The churlish comment of Advisor Law of the Interim Government of Bangladesh Asif Nazrul that India was only “a partner” in the struggle against the Pakistani yoke in East Pakistan and “nothing more” has exposed his ignorance of the history of the Liberation War of Bangladesh.
It is not surprising. Going by available records of his date of birth, he was only five years old when the Indian armed forces had secured for the Bengali population of East Pakistan a liberated Bangladesh.
It is more surprising that the office of Chief Advisor of Interim Government Mohammed Yunus, a Nobel laureate, has endorsed Asif’s view.
Possibly Asif in his younger days had not found it important enough to study the history of the Liberation War of Bangladesh.
He need not, however, have laboured on the study of history. A glance at the famous photo of the surrender ceremony of the Pakistani army in Dhaka, with Lieutenant General J. S. Aurora, GOC-in-C Eastern Command of the Indian Army, along with Chief of Staff of Eastern Command Lt Gen J.F.R Jacob and senior officers of the Indian air force and Indian navy, accepting on December 16, 1971, the instrument of surrender from the Pakistani commander Lt Gen A.A.K. Niazi is convincing enough that the Liberation War of Bangladesh was a famous victory for the Indian armed forces.
The Foreign Ministry of Bangladesh has tried to justify Asif’s comment by saying that General M. A. G. Osmani, Commander of the Mukti Bahini of Bangladesh, should have been at the surrender ceremony and made a signatory.
But the Foreign Ministry of Bangladesh should know why Osmani’s helicopter could not reach the surrender ceremony at Dhaka in time. Lt Gen Jacob in his book ‘An Odyssey in War and Peace’ has explained the fault line between Osmani and the Indian army whose commanders had wanted Osmani and his battalions of the Mukti Bahini to be concentrated at Mymensingh to the north of Dhaka to form a firm base for the best approach to Dhaka for Indian troops.
Osmani had instead preferred to concentrate his battalions in distant Sylhet where he belonged.
Naturally, he could not make it to the surrender ceremony at Dhaka. It was not possible to have delayed the surrender as the U.N. could have passed a resolution on ceasefire or the U.S. could have intervened.
The Mukti Bahini had, in fact, been raised under the aegis of the Eastern Command and trained in the border areas of West Bengal.
Osmani had wanted them to be raised into regular infantry battalions but the Indian army wanted them to function as a guerrilla force for subversion inside East Pakistan.
The Eastern Command had also issued the cadres of the Mukti Bahini with rifles and ‘lungis.’
By belittling the role of the Indian armed forces in the formation of Bangladesh, Asif has insulted the memory of the martyrs of the liberation struggle; those who had been the victims of the untold brutalities of the Pakistani army on the Bengali-speaking population of East Pakistan.
Under “Operation Searchlight,” the Pakistani army launched a massacre on the night of March 25, 1971, that began with an attack on Dhaka University in which the cream of Bengali intellectuals in East Pakistan was exterminated.
Recalling the massacre, The Daily Star wrote on March 25, 2019, that on that fateful single night over 7,000 unarmed Bengalis were massacred.
Teachers and students who were the vanguards of the resistance against Pakistani yoke in East Pakistan were exterminated in hundreds.
The girl students were dragged into waiting army trucks, raped and then killed. Male students were lined up in front of their dormitories and shot.
“Pakistani soldiers set fire to the houses of slum-dwellers and when they rushed out, half burnt, running on the streets in panic, mowed them down with bullets ‘for violating the curfew order.’”
Sohagpur village in Sherpur was the scene of one of the worst massacres. In an orgy of violence on July 25, 1971, in one night Pakistani soldiers massacred 164 men and raped 57 women.
Sohagpur is still known as ‘village of widows.’ Jalal, a boy, could run away. When he returned to the village he found 11 lifeless bodies; including his father’s.
A plaque with names of 69 martyrs still stand at a mass grave at the village.
In the 11-month period till the liberation of Bangladesh by the Indian armed forces, the Pakitani army had killed an estimated three million people, raped about 300,000 women, set houses on fire and caused enormous destruction of infrastructure.
It was the Indian Parliament that passed a resolution at the end of March 1971, calling for Pakistan to transfer power to the people of East Bengal.
Prominent Bengali resistance leaders from East Pakistan had set up their Government in Exile at a bungalow on Theatre Road (now Shakespeare Sarani) in Kolkata.
The Mukti Bahini freedom fighters had destroyed and disrupted the infrastructure, lines of communication and logistics of the Pakistani army, writes Lt Gen Jacob. General Osmani had, however, pulled out men from guerrilla operations and formed them into regular units; organizing the Mukti Bahini troops into brigades and battalions.
Some of these had fought well along with the Indian army, particularly in the Chittagong sector.
Their bravery notwithstanding, the Mukti Bahini did not simply have the strength to win the war against the Pakistani army.
According to Lt Gen Jacob, the Indian army had trained about 20,000 men, that too for only three weeks, though there were plans to train 100,000 Mukti Bahini soldiers.
As against this, Pakistan had deployed four divisions and three independent brigades of the regular army; some 75,000 men, together with artillery and armour support.
The Pakistani army was defeated when Indian troops attacked from three directions and in a strategy of bypassing pockets of resistance, made a dash for Dhaka.
The Indian army had even pulled out three infantry brigades from the China border to strengthen the push to Dhaka; denuding the defence against China in the interest of liberation of Bangladesh.
The Indian air force had achieved complete air superiority in the eastern sector. The Indian navy had blocked the sea lanes effectively to prevent Pakistan reinforcing its army in the east.
So what does Asif Nazrul want to teach? He should rather learn by heart that a nation which forgets its history soon gets obliterated from the world map.
Bidhan Chandra Das
Bidhan Chandra Das is a freelance writer based in Kolkata