by her. Some excerpts from the article, the last para quotes the figure.
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Sarmila Bose changes perspective on 71 war through Dead Reckoning
But recently I found the book of Ms Sarmila Bose, who is an American journalist and academic of Indian descent. She is presently a senior research associate at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. The grandniece of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and granddaughter of nationalist Sarat Chandra Bose, Bose is the daughter of former Trinamool Congress parliamentarian Krishna Bose. She was born in Boston, but grew up in Kolkata. This book has completely changed my perspective about the creation of Bangladesh.
An excerpt from the Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh war
In the terrible violence of a fratricidal war the victims were from every ethnic and religious group and from both sides of the political divide, and so were the perpetrators. Humanity was just as normally distributed. Both sides had legitimate political arguments and their idealistic followers, along with those who indulged in opportunism, expediency and inhumanity. Many Bengalis, supposed to be fighting for freedom and dignity, committed appalling atrocities; many Pakistani Army officers, carrying out a military action against a political rebellion, turned out to be fine men doing their best to fight an unconventional war within the conventions of warfare.
The Bengalis splintered into many fragments, those who wanted an independent Bangladesh, those who supported a united Pakistan, those who desired autonomy but not secession, those who actively fought for whichever side they supported and those who like Doctor Zhivago wanted to ‘just live’ but got caught up in the upheaval nevertheless. There were combatants and non-combatants, victims of violence and its perpetrators.
A longstanding theme of the 1971 conflict is the state of denial in Pakistan: a refusal to confront what really happened in East Pakistan. However, the study revealed a greater state of denial in Bangladesh and to some extent in India. In many ways the subsequent political formations in Bangladesh have been fighting out the battle of 1971 ever since, each constructing its own version of history. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this trend is the tendency on the part of pro liberation Bangladeshis to deny, minimise or justify the brutalities committed by Bengali nationalists against non-Bengalis and non-nationalists during 1971. The culture of violence fomented by 1971 explains much of what happened in Bangladesh subsequently and the cultivated mythologies of all sides aim to bequeath the legacies of hatred to successive generations.
Within months of the creation of Bangladesh, Sheikh MujiburRehman and his party the Awami League, who had fought the war in the name of Democracy, turned the country into a personal autocracy formalised later as a one party state. In August 1975 Bengali Army officers who had supported the liberation movement assassinated Sheikh MujiburRehman and massacred his entire family except for two daughters who were away at the time. Several former freedom fighters and Mujib’s cabinet colleagues were imprisoned and then murdered in jail.
The year 1971 was marked by a bitter civil war within Pakistan and between India and Pakistan, backed respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States. It was fought over the territory of East Pakistan, which seceded to become Bangladesh.
The numbers mattered, and matter still, because they make the difference between seeing the war as a tragedy and seeing it as a terrible crime, indeed as a genocide. Sarmila Bose’s attempt to set the numerical record straight, when she concludes that fewer died than claimed, still we are dealing with murder, rape, unnatural deaths and the destruction of individuals and their families in a land that had joyously embraced the idea of Pakistan less than a generation before.Bose estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in 1971. One hundred thousand at most.
https://dailytimes.com.pk/175915/sarmila-bose-changes-perspective-71-war-through-dead-reckoning/
