Atrocities on a massive scale accompanied the creation of Bangladesh in 1971; few of those responsible were punished. The Pakistan army officers and men, the major perpetrators, were taken to India as prisoners-of-war and then returned to Pakistan. Of the members of Islamist organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami and Al Badr, some were punished; in August 1975 was assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family; in August 1975, there were no more punishments. In fact, several of the assassins, far from being punished, were sent on diplomatic assignments abroad, ostensibly as a form of exile. Decades passed and the need grew for justice, for closure, for healing the wounds of both 1971 and 1975, but such a need was often suppressed and usually ascribed to political motivations. However, looked at from a broader perspective, this need is not just about punishment; it is also about the formal acknowledgment of wrongdoing, about forgiveness and a process of understanding.
Salil Tripathi’s book is primarily about closure in this broad perspective; why it is so badly needed in Bangladesh today; and how it can happen. Until it happens, the book concludes, the question of how the country reconciles with its past will continue to resound — as he puts it in colourful prose — across its bleeding rivers and sighing valleys.
Based on hundreds of interviews during several trips from 1986 onwards, on extensive reading, on visits to museums and the places where barbarities happened, the author writes vividly about the scale and intensity of the mass atrocities of 1971.
The military crackdown by the Pakistan Army, codenamed ‘Operation Searchlight’, began in March of that year. Awami League leaders, leftists, the liberal intelligentsia, faculty and students at the universities, Hindus from all walks of life more particularly, were taken from their homes and summarily shot. Tripathi embellishes the personal accounts of those who survived by graphic descriptions of photographs taken at the time. None of the photographs are included in this volume (indeed, it has no photographs at all, no charts nor maps or figures, only text, apart from a couple of tables of trade statistics). The killings continued throughout the year in a systematic effort not only to change the religious enumeration of the population, but to generate a new socio-political spirit and a culture based solely on Islamic values. In this endeavour, the Pakistan army was enthusiastically joined by the Islamist organisations led by the Jamaat-e-Islami. At the end, just before the Pakistan Army surrendered in December, this reached culmination. The pro-Pakistani militia, Al Badr, rounded up dozens of intellectuals, educationists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, others who were potential leaders of a future Bangladesh, took them to Raya Bazar and killed them all.
A separate chapter is devoted to the rape survivors, or ‘birangonas’. The author interviewed 28 of them, as well as lawyers and activists who were involved in helping them, and came away with not just horror at what had been done to them, but the sense of a nation ashamed of what had been allowed, unwilling to come to terms with it.
There is also the interview with the man who organised the assassination of Sheikh Mujib and his family, Colonel Farooq Rahman, the colonel of the book’s title. This is supplemented by the recounting of a later TV interview the colonel gave to David Mascarenhas. He was quite unrepentant, bragging about what he had done, and thought he was a patriot. He remained unpunished for over three decades after the assassinations but then Sheikh Hasina came to power with a majority in 2008, determined to seek justice. He and four of his associates were put on trial, sentenced to death and hanged in 2010.
However, the book is not just about atrocities. There is a chapter on Bangladeshi history, starting from the 300 BCE inscriptions in the Brahmi script, going on to a portrait of the region as an ancient centre for the Asian trade, the coming of Islam and how the people moved into the confluence of being Muslim and being Bengali, only to be divided many centuries later, in 1947, by what Amitav Ghosh calls a looking glass border, which paradoxically brought them closer together than they had been for 4000 years. There is a description of the language movement, the core of what later became the Bangladeshi bid for independence from Pakistan.
This brings up an account of the rise of Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League, leading to the elections of 1970 that the party won decisively. Another chapter gives a generally sympathetic account of the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi guerrillas or freedom fighters, and their gradually increasing effectiveness against the better-trained regular forces of Pakistan.
The December 1971 war is covered briefly, but here the author is a little unsure of his ground as far as India’s role is concerned. At one point he writes that India was unsure of the endgame and worried about possible outcomes; at another he eulogises the way Indira Gandhi, shrewd and articulate, played her cards. And he cites as fact a story that originated in a piece of bombast by General Manekshaw —was later consigned to the dustbin — that Indira Gandhi called him to a meeting and insisted he make war on Pakistan in April 1971, but ‘clenched her teeth’ and pulled back when he refused.
A chapter on the two Begums — leaders of the two political parties and main contestants in the political field since military rule ended in 1991 — discusses their personal and political legacies. Another chapter on the Generals — Ziaur Rahman and Hussain Muhammad Ershad — talks about how they over-wrote their ideas onto the political palimpsest of the country.
The heart of the book — namely the many interviews with and stories about the survivors and relatives of the 1971 atrocities — is a composite picture, vividly drawn, depicted in as much detail as the space allows. For over three decades, Bangladesh officialdom, the media and many political leaders had tried to cover up that picture, for fear of reopening old wounds and again dividing the nation. But there is a strong case for arguing, as the author does, that closure which goes beyond the legal is required, and can also heal the wounds of the past.
The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy; Salil Tripathi, Aleph, Rs.595.
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