Aisha Ghazi@aishaghazi
Dear Tariq Rahman, you not only owe a respect, rather you owe an apology to the martyrs of most heinous genocide that started from 7 March 1971 and the whole communities of Biharis and other non Bangalis were wiped out in brutal and systematic genocide designed by India and carried out by Mukti Bahini until Pakistan army was forced to opt for operation against genociders.
The gruesome details of Bihari and non-Bangali genocide in East Pakistan will shock the world if they ever came to the light. There were slaughterhouses set up and butchers hired to kill, there were rooms full of the bodies of young children who had been killed by smashing them in the wall, thousands killed and bodies thrown in rivers and genociders went in boats around the rivers looking for any signs of life in the bodies they had dumped in rivers so anyone found breathing could be killed with spears. Genociders raped the Bihari women and left Bangladesh flag stuck in their raped dead bodies. There were trains full of deadbodies, not just killed, but they were systematically cut to make them bleed to death. The kind of brutality that was perpetrated against non-Bangalis has hardly any equivalence in history and according to Tariq Rahman, it was all done by “unarmed people of Bangladesh”. No ! They were armed proxies of India working on bringing Bengali Muslims back in Indian shackles and it happened. Bangladesh has been a vassal state of India since 1971.
Regarding “teachers and intellectuals” killed on 25th March, the question remains intact: when the whole country was in complete chaos and universities were closed for weeks, what were the “intellectuals and teachers” still doing in hostels? And why non-Bangali women had been found locked in the custody of those “intellectuals”? Why Bengali documentary filmmaker Zahir Rehan was abducted from streets of Dhaka in early 1972, never to be seen again, just for questioning the narrative of these “intellectual killings”. Just because he was looking for evidence of Indian involvement in these killings? You are Prime Minister now. At least open the case of Zahir Rehan again to give him justice.
Let me enlighten you a bit more about the actual darkness of this history episode where whole Bihari communities were wiped out.
Just one example is Isfahani Jute mill community, where all the men were separated, killed and dead bodies were dumped in the river next to it while all the women and children were massacred in the hall of Isfahani Jute Mill. There were only two children survivors that Pakistan army pulled out alive from the rubble of dead bodies. One of these two survivors is still alive, living in Canada and suffers from a severe form of PTSD. When genocide started, this is the same community that paid security money to your so called first prime minister in exile, Tajjudin Ahmed, on his demand.
In People’s More mill community, there was not even a single survivor and the water reservoir beside the mill was full of deadbodies. When water dried in summer, there were thousands of severed heads of Biharis lying on ground, telling the story of what happened there. The same massacre was carried out in every corner of East Pakistan, specially in the areas bordering India. Your Kanchan river water turned red due to the blood of Biharis killed by Bengali agents of India.
Dear Tariq Rahman, the irony is that Genociders have audacity to observe Genocide day without any remourse because they know the world doesn’t know the scale of genocide perpetrated by their own brethren against the non Bangalis. I have spent more than three years in researching Bihari genocide, I have extensively travelled to meet survivors and cross check their stories. I can write pages and pages on this forgotten genocide but for now, this beginner course is enough to enlighten you who do you owe respect and apology.
