Published with permission from the writer

THE 1971 war may have been 30 years in the past. But this was my first visit to Dhaka. The day had to start at the National Martyrs` Memorial at Savar, some 35 kilometres from the capital.

On entering the memorial grounds, you skirt around various features, and then walk along the length of a pool of water at the head of which the multi-leaf triangular memorial rises 150 feet into the air.

Either side of it are mass graves, the final resting place of some of the (estimated) 30,000 people whose bodies were found in that area alone after Pakistani troops surrendered to the Indian army on Dec 16.

One was carrying an enormous burden on the shoulders. I may not have been an adult in 1971 but knew well what horrors we, the West Pakistanis, had visited on our eastern wing compatriots.

Solely for their crime of seeking their legitimate political rights; asking for transfer of power after their chosen party had decisively emerged as the majority party in the free and fair elections held the year earlier.

The election result shocked the ruling generals whose intelligence reports had painted a pretty fragmented post-election scenario. When the election didn`t yield their desired results, they delayed the transfer of power, and mass protests erupted in East Pakistan.

These protests were met by the only tool the army leadership possessed: more and more brutal force. This resulted in a flood of refugees to India which helped arm and organise the resistance and would later declare war.

When the resistance started to get robust, the conflict spiralled into a tale of unimaginable repression where the Pakistani army, paramilitary units and their collaborators` militias mainly comprising Jamaat-i-Islami zealots unleashed mass murder, mass rape.

While the Pakistani media blacked it out totally, the western media gave front-page coverage to this massacre. It would be many years before stories would emerge of the bestiality (in a different proportion of course) of the Mukti Bahini, the liberation army, on non-Bengalis (non-combatants) too.

As I stood head bowed in silent tribute, in contrition, a lump appeared in my throat. How could we? How could we inflict such pain on our own people? I must have asked myself a hundred times in utter shame.

Don`t know how long it was before a gentle tug on my sleeve made me turn to my visibly moved, red-eyed colleague Mahmud Ali who was reminding me we were running late for the next, equally important engagement.

Yes, I was going to see the Kalimullahs, the first time after 1967. But as we approached their Gulshan home I was filled with trepidation. What if they were still bitter about `71? What if they`d politely said yes but didn`t really wish to see me, a (West) Pakistani.

Within moments of arriving at their beautiful home, however, all my fears evaporated. I needn`t have worried. For neither had the stunning Auntie Tanima`s warmth waned nor had her affection for me or my parents (whom I lost in the late 1970s) gone anywhere.

A stroke had confined Uncle Kalimullah to bed and pretty much consumed the handsome cavalry lieutenant-colonel, our neighbour and commanding officer of the 24th Cavalry, I remembered from Kharian.

Asif and Maleeha, like me, were parents now. We reminded each other of every mischief, of each naughty trick we played as children but all this followed a serious conversation where I started by saying how guilt-ridden and contrite thinking Pakistanis were at the events of `71.

All Auntie Tanima`s love and humanity wanted was to put me at ease. There was no bitterness, no anger. She insisted that Asif tell me a story dating back to the end of the 1971 war. Asif, who told me he`d joined the Mukti Bahini aged 14 in 1971, narrated thus in a photographic recollection.

“A few days after the surrender, my father was talking to some visitors in the garden, when the doorbell rang. One of our staff members went to the gate and then returned to whisper something in my father`s ear.”

“Daddy turned to me and said `Asif go and see who it is`. I went and opened the gate. There was a Sikh major of the Indian Army standing outside. He said hello and asked if this was Col Kalimullah`s home.”

“I said it was. He then gesticulated to his driver who asked someone to come out of the back of the covered jeep. It was a slim, tall, young yet dishevelled man in a khaki military uniform whose epaulettes had been torn off.”

“The Sikh major`s prisoner introduced himself as a captain in the Pakistan Army, the son of a friend and colleague of my father`s. `When my unit was transferred here, my parents asked me to make sure your family was OK. But I landed here in the middle of the war and couldn`t`.

“I asked him to come in while the major said he`d wait outside. He met my parents and told them he was thankful to the major for bringing him to our place so he could see for himself we were alright. Otherwise, `whenever I get home my parents won`t forgive me if I say I couldn`t check`.

“The captain quietly said his goodbyes and left. We were never to see him again as we understand he was soon moved to a PoW (prisoner of war) camp in India. We live with the images of our slaughtered people. But that individual`s act of kindness too we`ll never forget.”

Don`t you wish we`d also never forgotten how and why we got to Dec 16? Time flies. It has been more than a decade since I stood at the Savar memorial. It`s been 40 years since `71. But tell me what`s changed?

The writer is a former editor of Dawn .

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

As we look back and introspect, there are but many questions and an unquestionable sense of resentment.  Was Pakistan army the only culprit? was Indian army not complacent? Did Mukthi Bahini not commit war crimes? If there is anything that matters through all this, it is the fact that innocent lives were lost in the conflict, that people suffered at the behest of politics, blame can be shared with one doing more than the other but that can not and should not allow us to overlook the human side of the story.

Perhaps, faiz has summed it up better than any other:

kab nazar meiN aaye gi be daaGh sabze ki bahaar
khoon ke dhabe dhuleiN ge kitni barsaatoN ke baad

When will we again see a spring of unstained green?
After how many monsoons will the blood be washed
from the branches?

It is time, we stopped lying to our people, it’s time we put the facts straight. It wouldn’t be possible without an unbiased an holistic approach to stories across borders. There is no pride in a history that is based on lies, no patriotism in drowning the hollers of people that suffered. Perhaps, the only way to ‘wash off the blood stains’ would be to acknowledge their existence, may history never repeat itself.

Republished from bdnews24.com

I may never have visited Dacca (as my father still chooses to spell it) until very recently, but my affiliation with the city is genetic. The birthplace of my father, grandfather and many generations before them, which till before 2009 was only known to me through stories narrated by family members and treats of ‘aam sath’, ‘bakar khani’ and ‘muri’ flown across.

In the events leading up to December 1971, my family home in Dacca was torched by an angry, politically motivated mob on the 16th of February 1969. The fire was fuelled by the petrol from the family cars parked on the drive way. Today all that remains of the ‘Twin House’ are memories and the walled piece of land where it once stood.

I must admit, I did arrive in Dhaka fielding some resentment. My father’s hometown was no longer his home but just the city of his birth as stated on his passport. However, as I left the airport, the stories of Dacca I grew up with seemed to come alive; each landmark familiar and the city welcoming.

Over the course of my week-long stay, I realized that Dacca, like my father, had reconciled with and moved beyond the events of December 1971. The city, though firmly imbedded in its roots, didn’t take nationhood for granted.

My visit to ‘Ahsan Manzil’ on the banks of Buriganga, the very grounds where my great great grandfather, Nawab Sir Salimullah, initiated the struggle for Pakistan, embodied the very essence of my journey to the fatherland. ‘Ahsan Manzil’, where both the idea of Pakistan and my father were born, is no longer the property of the family or Pakistan but of the now 40-year-old state of Bangladesh. Lesson learnt: borders may change, new countries may come into being but history stands. What we choose to take away from it is what counts.

As published on tribune blogs

My stepfather, Afzal Ahmed Syed, is a generally quiet and inward man who occasionally breaks from his reticence with humorous insights about the world. He does this not through fanciful and elaborate explanations, but in pithy quotes or by reciting a shaer.

As many thoughtful commentators on his life and poetry have suggested, much of my father’s poetic vision has been shaped by his experience as a witness to immense political tragedies like East Pakistan’s violent rebirth as Bangladesh in 1971, the Lebanese Civil War, and the ethnic and sectarian violence that overwhelmed Karachi in the 1990s.

Musharraf Farooqi, my father’s friend and translator, has suggested that his poetry reflects a long “inner migration” commonly found amongst writers and thinkers who have witnessed the enormity of war and suffering. This is undeniable. But, there is a little more to the story than that. It is important to remember that experiencing great trauma does not necessarily generate the kind of humanitarian ethos that I believe is central to my father’s life and work. In fact, if our modern day experience demonstrates anything, it is that political tragedies are just as likely, if not more likely, to deepen the ethos of brutality and violence as they are to create an ethic of self-reflection and compassion.

Perpetrators of violence often believe themselves to be victims of some kind. They always imagine that they are merely defending themselves against the machinations of others. It is no surprise then that the arc of history takes the shape of a recurring tragedy as one generation of victims becomes the next generation of perpetrators. Not surprisingly, violence and suffering are recurring themes in his poetry:

We need a whole lot of flowers

for one half of them will succumb to their wounds

We need a forest of nocturnal flowers

for those who could not sleep for the report of gunfire

we need a whole lot of flowers

for a whole lot of rueful people

we need anonymous flowers

to cloak the stripped girl

(from “We Need a Whole Lot of Flowers”)

My father’s humanistic ethic is built around a realisation that the lines between victims and perpetrators of violence are often quite blurry. This too comes from experience, especially his experience in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the Bangladesh war of Independence. My father frequently says, and with no small measure of pride, that the first and only vote that he has ever cast in his life was for the Awami League Party in the 1971 elections.

For those of you who are not familiar with Pakistani-Bangladeshi history, this election was won convincingly by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader and champion of Bengali political autonomy and civil rights, but was later abrogated by the West-Pakistani establishment backed by the powerful Pakistani military. This event thrust the country into a cataclysmic Civil War that led to the deaths of millions and culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state. Although himself an Urdu-speaking West Pakistani, he was a firm supporter of the Bengali movement. This commitment was informed by his unbounded love for Dhaka, a city that he had made his own. He says that every night, around dusk, he would renew his love for the city by taking a stroll through its narrow streets and newly erected parks.

He was a staunch supporter the Bengali movement because he understood that a people, especially a people with such monumental intellectual and literary achievements, could only be subjugated so long before they revolted. Yet, despite his support of the Bengali movement, my father became a victim of the war. On December 14, 1971, Bengali soldiers forcefully removed him from his home in Purbali, a suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, and interned him in Mirpur, a quarter of Dhaka where other Urdu-speaking minorities lived. He could no longer walk through his city and as a result his love, naturally, dissipated. In 1972, he was arrested as a Pakistani sympathizer and a collaborator with the Pakistani military. This was during a time when many such “internal enemies” were being executed. He was later deemed a “peaceful citizen” and released, possibly at the request of an influential member in the Bangladeshi militia forces. A year later, he along with his mother and six younger siblings managed to escape Dhaka, never to return, making their way through India and Nepal to Karachi where he now lives.

If my voice is not reaching you,

add to it the echo —

echo of ancient epics

And to that —

a princess

And to the princess—your beauty

And to your beauty —

a lover’s heart

And in the lover’s heart

a dagger

(from “If My Voice is Not Reaching You”)

My father rarely speaks of Dhaka, but when he does it is with a tremendous sense of betrayal and sadness. His beloved city, he says, now only appears to him in nightmares. It was in Dhaka that he first began to think about the destructive potential of language, its capacity to strip people of their humanity and open them up toviolent retribution. The War my father experienced was very much fought in language well before it was fought on the streets of Dhaka. West Pakistanis had long dehumanised their fellow citizens in East Pakistan, attacking them for being backwards and unsophisticated.

This was also very much a war about language because West Pakistanis had imagined their Bengali counterparts to have a degraded and inferior tongue. Later, when everyone had abandoned speech for war, the Bengalis turned on their Urdu speaking minority with the same vitriol to which they had themselves been subjected. Now, it was Urdu-speakers who were imagined to be conspiring, by virtue of their language, against Bangladeshi liberation. Much of my father’s interest in poetry emerged in a context where everyday language had become deeply compromised on all sides. His poetic vision springs from the knowledge that our modern day political tragedies are rooted in everyday speech and language. Maybe this is why he remains to this day a conspicuously “quiet” and “inward” man and maybe this is why when he does speak, he prefers to speak in the language of poetry.

Maybe poetry in his world carries a unique potential to transcend the violence of our modern world, a violence woven deeply into the tapestry of our everyday lives.

Poetry translations have been done by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

This post was originally published here.

‘I cut my leg off and ordered: ‘Go and bury it’
Major General Ian Cardozo was a young major in the 5 Gorkha Rifles in the 1971 war with Pakistan. In a swift military offensive, India defeated Pakistan within 13 days, liberated a region and led to the creation of Bangladesh.
In the war, the then Major Cardozo stepped on a landmine and had to cut off his badly wounded leg with his own khukri.
Yet, through sheer will power and determination, he did not let his disability come in the way of his duty as a soldier and went on to become the first disabled officer in the Indian Army to command an infantry battalion and a brigade.
Awarded a Sena Medal for gallantry, General Cardozo spoke to Claude Arpi about the historic war and how he conquered his disability in the second part of a fascinating interview.
Q:Tell us about your wound.
At that time, I was still not wounded.
There was a BSF commander who got panicky when he saw all these fellows (prisoners) and asked: “Please send someone here.’ I told the CO that I would go. I did not know that I was walking on a minefield. I stepped on a mine and my leg blew off.
A Bangladeshi saw this happening, he picked me up and took me to the battalion headquarters. They were feeling bad. I told the doctor, ‘Give me some morphine.’ They had no#8800 it had been destroyed during the operations. ‘Do you have any Pethidine?’ ‘No’
I told him: ‘Could you cut this off?’
He said: ‘I don’t have any instrument.’
I asked my batman: ‘Where is my khukri?’
He said: ‘Here it is, Sir.’
I told him: ‘Cut it off.’
He answered in Gorkhali: ‘Sir, I can’t do it.’
I told him: ‘Give it to me.’ I cut my leg off and ordered: ‘Now go and bury it.’

Q:You tell people that you are embarrassed to tell the story because it was nothing at all. What was your first thought?

My first thought was for her (pointing to his wife, Priscilla). I thought, ‘What a stupid thing happened to me. It was beyond my control, it just happened.’
Then the doctor came and tied it up. My CO also came: ‘Ian, you are very lucky, we have captured a Pakistani surgeon. He will operate on you.’
‘Nothing doing, Sir, I don’t want to be operated by a Pakistani doctor. Just get me back to India,’ I answered.
By that time Dhaka had fallen and there was no chopper available.
I then told the CO: ‘Two conditions.’ He immediately said: ‘You are not in position to put conditions.’
I told him: ‘OK, two requests. One, I don’t want Pakistani blood.’
He retorted: ‘You are a fool.’ I said: ‘I am prepared to die a fool. My second request, Sir, I want you to be present when they operate on me.’ The CO asked: ‘Why?’ I answered: ‘You know why.’ (There had been cases of torture). So, he agreed.
Anyway, the Pakistani surgeon did a good job. His name was Major Mohamed Basheer. I have never been able to say, ‘Thank you.’ I owe him a thank you, but it is not easy (to find someone in Pakistan)

hum ke Thairey ajnabi itni madaraatooN ke baad
phir banain gaiN aashnaa kitni mulaqatooN ke baad

Kab nazar maiN aaey ge bai_daGh sabzey ki bahar
Khoon ke dhabbey dhulain gaiN kitni barsaatooN ke baad

dil to chaaha par shikasht-e-dil nay muhlat he na di
kuch giley shikvey bhi kar laitey manajaatooN ke baad

thay buhat bai_dard lamhey Khatm-e-dard-e-ishq ke
theeN buhat bai_mehar subhaiN meherbaaN raatooN ke baad

un se jo kehney gaey thai “faiz” jaaN sadqa kiye
unkahee he reh gai voh baat sab baatooN ke baad

Translation by Sadia

Hospitalities exchanged, yet we who strangers stay
With how many encounters, shall amiability display?

After how many rains, shall the blood stains fade,
And when, in our sight, shall unspotted fields sway?

All that the heart desired, its breaking permitted not,
No grievance did those contained praises betray.

Merciless were moments, that witnessed the end of pain,
Benevolent nights brought in a cruel break of day.

That which, on your life, you determined to convey
Unspoken on your lips, Faiz, the decided words lay