Debunking "Truths," Claiming Justice: Reflections on Yasmin Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (review)

In Yasmin Saikia's groundbreaking and provocative book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, she challenges a number of cherished and inherited "truths" regarding the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971. The book is groundbreaking because it joins a small number of scholarly publications for a global audience that attempts to shed light on a forgotten conflict in the history of modern South Asia and one that prioritizes women's narratives as the primary vehicle for reconstructing this forgotten history.¹ It is also provocative because it debunks a number of national myths that have shaped the consciousness of the post-1971 nation of Bangladesh. Saikia rightly points out that there is an abundance of literature generated in Bangladesh about the war. Published as memoirs, novels, district level reports, and accounts of war crimes, however, together these documents have re-membered the war as a triumphant narrative of masculine liberation. Women's wartime experiences and struggles in these narratives have not only been made invisible but also reduced to "the private sphere and are dealt with as private matters by the victims' families [Saikia refers here to the victims of sexual violence] and often solely by the victim who hides in shame."²

Countering such reductive renditions, Saikia astutely posits that since the partition of the Indian Sub-continent in 1947, 1971 was the only instance when the three nations of India, Pakistan, and the erstwhile East Pakistan or Bangladesh encountered one another. Considered a civil war between the two wings of Pakistan, it was thus also an international war involving India in multiple ways even preceding and beyond its much trumped up "intervention" in the last two weeks leading to the surrender of Pakistan army on 16 December. Moreover, an internal war was fought between the Bengalis and the Urdu-speaking Biharis residing in Bangladesh and whose allegiance was to Pakistan. Lastly, a gender war was unleashed against the vulnerable women, both Bengali and Bihari of this region. Hence, taking issue with the branding of 1971 as liberation or even heroic, Saikia urges readers to delve deeper in order to "develop an ethical memory," which she hopes will "initiate multiple tellings of 1971."³ This in turn she believes will "cultivate a site for the divided people of South Asia, in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to contemplate a different self and Other relationship."⁴

Noteworthy here is Saikia's attempt to broaden the scope of reconstructing and remembering 1971 beyond the borders of Bangladesh and to reestablish the intertwined history of the region. However, unraveling this complex history will dislodge, Saikia renders, a number of perceived truths—a point to which I will return in the concluding section of this essay. For Saikia, these "truths" include the misguided idea that Bangladeshis willfully hold on to: the notion that there were clear-cut enemies and victims (namely Pakistanis versus Bengalis), which suggests Pakistan was the sole colonial power oppressing them pre-1971⁵; and the claim to genocide, which Saikia defines as "a cold and rational plan and not irrational, random acts of killing."⁶

Contrary to this definition of genocide, her findings determine that "No single group had a monopoly on committing violence, nor did one single group control the production of death in East Pakistan."⁷ Consequently, since the many acts of internal violence have not been confronted in Bangladesh, Saikia is suspicious of a Truth and Reconciliation process or a war crime tribunal. She asks, "Who will try the criminals? And who has the authority to do so?"⁸ She notes in the current climate of distrust and vengefulness between the governments of Bangladesh and Pakistan, these processes could not be properly administered, and most importantly would not solve the uncontended with problems of women who are yet to be recognized as political actors. After all, as...