After the war was over, a list of Bengali intellectuals (most of whom were killed on 14 December) was found in a page of Farman Ali’s diary that he had left behind at the Governor’s House. Ali confirmed the list as genuine but denied that the aim was to kill the people. Altaf Gauhar, a former Pakistani journalist and bureaucrat, also confirmed the list.
He said he had seen the name of a friend of his on the list and requested Farman Ali to cancel it, and Farman Ali had obliged.151Gen. Farman Ali continued to deny that he had any role in those killings. But he understood the city well, knew the elite, and since Operation Searchlight, had a very good idea of what the troops were doing.
A woman whose husband had been taken away went with a friend who knew the general to find out where he might be. He asked her about her husband’s name and details. She wrote down the information anxiously, hoping that Farman Ali would be able to find out the information.
Farman Ali looked at the name for some time, folded it, and put it on the table, saying nothing. The woman bowed in gratitude and left. Her friend who had taken her to see Farman Ali (and who told me the story) is convinced that Farman Ali knew exactly what had happened but didn’t want to tell her that her husband would never return.
Farman Ali’s defence over the Rayer Bazaar killings is that the bodies were found only on 17 December, by which time the Pakistani army had surrendered. He claimed that a week earlier Maj. Gen. Jamshed had called him to the army headquarters and asked him to join him on a car ride.
During the journey he told him that they were thinking of making some arrests of civilians. Farman Ali claimed he advised against it and did not know what happened after that.
But in his book, The Betrayal of East Pakistan, Gen. Niazi described Farman Ali as an opportunist and a conspirator. Niazi also said that Farman Ali insisted on being sent back to Pakistan because ‘Mukti Bahini would kill him of his alleged massacre of the Bangalees and intellectuals on the night of 15-16 December. It was a pathetic sight to see him pale and almost on the verge of breakdown’. Brigadier Salik, whose memoir does not spare Niazi from criticism, wrote: ‘He [Farman] was the major general in charge of civil administration. As such nothing would happen which he would not know.’
Two days before surrender, Pakistani troops made one final attack to cripple the emerging nation. Asif Munier was 4 years old that year. He lived in his grandparents’ house in Dacca. Asif’s father Munier Chowdhury was a sensitive linguist who taught at the Dacca University. They used to live in a part of the campus near the British Council and after the crackdown on 25 March and the killing of academics they did not feel safe and left their home.
Munier Chowdhury taught English and Bengali and was a well-known playwright. Some of his writing was political—in the 1960s he wrote a play, Kobor, about the resurrection from death of the martyrs of the 1952 language movement. He was jailed, and his health suffered, so upon release he focused on writing and teaching and stayed away from overt politics, although he stayed engaged with ideas—he was part of the Pragatisheel Lekhok Songho (Progressive Writers’ Union). Munier was involved with the development of the Bengali keyboard for typewriters, and with the German company, Optima that developed a keyboard, Munier-Optima, which later became a standard in the industry. He was a very strong proponent of Bangla.
The house in which they lived was old. It had two storeys and plenty of rooms. Munier had eight brothers and six sisters, and while some had gone to live in villages during the war, and a few had gone to India, only two siblings had stayed. Asif ’s oldest brother (now a UN official), who was 20, joined the Mukti Bahini. He secretly left home with cousins and friends, leaving behind a letter for his parents. His father Munier was devastated with the uncertainty of the war and about his eldest son. Asif was too young to understand everything, but he sensed that things were not all right. His mother, the actress Lily Chowdhury who had grown up in Calcutta and Delhi, told him later that she noticed him observing everything, and he was not behaving like other children.
On 14 December, Munier sat at home, listening diligently to the BBC and VOA. He said aloud, ‘It is reaching the end. The good day will come very soon, I can feel it’. Lily had had a surgery so she was resting. Asif ’s grandmother was cooking lunch. His younger brother was in the shower. Asif had just had his bath and his father had wiped him dry. The house had an iron gate. The main entrance had a courtyard. Somebody knocked and shook the grill. Asif’s uncle went over to see who it was. When the gate was opened, Munier’s wife and mother could see that there were two or three boys whom they did not recognize, and they were wearing grey kurta pyjamas. The boys asked Asif ’s uncle if he was Munier Chowdhury. Asif ’s older brother who was 12 was standing nearby, so the uncle sent him away and spoke to the boys. ‘Can you call him? We need to talk to him,’ the boys said.
Lily saw a camouflaged van. She could not see the full car, but she could see its roof and its window. It had branches and leaves, and there was mud on the window.
Munier was about to have lunch—chapatis, vegetables, and fish which his mother had prepared. It was around 1:30 p.m. He got up, put on his white kurta and started going down. ‘They want to talk, let me find out’, he said.
Al-Badr took away many people like Munier that day and brought them to Rayer Bazaar in the Beribadh area of Dacca where potters had lived since Mughal times because the red earth of that area was excellent for making clay pots. The men and women brought here had been tortured and their hands were tied; they were killed near Turag River, where their bodies were dumped—Shahidullah Kaiser, an award-winning novelist from Mazupur; Santosh Chandra Bhattacharyya, a Sanskrit scholar; journalist Syed Nazmul Haque who was arrested during the war and taken to West Pakistan to testify against Sheikh Mujib in his secret trial and then returned to Dacca; linguist Mofazzal Haider Chaudhury whom Tagore’s university Vishwabharati had honoured; journalist Nizamuddin Ahmed, who acted as a go-between for foreign correspondents; Dr M.A.M. Faizul Mahi, who quietly helped Mukti Bahini; Sirajul Haque Khan, an educationist; historian Ghyasuddin Ahmed; physician Mohammad Fazle Rabbi; poet and journalist Selina Parvin; and Zahir Raihan, the leftist filmmaker who had made the film Stop Genocide. Between 14–16 December Al-Badr and Al-Shams tried to enfeeble Bangladesh at its birth.
The men and women became part of the clay of this land two days before it became free, their blood joining the water that flowed through the land.
Asif Munier, whose father was among the intellectuals taken away by Al-Badr on 14 December 1971 and later killed at Rayer Bazar, said that Projonmo’s rationale was to keep the memories of the martyrs alive, because it was not yet time for closure. There were too many answers not given, explanations not received, questions that were unresolved. ‘Within the group we don’t all think alike; we have our differences,’ he told me. ‘We are also perceived differently. Some look at us as unspoilt victims. We see ourselves as activists. We also see ourselves as catalysts. In the early 1990s when we were students we found that nobody really knew our stories, so we decided to organize the families of the martyred. In those days, we’d meet regularly and every day someone new would come to us with a heart-rending story about losing a father or a mother.’ l