India, Pakistan should rethink the Bangladesh war narrative
NARENDRA Modi, the prime minister of India, on Victory Day of Bangladesh on December 16 tweeted recalling the courage of ‘our armed forces that resulted in a decisive victory of our nation in the 1971 war’. He also shared that day a tweet of the Indian army which, in Hindi, terms the war an India-Pakistan affair and says that in the war, India’s army, air force and navy and Mukti Bahini ‘reached East Pakistan’s capital Dhaka only in 14 days and defeated Pakistan.’
It is true that the Indian state, along with its people, provided Bangladesh with multidimensional assistance in Bangladesh’s fight for national independence from the neo-colonial West Pakistan in 1971. Nevertheless, Modi’s claim in question stands to negate the evident truth that it was mainly the Bangladeshis who fought the war for their national independence after a series of struggles beginning in 1948, soon after the subcontinent in question was partitioned into two dominions. This is also untrue that Mukti Bahini, or Bangladeshi freedom fighters, reached Dhaka in 14 days after Pakistan’s declaration of war on India on December 3, 1971. The fact is that Mukti Bahini had been in Dhaka since the Bangladesh war broke out on March 25 and had fought the war for nine months while India joined the war only 14 days before Pakistan’s surrender on December 16, 1971.
What Indian authorities try to establish, wholly wrongly, through such statements negates the aspirations and the struggle of Bangladeshis and, thus, overshadows the gratitude that Bangladeshis hold for what India, its government and people, did for a people fighting for their independence in 1971. While Indian authorities continue to do so at the slightest of chance, Pakistan authorities always subscribe to, and propagate, a similar proposition that their army lost, and surrendered, to India’s army, conveniently setting aside that the occupation army of Pakistan suffered an almost defeat to Bangladeshi freedom fighters by December 1971. The border force of India, which has termed since April 2017 its relation with Bangladesh ‘far beyond a strategic partnership’, shot dead a Bangladeshi in the Lalmonirhat frontiers, the second shooting in the frontiers in a week, on Bangladesh’s Victory Day, taking the number of Bangladeshis having died at the hands of India’s border forces this year to 45. A day after, India shoved the issue of the sharing of Teesta water down its priority list by not resolving the prickly matter although in the virtual summit with Bangladesh, it discussed a range of issues such as the demarcation of borders along rivers, border fencing, border death, barriers to trade and transshipment for India, most of which are meant to benefit India more. The Teesta water issue, agreed on by both the governments in 2011, remaining unresolved has caused the desertification of Bangladesh’s north.
It is, therefore, time that Bangladeshis understood how India, especially, and Pakistan, generally, project the liberation war of Bangladesh and their official narratives that fundamentally differ from what happened in the war in 1971. In an age when countries should work more closely, especially, India and, generally, Pakistan, should give a second thought to their narrative of the 1971 Bangladesh war so that Bangladeshis could give Delhi its due credit, on the one hand, and think of forging a better relation with Islamabad, on the other, to ensure peace and stability in South Asia.
Courtesy: New Age
