There can be no lasting peace on the subcontinent unless Pakistan, India and Bangladesh let go of their flawed narratives of the war.
Festivities have gripped Bangladesh as the nation marks the golden jubilee of independence from Pakistan. Patriotic songs, red-green Bangladesh flags and patriotic cultural shows are on full display on Victory Day today.
On this day 50 years ago, millions of Bengali people shed tears of joy and relief when Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation as Pakistani troops accepted an unconditional surrender to the India-Bangladesh Joint Forces following a bloody nine-month civil war.
The cruel birth of Bangladesh, just 24 years after the British partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines in 1947, was a heartbreaking pointer to one of the worst historical and political blunders of the 20th century.
The war came after the military regime refused to hand over power to the Awami League party led by Bangladesh’s founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, following the party’s landslide win in the 1970 general election.
More wars were fought on the subcontinent before and after 1971, but it remains one of the defining chapters in the history of South Asia and continues to shape political and diplomatic discourse in the region.
This was also a proxy war overshadowed by the Cold War. Russia and India lent support to Bangladeshi independence, while the US and China backed the Pakistani regime.
Numerous villages and towns were razed to the ground amid a campaign of massacre, terror, looting and arson when the military brutalized its own people
The sad reality is that the combatants failed to bury the ghosts of the past and to learn good lessons. Propaganda, vilification and hatred dominate the written and oral history of the 1971 War of Independence stemming from narrow perspectives.
The Pakistani military and Islamist militias stand accused of a genocidal crackdown, codenamed Operation Searchlight, that left three million dead and as many as 300,000 women raped and forced into sex slavery. About 10 million people took shelter in India as refugees.
Independent researchers put the death toll at around 500,000. Even at this scale, it was still a genocide. Hundreds of mass graves across Bangladesh bear testimony to the slaughter.
Worst of all, the military and their local collaborators brutally tortured and killed about 1,000 Bengali intellectuals for supporting independence with an intention to cripple the infant nation. Such atrocities can only be compared to Gestapo killing squads in Nazi Germany.
Source: UCANews