Post-East Pakistan debacle: ‘Rulers have failed to resolve grievances of Bengalis’

Speakers discuss the myths around official narrative about creation of Bangladesh

LAHORE: Rulers failed to handle the situation arising after the separation of East Pakistan and even failed to address the grievances of the Bengalis living within Pakistan.

This was said by Punjab University's Pakistan Study Centre Director Prof Dr Massarrat Abid while addressing a seminar on the separation of East Pakistan on Friday.

“December 16 is remembered as a sad day in the history of Pakistan,” she said. “The issue has deep roots as it started after just one year of Pakistan’s independence.”

She added the loopholes in legal framework order further aggravated the already spoiled situation.

Dr Rizwanullah Kokab from Government College University said December 16 reminded us of many lessons.

While talking about the reasons of separation of East Pakistan, he said: “It was not a sudden event. It has its roots deep since December 1948.”

He said the major causes were lack of due share in power, lack of leadership, mismanagement of resources and many more.

Dr Rizwanullah concluded  that the lack of public leadership in the country resulted in such issues in the society.



Political and security expert Murtaza Shibli discussed the myths around the official narrative about the separation of East Pakistan - the numbers  of those killed or raped, the victimhood of Bengalis as the exclusive victims of the Pakistani side and the Indian role both in precipitating the crisis and enhancing human tragedy.

“The claims about three million deaths of Bangladeshis and nearly half a million rapes is anything but true,” he said. “Though these claims are nothing more than mythical fantasies of misplaced nationalism, such assertions have remained largely unquestioned despite a chronic lack of empirical evidence.”

“Just to afford some perspective to such politically loaded declarations is to compare it with the holocaust during the World War-II that allegedly consumed six million Jews over a seven-year period, achieved through a pre-planned process,” he maintained.

He said the question as to how could 34,000 (73,000 or more often quoted in reports) Pakistani army personnel stationed in East Pakistan annihilated three million people in less than eight months of war seemed to have been conveniently overlooked.

“Equally, the various claims of mass rapes of 200,000 to 400,000 women are absolutely implausible,” Murtaza said.

He said the process that culminated in dismemberment of Pakistan was propelled by a continued failure of civilian and martial-law leadership of Pakistan at the time. “However, it is no exaggeration that Bangladesh was a project of the premier Indian intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and it remains so till this date to perpetuate a pliant Indian client-state as a base to fan hatred against Pakistan on the basis of exaggerated myths about the sufferings of Bengalis,” Murtaza added.

Faculty members and students of various departments of Punjab University attended the lecture, which concluded with a lively question-answer session.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2016.