IT is deeply unfortunate that the trials of alleged war criminals in Bangladesh, 40 years after the war of liberation, have been mired in controversy. There are two levels at which this has occurred.

On the one hand, there is the charge that the court proceedings are motivated by partisan political considerations, with those in the dock being members or allies of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its allies. On the other, it is claimed that the Bengali nationalists who participated in reprisals against non-Bengalis — mainly Biharis — in 1971 have not been called to account.

Neither of these complaints can be dismissed as entirely facetious. The conduct of the trials has elicited concerns from respectable independent international organisations. In the second context, it could of course be pointed out that, historically, in countries under foreign military occupation, perceived collaborators have often fared poorly at the hands of single-minded resistance movements.

That does not in any way justify atrocities against non-Bengalis, but it does place them in context. The automatic perception of Urdu-speaking ethnic groups as collaborators was profoundly unfortunate but not unprecedented and hardly surprising. The violations of their human rights cannot viably be offered as an excuse for the massacres perpetrated by the West Pakistani army.

The consequent death toll is, again, contentious — ranging from the horrific figure of three million officially cited by Bangladesh to a ‘mere’ 200,000.

Perhaps the arithmetic of extermination does not matter all that much. Even those who fixate on the lower end of the scale can hardly deny that it was far too much. And the object of this undeniably evil exercise was to thwart the logical consequences of Pakistan’s first general elections, in which the Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman had swept the country’s largest province, thereby obtaining an absolute majority of seats in a putative parliament that was never convened.

The real travesty in the context of the trials is not so much the political affiliations of the men in the dock but the fact that they are not accompanied by the primary perpetrators and instigators.

It was, after all, the Pakistan army that was responsible for most of the bloodshed of 1971, either directly or through its local proxies such as the so-called razakars. On the night of March 25-26, one of the chief focuses of Operation Searchlight was Dhaka University, with students and members of the faculty alike slaughtered with impunity. Hindus were particularly targeted — not just on campuses but across the incipient nation.

The strategy of eliminating as much as possible of the intelligentsia was maintained until the end — the final massacres were undertaken just a couple of days before the surrender of the Pakistani forces 40 years ago this week.

One can only assume that by then the motivation was no longer to silence the richest sources of nationalist sentiment but to rob of its intellectual wealth a nation whose emergence could no longer be prevented.

The Pakistani army’s capitulation came as a shock to most people in what remained of the country, not least because the development sharply deviated from the picture painted by the mainstream media of military advances against Mukti Bahini ‘miscreants’ and, subsequently, stout resistance against Indian aggression.

India had been swamped by millions of refugees, and its eventual military action provided disconsolate Pakistanis with a framework within which the loss of East Pakistan could be viewed as primarily the consequence of malicious actions by a traditional foe.

In fact, it was a rare instance of a broadly salutary intervention by a foreign power — comparable in some ways with Vietnamese action less than a decade later to wrest neighbouring Cambodia from the baleful clutches of the Khmer Rouge.

Whatever the geo-strategic motivations of Indira Gandhi’s government, there can be little doubt that India’s role in the liberation of Bangladesh thwarted the likelihood of a great deal more bloodshed.

Crucially, the Pakistani surrender was not followed by Indian military occupation. And Mrs Gandhi is believed to have sensibly shot down proposals by some of her more reckless generals to invade West Pakistan.

The latter had, in early December, launched Operation Chengiz Khan on India’s western front in a futile effort to deflect attention and Indian resources from the east. It ought to have been obvious by then that the ploy was bound to end in tears.

The seeds of East Pakistan’s secession had been sown across two decades of economic relegation, political discrimination and ethnically motivated contempt. It is arguable whether the last straw was the refusal to honour the results of Pakistan’s first general elections in December 1970 or, a couple of months before that, the western wing’s dreadful insouciance after the eastern province was battered by an unprecedentedly devastating cyclone. But the conceptual glue of a common faith had by that point lost any adhesive properties it might once have possessed.

The real tragedy in this context is not that the secession of East Pakistan could not be thwarted, but that the birth of Bangladesh could not be accomplished in less painful circumstances.

A sense of denial about the events of 40 years ago persists in Pakistan, and no adequate apology has ever been delivered. (It should be noted that Gen Pervez Musharraf came closest to the mark during a visit to Dhaka some years ago.)

The lack of acknowledgment of the havoc wrought in what was then considered a part of Pakistan also translates into lessons that grievously remain unlearned. It’s instructive to recall that, despite an effort to move on from 1971, within a couple of years the army was back in action against ‘miscreants’, this time in Balochistan (a tragedy that, nearly four decades hence, continues to be played out).

At its helm as chief of staff was Tikka Khan — the general who had assumed charge of the Eastern Military High Command on March 26, 1971, and shortly thereafter earned himself an international reputation as the Butcher of Bengal.

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