I remember I was in fourth grade. Our Bangla teacher asked:
“What led to the Liberation War in 1971?”
All of us spiralled into a discussion, concluding that the war ensued due to the demand to make Bangla the state language. To our joy (and the probable horror of most Bengalis), this answer was accepted by all. However, it was a question that never quite had a well-rounded answer for me.
Cut to eight years later, and I have been shocked in realizing the discrepancies in my understanding of the root cause of the Liberation War -- in actuality, a nine-month long sacrifice made so we, Bengalis, could have our independence and identity as a nation.
While the tension between the two parts began with the march to make the state language Bangla, it can never be sealed as the event that led to the armed struggle. In 1956, Bangla was accepted as the state language in addition to Urdu. There, done and dusted!
The War of Liberation, on the other hand, was a culmination of a series of events, essentially starting with the general elections held in 1970. In simple words, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won the majority votes in the Pakistan National Elections. Yet, the ruling party of West Pakistan refused to hand over his due title.
He then rightly refused to accommodate to the West’s pressure and did not settle on this issue. As talks between the two elected representatives went on, the troops from the West began to sweep into the East clearly showing disregard to the fair settlement of power. No sooner than the talks failed had the Pakistani army unleashed a genocidal attack on unarmed and innocent civilians on March 25, 1971. The rest is history.
To start off, the proper facts of history should be laid out to children from a young age to instill compassion and understanding of how our country came to be. The nine-month long war holds ideals for the children to carry with themselves for years to come as a citizen of this nation. It includes, among many, a fight against unjust settlement of power, sexual violence, religious intolerance, and racial discrimination. The facts should be known by all and there is no shame in learning extensively at any age.
Secondly, the history of our nation cannot be heralded as “a study of the past” with the pressing demands in the present. The past causes the present, and the present forms the future.
Take the ongoing pandemic at hand; scientists are scrambling for evidence as to how matters were dealt with during the 1918 influenza, which is of a similar pattern to the current pandemic. Although relatively short-lived, it had a permanent effect on the atoms of human society.
Those who were affected by the influenza had their lives changed forever, socially and economically. However mobile and connected our society may now be, the pandemic in 2020 has been much more severe in its reach and virulence than that of 1918, despite the improvements in health care in the last 100 years. Understanding pandemics from the past can still mitigate its severity, but this could have been done at the early stages or before it hit the entire world.
Finally, the accuracy surrounding historical facts should be discussed within families from an absolutely non-partisan standpoint. It would mould generations to come to take pride in their identity, nation, and language. Our history provides us with a terrain of moral contemplation.
Moral understanding has been accentuated during the pandemic as more cases of women suppression through rape and domestic violence in society has come to light. The lack of understanding for what our nation stands for -- but not solely this reason -- plays a role in committing such crimes with impunity, a remnant of what we fought against back in 1971.
The Liberation War can impart a range of values to us. Implementing interactive classes and courses exclusive to comprehending our past across the English and Bangla medium institutions from an absolutely non-partisan perspective might enable people to reject inaccuracies found in various avenues.
As such, more and more people can actually answer accurately a basic question as to what started off the war in the first place.
Nazifa Zahin is a high school graduate from Scholastica.
