One hears that the human brain has a remarkable ability to adapt and change. Our brain can form new neural pathways, learn and remember things well into old age. Implicit in all this is that the force of the lessons we draw from our memories — and our ability to recall — depends directly on our will. Nations, just like individuals, represent the power and pitfalls of selective memory. And nations, maybe far more often than individuals, indulge in selective amnesia.
Children going to school, reading their books and coming back home is a seemingly innocent routine. But depending on what we teach our kids, this is exactly where the corruption of the minds can take place. What lends this corruption strength is its acceptance by those around these young minds. Sanity to an individual, after all, is little more than a validation of her faculties by the people she interacts with. Even our noblest passions and gravest crimes need validation. And when mobs validate them, we risk becoming part of a mindless collective entity; some call them nations.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot relive the grief of the partition of 1947 or the debacle of 1971 that led to the creation of the present day Bangladesh. But the 1947 tragedy is not something that we forget. In ways acceptable and otherwise we keep it alive. Somehow or the other, the authors of the Punjab Textbook Board managed to keep the tragedy relevant in ways that suited them and the establishment. Birthdays — no matter how deeply colored by counterpart deaths — manage to get celebrated.
Maybe we keep the tragedy of 1947 alive because it allows us to point fingers at a perceived enemy. Is that what it is? I am increasingly convinced. The reason? If a country is so willing to relive and recount tragedies inherent in its birth then it defies logic why it would not do the same for the day it chopped off a limb — after deliberately corroding and letting it rot for years. 16th December, 1971 is a day that we do our utmost to push out from our collective memory.
Did the Two Nation theory die with the creation of Bangladesh? Was it ever alive? I don’t know. But something in us died in 1971. And it haunts our collective existence each day.
Did we ever treat the people in present day Bangladesh as our own? Even our towering intellectual elite of the times saw the people in Bengal as lesser Muslims; they were far too ‘Hinduized’. Mr Jinnah’s insensitive handling of the language issue in the former East Pakistan is just one example. Maybe it was a tragedy in the making all along but our despicable hypocrisy regarding the tragedy of 1971, and everything leading up to it, must not be forgiven.
The words ‘Operation Searchlight’ hardly figure in our textbooks yet they represent the systematic beginning of one of the most gruesome campaigns of genocide in history since World War II. Men, women and children were rounded up and shot. Their deaths, screams and last breaths happened on our watch, no matter how hard we try to look away now. Intellectuals were rounded up and killed by the thousands as were many young men our army saw capable of putting up resistance. Those lives were stories of promise and innocence. We allowed them to be butchered and we watched silently as their stories were torn out from the selective history we decided to teach our children.
Our favourite way of dealing with tragedies we want to bury — a judicial commission — led to findings that understate the atrocities committed in our name. But even then we refuse to debate or learn from the Hamood-ur-Rehman Commission Report. A genocide is not something a nation can forget. But as we now know, it is definitely something a nation can accept and then heartlessly move on. Fresh targets: Baloch intellectuals and youth for they are not good enough Pakistanis. The most vulgar condition of secure citizenship in Pakistan is submission to the establishment’s narrative. We raise our kids to be oblivious to the deaths of innocents we called our own. The hatred and dementia that has been taught to each one of us must be confronted by none other than us.
Bangladesh has recently taken steps to prosecute war criminals from 1971. Pakistan must issue a formal apology and take all steps necessary to hold the perpetrators accountable. One can disagree with the nuances of the Bangladeshi law enacted for prosecuting war criminals but an acknowledgement of all that we took away from them is essential. No doubt that in retaliation injustices were committed against innocents from West Pakistan too but that is no excuse to deny a greater tragedy.
Uncomfortable silences and blaming others characterise our way of dealing with this tragedy till now. Our silence simply cannot drown out the screams of millions of innocents demanding accountability of our collective soul. For cleansing our collective conscience and for raising future generations that have the courage of confronting history, this silence must be broken.
The writer is a Barrister and an Advocate of the High Courts. He is currently pursuing an LL.M at Harvard Law School. He can be reached at wmir.rma@gmail.com