Taimur then asked me about the controversy over numbers -- were 3 million people killed? Or 26,000, as the Hamoodur Rahman Commission said? And were indeed 250,000 to 500,000 women raped? I had explored this in my book. What did I mean? I explained my conclusion -- that the number is not crucial, what happened is crucial.
It wasn’t as low as 26,000, and may not be as high as 3 million -- but many, many innocent civilians were killed; there were dozens of camps where women were taken against their will; many were raped often every night; and this went on for months. Doing the math gives you a very large number. Was it a quarter million? Half a million? How can we estimate, when the few records that were kept had been destroyed, many children were adopted, and many fetuses aborted?
Sadaf Saaz Siddiqi explained how the records were unfortunately destroyed: Bangladesh is a conservative society, and rape carries a stigma. For privacy reasons the records were not kept, she said. But one consequence of that is that it has become difficult to establish what had happened, and making a legal case against alleged perpetrators has become complicated. After 1975, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated, the rehabilitation work ended. It is now carried on by NGOs like Nijera Kori and Nari Pokkho, among others.
But the women are alive, and many still live with that experience. Sadaf has met them, and so have I. She spoke movingly about the lives that birangonas live today. They are growing old; some of their families have disowned them, sometimes years after the war, sometimes by children who discover what was done to their mothers and they conclude it is their mothers’ fault somehow; some are told they won’t be buried with their families. Their lives have been ruined.
At this point, a man rose from the audience and shouted loudly: “This is rubbish.” He began walking out of the hall, saying: “This is Indian propaganda; Pakistan army zindabad.” I told him to let Sadaf complete, but he ignored me.
Several Pakistanis shouted at him, saying he should be ashamed; that Pakistan owed Bangladesh an apology.
The mood had begun to turn. A man got up and emotionally apologised to Sadaf and all his Bengali sisters. Others too rose, asking why they were not being told what really happened in 1971. The conversation that was difficult to begin in Pakistan was finally getting started, on February 21.
The man who had heckled was escorted out.
But his intervention allowed others to challenge me. Ahsan Akbar, the British-Bangladeshi poet who attended the session, later told me: “Too often we romanticise the notion that the youth of today’s Pakistan are right-thinking and want to acknowledge and apologise for the atrocities of 1971. It is a romanticisation because I was there and the packed auditorium was tense. I saw the number of young people who challenged what Sadaf and you had to say. It is not only the elderly who are stuck to one view. The damage is deeper and too often we like to be optimistic, and say: ‘At least the next generation is acknowledging,’ even though I’m the first to say it is not their fault at all. But that is not always the case, as I witnessed and learned from speaking to people in Pakistan.”
And those questions followed: What about the atrocities committed against Biharis? What about the war crimes of the Mukti Bahini? Taimur said that my book does not spare the Mukti Bahini, and there is a part where I write about the Bihari plight. But one man said: “That’s not what you are saying. Your speech is not neutral.”
How does one stay neutral talking about rape? But instead of saying that, I spoke of the perils of whataboutery: Two wrongs don’t make something right; a wrong committed by X does not permit Y to commit a similar wrong, nor does Y’s committing a wrong absolve X of what he did. Hina Jilani rightly explained the overriding principle: That a state is held to higher standards than a non-state actor -- which the Mukti Bahini was, being a rebel army. An army accountable to a state cannot retaliate the way it wants against a guerrilla force. I mentioned the obligations international humanitarian law, through Geneva Conventions, places on armies.
Read the book, I told the skeptics. “If you don’t believe me, and if you don’t want to buy it, borrow it from a library, but read it first,” I said.
Is it possible to move on? Can there be closure? Taimur asked me. And I recounted what the Bangladeshi researcher and academic Meghna Guhathakurta had told me, and that story became part of my book. Her father, Professor Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, was one of the first intellectuals killed by the Pakistani army on March 25, 1971. She said it is easy to ask the victim if she is willing to forgive and move on. But before she can forgive, there has to be someone expressing remorse. And where is the remorse? And what would remorse look like? If Berlin can have a Holocaust Museum, can Islamabad have one?
At this, there was applause, louder than I have heard anytime when I’ve spoken. It was long and thunderous; it still reverberates in my ears. It was a powerful sentiment, and it possibly made many people uncomfortable, but it needed to be said. And I was merely the messenger; the voice came from the survivors of 1971.
Later that afternoon, many Pakistanis came to me and asked me how I could stay so calm when challenged. I said I believed in the power of the stories I had heard, which I believed, and which I had told in the book. And I wasn’t taking it personally, just as I was not accusing anyone personally in the audience. If what you are saying is the truth, then you are never alone, as Mohandas Gandhi had taught us in India, I said.
Many bought my book and got me to sign their copies. Several came and took photographs with me. Some exchanged email addresses, a few have written and I’ve written back. Most of them were young. They had grown up on histories written by the Establishment. They were discovering parts of the past kept hidden from them. They found those stories understandably uncomfortable.
Mofidul Hoque of Dhaka’s Liberation War Museum once told me the story of a young Pakistani woman who visited the museum and made a video, addressed to her parents’ generation, where she says: Tumne chhupa ke rakha/ Meri kaum ne chhupa ke rakha/ Hamne chhupa ke rakha (You kept it hidden/ My community kept it hidden/ I kept it hidden).
In Kamila Shamsie’s 2002 novel, Kartography, Maheen tells Raheen: “The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.”
Pakistan needs such conversations.
February 21 is now recognised as the International Mother Language Day. The day after in Lahore, I read in local newspapers that young students in Sahiwal, a town 170km from Lahore, had danced and performed folk songs, celebrating the International Mother Language Day. At the Lahore Literary Festival itself, there were conversations not only in English and Urdu, but also in Seraiki and Punjabi.
Somewhere beyond that auditorium, in spite of that heckler, and in spite of understandable skepticism among some in that audience, a simple message was getting across -- that people have the right to speak and express themselves in the language of their choice, and which comes naturally to them. And, as Romila Thapar had reminded us while opening the festival, history is a dialogue between the present and an assumed past, and therefore we should all question our histories.