1971 by Anam Zakaria

Author:Anam Zakaria [Zakaria, Anam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057213
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

9

Pakistan’s War

Throughout the course of this book, I have touched upon the selective silence that envelops 1971 in Pakistan, as well as the dominant narratives about the creation of Bangladesh. The discourse popular in the army, in textbooks and in mainstream society has been highlighted in the previous chapters. In this chapter, while I have chosen to make references to these silences and narratives, I have also consciously opted to share experiences of people from Pakistan who offer a different and more nuanced perspective on 1971. Interviews with the Bihari community form the initial part of this section. These interviews seek to explore what the war meant to them. While their experiences have often been censored from official Bangladeshi accounts, they have been appropriated in Pakistan to justify the military operation. Conversations with members of the community reveal the personal implications for the Bihari families who were able to flee to Pakistan. This is followed by narratives of West Pakistanis who survived the war in East Pakistan, providing a civilian account of what transpired there during those months. Witnesses to and victims of the war, their experiences vary from those who ‘watched’ from afar. After all, the latter often relied only on the versions of events provided by the state, whereas those who were in East Pakistan had experienced the war first-hand. The last part of this chapter details the experiences of those Pakistanis who resisted the military action, whether as poets and activists or as military men. Seldom remembered, these people opposed the state policies in East Pakistan then and continue to challenge the statist narratives about the creation of Bangladesh in Pakistan today.

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