December 15, 2002

“Instead of its generals, Pakistan can be proud of those who actively opposed the genocide the army had conducted in 1971 in the erstwhile East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh,” says Afsan Chowdhury, a 50-year old Bangladeshi researcher, who is presently working on the conflict of the two erstwhile wings of Pakistan that led to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.

Chowdhury made the observation at his Mohammadpur residence in Dhaka in the first week of December — the month the Pakistan army had surrendered to the joint command of Bangladesh and India after a nine- month massacre, 31 years ago. “Some people in Pakistan, the West Pakistan at that time, protested against the atrocities committed in Bangladesh by General Yahya’s military junta in 1971. Staging a demonstration for the people of Bangladesh in the erstwhile West Pakistan at that time was no joke, given the contemporary political context of Pakistan.”

Chowdhury, a highly regarded journalist in Dhaka, is now busy finishing his book on 1971, the focus of which is the ordinary people who suffered and survived the nine months of the war. “The war the rich and educated fought was not the same that the poor and uneducated had to fight. The former fought the war from the political point of view of forming a state. But the latter, on whom the war had been almost imposed, endured it. But many a brave fighter emerged from among them,” he says.

“As the aspirations and compulsions of the two classes were not identical, their experiences of the war, as my ground level study shows, are also different.”

Afsan Chowdhury, who was responsible for the state-sponsored project for the documentation of the first six of the 15 volumes of Bangladesh’s history of struggle for democracy in its Pakistan era, believes that “a lot has been written on the experiences, both empirical and political, of the educated middle class”. “But there has hardly been any attempt to document the experiences of the vast majority of the downtrodden, who were marginalized as soon as the war was over. Mine is an attempt to document the social, political and economic compulsions that prompted our people in general to fight against the occupation forces of Pakistan and the multifarious sufferings they underwent during the war, both in the homeland and in India where some ten million people took refuge.”

A student of Dhaka University’s history department, Afsan Chowdhury initially planned, in the late 1970s, to write his MPhil thesis on how the whole idea of Bangladesh’s independence movement evolved since the creation of Pakistan in 1947. But as he was exposed to some military documents during his involvement with the history documentation project between 1978 and 1983, certain bitter truths of the country’s political history confused the innocent researcher in him. “Suddenly I realized that military conspiracies are part of the country’s political history, because I came across some ‘classified’ military documents that showed that the army used to issue cheques for certain political programmes, which were regarded by the people as sacred!”

Could the war, or the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan for that matter, have been prevented in 1971? Chowdhury quipped, “Why not? The failure of governance led to the conflict. If the Pakistani ruling class of the time had honoured the people’s mandate as it was manifested in the 1970 general elections and handed over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League, the question of secession would not have arisen at that time. But it did not happen, because, as certain military documents revealed later, a section of the erstwhile military bureaucracy of Pakistan had considered the country’s eastern wing (Bangladesh) a burden for them and, consequently, decided to jettison it.”

Meanwhile, his MPhil was converted into a PhD programme. But he eventually abandoned the idea of doing it in 1985 — thanks to the realization that the historical material available to him was not adequate enough to explain the gradual change in the people’s political psyche and the transformation in their political will to have an independent Bangladesh.

“Not that I was barred from seeing or examining any material I wanted to consult; but I felt, at a phase of my research, that I could see only those documents which the system had permitted to be recorded or preserved over the years. As I found the material inadequate to track the social, political and economic developments leading to the country’s independence, I abandoned the idea of pursuing my PhD on the subject, because I was hungry for total history, and not for a glimpse of it,” Chowdhury says.

He then entered journalism thereafter switching over to development activism. But, once again, got disillusioned with the existing development paradigms. “I lost confidence in the existing development initiatives in 1991, when I witnessed, very closely, the non-ideological sufferings of the people at large after the devastating cyclone in our coastal belt. I saw how nature took over all the so-called development initiatives by the government and non-government agencies.” However, he returned to his original passion — the involvement and experiences of ordinary people in the nation’s war of liberation in 1971 — while preparing a few audio-episodes on the subject for the BBC Bangla service in 1994. He was BBC’s political correspondent at that time.”While doing the episodes, I saw for myself that there is a wide gulf between the perception of the toiling masses who endured the 1971 episode and that of the educated middle class who led the event,” Afsan Chowdhury asserts. Recently he has done a 20-part episode on the subject , which the BBC was scheduled to start broadcasting from December 14.

Three decades after the war, the people of Bangladesh, Chowdhury finds, no longer hold any animosity towards Pakistan, because the relationship between the two countries is now defined and distinct. “But different is the case with those who were affected, physically or psychologically, socially or economically, by the Pakistan army’s atrocities. They, who are still millions in number, have no reason to be neutral towards Pakistan.”

Meanwhile, Afsan Chowdhury, has visited Pakistan several times after the independence of Bangladesh. He has also interviewed, for his yet-to-be-published book on 1971, some Pakistanis who played a key role in the politics of Pakistan in the 1960s and early 1970s. He, however, found ‘the present generation of Pakistani elite more enlightened on various issues including the 1971 event than their predecessors’.

He has also interviewed some Indians, who were directly or indirectly involved in the Bangladesh issue in 1971. “The Indian policymakers’ long cherished aspiration of breaking up Pakistan had coincided with the Bangladesh’s struggle for independence in 1971,” Chowdhury says. “A section of the Indian intelligentsia has always tried to disprove the religion based two-nation theory on the basis of which India was partitioned in 1947. Bangladesh’s war of liberation provided them with the tool to vindicate their proposition and they exploited it well.”

A good number of books have so far been written in Bangladesh on its pro-democracy struggle against the Pakistani Establishment that led to the armed conflict in 1971. But Chowdhury does not find them very useful, especially from the point of view of constructing history on the basis of documents.

“We have a lot of ‘researches’ done and prose, fictions, poetry etc. written on 1971, but most of the works are mere glorification of the middle class valour and heroism displayed in the war. There is hardly any critique or analysis of the political process involved in it.,” a disappointed Chowdhury observes.

He, however, hastens to add, “It is very difficult, indeed, for the writers of middle class origin to go beyond their inherent class-consciousness, especially when the struggle for independence was the construction of the rising middle class of the country. They narrate as ‘history’ what they love to accept as history. Besides, there is the problem of dynastic analysis of history in Bangladesh.

“Immediately after independence in 1971, there was an attempt to shape the political history of Bangladesh with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League in the centre stage of every event,” observes Chowdhury.

Mujib was killed, and his government ousted, in 1975. “Then appeared another group to recreate history as a reaction to the Awami League’s deliberate attempts to construct history on party lines on the one hand, and as the justification of its new brand of politics on the other. This group created the second icon, General Ziaur Rahman, who seized power after the military putsch that dethroned Mujib and floated his own political organisation - the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Both the schools are still very much active in the country, sharply polarizing society politically.”

Thus the history, created and recreated by the partisan authors, remains the description of an iconic event, rather than the narrative of the formation of a state in this part of the subcontinent. “The result is obvious. History no longer serves as a nation building tool in Bangladesh,” concludes Chowdhury.

Many of those who closely know Afsan Chowdhury love to believe that his book on 1971 will shed light on some of the yet-to-be-revealed aspects relating to the emergence of Bangladesh. The book is expected to be published by the middle of 2003.

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