1971: a war story

The narrative around the 1971 India-Pakistan war is changing and the genocide that took place is now in focus. A new film, Children of War, reflects this shift in discourse

Early last year, when Mrityunjay Devvrat, then 29, decided to make a film on Bangladesh’s Liberation War, he had his own reasons for choosing the subject. As a child he had lived in Dhaka, where his parents worked, not far from former Bangladesh president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s house. Barely a decade had gone by since the war and a lot of memories of that time harkened to the events of 1971. More recently, in Bangladesh, trials were being held for the crimes committed during that war. All in all, it seemed like a strong enough subject — one that the Indian audience would relate to, given the role India played in helping Bangladesh win its freedom. What Devvrat did not expect to come across was the mind-numbing scale of the genocide and the systematic mass rapes that the Pakistani army had carried out on the Bengali population of what was until then its own country.

“More than 600,000 rapes took place in nine months — that’s more than 2,000 rapes a day,” says Devvrat whose film comes at a time when the narrative around the war of 1971 is beginning to change. His film — which will be released as The Bastard Child internationally but has been renamed as Children of War – Nine Months to Freedom in India keeping in mind, as the Censor Board believes, the sensibilities of the Indian audience — reflects that changing discourse.

The focus is shifting from the role that India played in a war, which many argue was one country’s internal affair, to the brutality and culpability of the Pakistan army, which used rape and religion as weapons of war. Figures continue to be debated, but it is largely believed that three million people were killed in the crackdown launched by the Pakistan army on March 25, 1971. Scores of rape camps were set up, on the lines of Hitler’s concentration camps, to which Bengali women were herded and brutalised by Pakistani military. “The Pakistani army and their razakars (local Bangali confidants) would carry lists of Bengali women to be abducted and raped, sometimes 20 times a day,” says Devvrat. The idea was to get them to bear children from Pakistani army men and thus, genetically engineer the future race of the region.

Major General Khadim Hussain Raja, the Pakistani general officer commanding of 14 Division during the war, reveals in his book, A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan, 1969-1971, how General Niazi, the commander of East Pakistan, declared, “I will change the race of this bastard nation” and threatened to let his soldiers loose on Bengali womenfolk. That is precisely what was done under the supervision of Pakistani army general, Tikka Khan, who is still remembered as the ‘Butcher of Bengal’. “Tikka Khan was my student in Deolali in 1947. He seemed an inoffensive guy then,” recalls Lt Gen JFR Jacob (retd), the top ranking Indian military officer who was the chief of the staff of the Eastern Command during the December 1971 war and whose strategy defined India’s victory in that war within a span of 12 days. Jacob, who is now past 90 and lives in Delhi, remembers the war as though it happened yesterday. “They raped. They killed. They slaughtered students at Dacca University. Almost 10 million refugees poured into India. We had to intervene,” says Jacob who has written two books on those events, Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation and An Odyssey in War and Peace.

Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis, who performed thousands of late-term abortions following the mass rapes during the war, compared the extent of the atrocities to the Nazi Lebensborn programme. “All this happened in our neighbourhood, but we never read about it in school or college. We never heard stories about it. Unlike Partition and the Holocaust, there’s hardly any mention of it in our films and plays, or literature,” says Devvrat. The more he researched for his film, the more convinced he was that its focus had to be entirely on the bloody conflict between the Pakistani military and the Bengali population that was being brutalised but was retaliating. He decided to keep the Indian perspective out.

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In Bangladesh and Pakistan, too, it is this forgotten chapter of the 1971 story that is being reopened after four decades of silence. The India chapter continues to remain in that book but is not being scrutinised as intensely. The youth of Bangladesh are now spilling on to the streets, demanding justice for what their parents and grandparents suffered during the war. The Awami League, led by Mujibur Rahman’s daughter Sheikh Hasina, is finally acting on those crimes. And the radicals are protesting. Old wounds are bleeding again. The International Crimes Tribunal created in Bangladesh in 2009 has so far charged 12 men with war crimes. Three of them have been convicted of whom one, Abdul Quader Mollah, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s leading Islamic party, was executed on December 12, 2013.

On January 6, a day before the editor of Dhaka-based Weekly Blitz was arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison in Bangladesh in connection with a decade-old case concerning dissenting articles, the anti-Jihadist tabloid’s Executive Editor Sohail Choudhury told Business Standard through email, “Those behind the atrocities — Pakistani officials or Pakistan government — should accept responsibility.” He added, “During the liberation of Bangladesh, the Awami League was the political commander here, while the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was the political commander on the other side. So, if Jamaat-e-Islami is hated for being the friend of the enemy, should PPP be considered a friend?” But like several others, his reaction to Mollah’s execution is mixed. “According to many local and international legal experts, the trial wasn’t conducted according to international standards. Quader Mollah has been portrayed as ‘Kasai Quader (butcher Quader), but he and many others argued that the infamous ‘Kasai Quader’ and Abdul Quader Mollah were not the same person,” Choudhury wrote.

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That debate apart, the reverberations of what’s happening in Bangladesh are now being felt in Pakistan. “For decades, the key narrative of the Pakistani military has been silence [over what happened in Bangladesh in 1971]. Don’t admit it. Don’t deny it,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, Pakistani social scientist and author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. “Now that Bangladesh has brought it out, the discourse has completely changed. It’s an uncomfortable situation for Pakistan to be in,” she says. Siddiqa lists out three kinds of reactions that are emerging from Pakistan: “The view of the liberal left is that what the Pakistani military did was bad because this was not a foreign war, but a conflict with its own people. The establishment’s view is that it was a war imposed by a foreign country, India. Then, there is the opinion of the youth, who are not familiar with 1971 or have been fed official versions. They are more bothered about Pakistan’s image and see this as something Bangladesh is unfairly raking up.”

The starkness of Devvrat’s film — the horrors that women in the rape camps are subject to, the fate that awaits the children born to them, the mindless slaughtering and the uprising — questions this dominant view.

In 1971, soon after the war, another film had drawn attention to the dance of death playing out in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi filmmaker Zahir Raihan’s 20-minute documentary, Stop Genocide, had used powerful and disturbing news footage of the massacres and followed refugees into the camps where they were forced into a subhuman existence. Raihan had witnessed all this and more before he had fled to India like hundreds of others. A year later, when he went back to Bangladesh in search of his brother, the filmmaker disappeared, never to be found again. Over the years, his film and the horrors it brought to the world also disappeared from public memory. Children of War, which is awaiting release, revives precisely this forgotten narrative — one that is now gaining momentum in the Indian subcontinent.

'Why could we not smell the stench in the air?'

Mrityunjay Devvrat, director of Children of War, shares his thoughts about the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh and how those events are playing out in the region even today. The movie, which is awaiting release, features Farooq Shaikh, Pavan Malhotra, and Victor Banerjee, Raima Sen and Indraneil Sengupta.

What did you feel is the general opinion in Bangladesh about the execution of Abdul Quader Mollah?
Abdul Quader Mollah, from what I understand, was a criminal accused of heinous crimes, including the murder and torture of innocent civilians. For a person to be called the ‘Butcher of Mirpur’ and to live on with no regrets for what was done is shameful not just for him but also for the society that allows him to do so. In my brief experience with the people of Bangladesh, I would think they would be overjoyed at finally putting an end to one of the most hated criminals of their history. What did we feel when Ajmal Kasab was executed? A sense of justice delayed but not denied.

Can you share some stories from 1971 that you came across during your research?
There are many gut-wrenching stories from the time of '71, some of which I am never going to forget, no matter how hard I try. This movie attempts to bring some such stories to us so that we can all learn from the mistakes we have earlier made; so that we can all relate to and understand the people who suffered and their call for justice. I do not know what to share with you, not for the lack of such incidents but for the fear of what I may leave out; for these are not just stories, it’s the brutal truth. Imagine a state of complete decay where the lawmakers were the biggest lawbreakers; where women were used as vessels for their immoral philosophies; where men were burnt and children were left to fend for themselves on earth stained with blood and the air foul with the stench of the dead.

I can narrate to you incidents of women being raped twenty times a day, of daughters and wives snatched from their fathers and husbands, of lawyers and professor brutally tortured, of children molested and locked away or of the rivers flowing red and trucks full of bodies being emptied in garbage dumps; but that is not the real story. The real story, the real question is: why could we not smell the stench in the air? Not then, not now!

Does the issue of the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army in Bangladesh during 1971 also get highlighted in Bangladesh through films or plays -- the way Partition does in India?
Yes, but unfortunately it is limited to Bangladesh only. The people of Bangladesh are very aware of their history and their struggle for independence and do whatever they can with their resources to bring out the subject from time to time. The Indian Partition, however, is very different. Many movies have been made at a larger scale and have been promoted on the global stage and, therefore, we find a lot of people who know the story of India’s Independence.

We made this movie in Hindi and Bangla hoping to achieve exactly that for the 1971 partition. Just like the world knows of the atrocities committed by Hitler they must also know of the atrocities committed by the Pakistani Army.

Do the people of Bangladesh believe that Jamaat-e-Islami is becoming more powerful and is making its presence felt in a larger way after the execution of Abdul Quader Mollah?
From what I understand, yes there is! But having said that, they also have the solution to it. In the last few years we have seen more and more people revolt against the idea of even tolerating a group like the Jamaat-e-Islami, let alone allowing it to get more powerful.

Like any society or any other country, people just want to live in peace -- far from political agendas or corrupt motivations. There is a surge of change taking place throughout the world, not just in Bangladesh but in India, in Egypt, everywhere people are standing for what is right and making their voices heard. And when that happens, a new beginning cannot be too far away… like Sahir Ludhianvi had once famously said “Zulm phir Zulm hai, barhta hai to mit jata hai…”