Misinterpreting Bangladesh’s history

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes for DOT : 
It is always important to remove misconceptions about history. Where that is not done, it is people who go through life with ideas that are wrong and indeed get to be warped at a point.
That brings us to the question of how political commentators in the West have with regularity referred to Bangladesh’s freedom struggle in 1971 as a war between India and Pakistan. Nothing could be further from the truth and most vociferously should we in Bangladesh make it clear to those commentators that their interpretation of what took place is not only flawed but is also a clear instance of ignorance on their part.
Of course there was an Indo-Pakistan war in 1971, but that came to pass on 3 December when Pakistan’s attack on Indian airfields in the western sector prompted a full-scale retaliation by Delhi. In a broad sense, therefore, what westerners refer to as the Indo-Pakistan war took place in the western sector of the subcontinent from 3 December to 17 December, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was prevailed upon by the Soviet Union and the United States to stop her army from going further inside what remained of Pakistan after the surrender of its army in Bangladesh on 16 December.
But if the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 was confined to the western sector, how do we look at the conditions which emerged in occupied Bangladesh between 25 March and 16 December of the year? The picture is plain to see. All the way from the moment the Pakistan army launched its genocide in what till then had been East Pakistan up to to its capitulation, the war was patently one between Dhaka and Islamabad. Of course, the Indians joined in on 3 December through the formation of the Indo-Bangladesh Joint Command; and of course Indian soldiers and Bangladesh’s Mukti Bahini together liberated Bangladesh through marching all the way to Dhaka. In the eastern sector, the war despite the Indian entry was Bangladesh’s War of Liberation. To dub it as an Indo-Pakistan war is a clear falsification of history in our part of the world.
Where Bangladesh’s history is concerned, there are other areas where prevailing misconceptions — and they are again in the western narrative — have consistently threatened to upend reality. And here is how: westerners, especially in the media world, have often referred to Bangladesh’s emergence in 1971 as the country’s secession from Pakistan. That once more is a mark of poor historical understanding. Secession is when a part of a country decides on its own, without being compelled to do so by outside force, to go its independent way. A shining instance we have of secession is that of the eastern region of Nigeria opting to move out of the federation as the independent republic of Biafra in 1967.
The story was obvious: Biafra had seceded from Nigeria. The secession was brought to an end within three years, in 1970. Earlier, in the mid-1960s, Singapore seceded from the Malaysian federation and went its separate way. In 1960, Katanga under Moise Tshombe seceded from the newly independent Congo but eventually made its way back into the mother country after much of murder and mayhem. In 1861, the southern states of the United States of America seceded from the north on the question of slavery. It took President Abraham Lincoln and his generals four years, through war, to herd the south back into the union.
Nothing of the kind happened in Bangladesh in 1971. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman famously did not go for secession or a unilateral declaration of independence when he addressed a million-strong crowd at the Race Course in Dhaka on 7 March. The thorough political being that he was, he was fully aware of the consequences that could result from such a precipitate move. And when he finally moved to declare Bangladesh as an independent state in the early minutes of 26 March, there was nothing in the nature of secession about his action. He was acting within minutes of the vicious armed assault on his people launched by the Pakistan army. The point ought not to be missed: Bengalis did not provoke the Pakistan military into action by going for secession; Pakistan provoked Bengalis into declaring independence the moment its soldiers fanned out on a killing spree in Dhaka.
These are the truths which have infuriatingly been sidestepped by interpreters of Bangladesh’s history. And these are the facts which we need to hold high in the face of a misrepresentation of the historical narrative by outsiders. And there are other misleading statements which call for correction, in countries like Pakistan. In the years since the rise of Bangladesh, Pakistanis and a good number of westerners have naively or deliberately referred to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, with absolutely no reference to the results of the December 1970 election which gave the Awami League a clear majority in the eventually aborted national assembly. That Bhutto took charge of Pakistan by default is consciously papered over; that East Pakistan went for a rebirth as Bangladesh as a result of the repudiation of the election results by the military junta of Yahya Khan finds no mention in the history taught to Pakistan’s young.
These are some glaring examples of the anti-history some people have been trying to project as the truth over the last nearly forty eight years. There is, therefore, a paramount need on our part — on the part of our scholars and historians and journalists and of course our government — to enlighten those who would tamper with the story of our struggle for freedom with history as it happened.
The Writer is Editor-in-Charge, The Asian Age