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Of Blood and Fire The Untold Story of Bangladesh War of Independence Mustafizur Rahman 9789848815267 Books

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The year 1971 saw the eastern half of Pakistan (now Bangladesh) rise in revolt against the military regime of the country which had unleashed a reign of terror to crush the people's demand for independence. There were indiscriminate killing, burning and looting of the unarmed civilians. An underground resistance movement spearheaded by students came into being to fight the oppressor. A ful-fledged war of liberation ensued. The breathtaking events of 1971 are faithfully recorded in the present volume. It is a first-hand account by the author who along with her son and husband took an active part in the struggle for freedom. She had herself witnessed some of the events. For the rest she gathered facts from authentic sources. Written in the form of a diary, -the book was originally published in Bengali. This English rendering of it now presents the story of Bangladesh's war of independence to a larger audience.

Of Blood and Fire The Untold Story of Bangladesh War of Independence Mustafizur Rahman 9789848815267 Books

The origins of the bloody national liberation struggle that saw East Bengal emerge as an independent entity lay in the incomprehensible departure of the British Raj in the aftermath of the titanic struggle of the Second World War. Whereas Bengal had been the first to fall to the covetous and aggressive British East India Company in the 18th century, it completely disappeared from the maps when the British Empire left South Asia, horribly mangled and partitioned in bloody fratricide, the western half incorporated into the state of India, and the eastern wing, composed mainly of Muslims, subsumed into a new state, called "Pakistan," purportedly for the Muslims of India, with a western wing separated by hundreds of miles.
Who exactly was to blame for this calamity? The British Empire certainly did not carry out its promised mandate of implementing a just resolution before its quick exit from the stage. Then again, where have the British left things intact before departing? Ireland? Cyprus? Palestine? What about the South Asian politicians and their role in the partition of Bengal? Most had compromised themselves with the colonial master long ago to have any sway in the matter, and that is even if they had genuinely wanted to see a just settlement. The few Bengali leaders of note and integrity, who could have bridged the ever-widening religious divide and prevent the dive into the abyss, were tragically not present in 1947. "Deshbandhu" Chittaranjan Das, the cultured and educated politician who was highly regarded and trusted by both Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims, affectionately known as the "Friend of the Country" had passed away unexpectedly in 1925.
His tragic passing was a body blow to secular & rational thought in the upper echelons of the South Asian anti-imperialist struggle. His protégé, the intellectually gifted Cambridge-educated Subhas Chandra Bose, took upon himself the responsibility to carry the banner of secular leadership, but it was not to be an easy task by any means, assailed as he was by both bitter South Asian opponents and the British Empire and its agents. Bose was the one South Asian politician during the anti-British struggle who was cognizant of, and willing to utilize, the international situation for the pursuit of liberation. He was essentially the forerunner of the idea of using intra-imperialist struggles and conflicts in the world-system to strike for Third World National Liberation, especially using armed struggle, the idea that gained currency and was utilized by the colonized peoples in the post-1945 period to gain their freedom from imperialist occupation in the Third World. Bose's singular distinction was subverting the loyalty of South Asian mercenaries of the British Empire and using them and South Asian civilian volunteers(from Southeast Asia in areas that had been cleared of the various European imperialist powers for the duration of the Second World War) including a military unit composed only of women, to raise a revolutionary army to fight the British Empire.
An indefatigable, rational, incorruptible and uncompromising revolutionary, Bose died, or disappeared according to an alternative narrative, in controversial circumstances in 1945 in the dying days of World War Two. The salient point is that apart from Bose's certain, bitter and determined opposition to partition, his genuine secularism, a rare trait amongst South Asians then and now, was to be sorely missed during the horrors of 1946 - 1947. What about the Bengali people themselves? By 1946, the twin specters of communalism and class ensured that the people themselves were in no mood to reason about the logic of nationalism, i.e., for it to survive all other considerations had to take second place to the nation-state. One of the ironies of the British departure therefore was that Undivided Bengal, one of the most linguistically and culturally homogeneous areas of the subcontinent, did not reemerge as an independent state (after the disappearance of its independence in 1757). And so it came to pass, in August 1947, when two new states were created in South Asia, the third, which, with the logic of history and national identity behind it, should have also emerged, was strangled. What was more, adding insult to injury, India and Pakistan did not achieve "liberation" in 1947 but first became Dominion States, owing allegiance to, and with His Britannic Majesty as Head of State for both dominions. This success on the part of the Attlee Government, which the British Premier had insisted upon as one the conditions for the departure of the Raj, says all that needs to be said about the success and failures of the Gandhiite 'anti-colonial' civil-disobedience movement. In fact, years after the events of 1945-1947, Clement Attlee would concede that Gandhi and his so-called civil disobedience movement had played no part whatsoever in British imperial considerations. However, the actions of Subhas Chandra Bose, and his subversion of the South Asian mercenaries which had fatally undermined the British trust in their minions, was a critical factor in the imperial decision to weigh anchor from Southern Asia after nearly two hundred years of loot, plunder and devastation. The absence of Bose and his leading associates however, meant that despite the gallant efforts of the armed revolutionaries and their supporters the British would before leaving play their role in the despicable partition of the subcontinent, especially of United Bengal. So, after the partitions of Bengal & the Punjab, the horrors of fratricide and displacement, if there were still those who thought the passing of the Raj in this manner would still herald some mythical nirvana they were soon rudely awoken from their dreams of wishful fancies. For East Bengal, a new more horrific colonialism lay in store in the post-1947 period. Whereas British brutal colonial rule had been tempered, in some instances, by Britain's democratic traditions and rule of law, the new and sinister colonialism engulfing East Bengal post-1947, after the departure of the British Empire, was purely malevolent, its putrid, militaristic, undemocratic and decidedly noxious stench emanating from "Western Pakistan" was devoid of any of the considerations which had restrained British imperial rule (This is not to excuse by any means all the horrors of British fascist-imperialist tyranny; wars of aggression against independent South Asian states, the wholesale slaughter of South Asian innocents during the revolution of 1857, the famines from 1770 onwards, and other war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide visited upon South Asia by the British from 1757 to 1947). The gradual realization on the part of the East Bengali people, that they were essentially seen as sub-human colonial subjects by "Western Pakistan" whose only intent was to parasitically siphon away the resources of East Bengal, saw the Bengali nationalist consciousness remerge amongst secular Eastern Bengalis, along with demands for parity if this unnatural state was to exist at all, and the immediate implementation of democratic rule, espoused brilliantly by the leading East Bengali politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would become affectionately known as "Bangabandhu" or "Friend of Bengal." The refusal of the military junta to accept the democratic results of the first free election in both wings, which would have meant that East Bengal and its progressive democratic leadership would rule at the center, finally led to the East Bengali fight for liberation. It is this fateful year that the noted writer & activist, Jahanara Imam has faithfully recorded in the form of a diary, spanning the months of March to December in the year 1971. In a carefully planned systematic aggression against unarmed civilians, the Pakistani military hordes & their local quisling death-squads (undoubtedly modeled on the German "Einsatzgruppen" or "action groups" in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during World War II) in East Bengal, struck in late March, with the single purpose of annihilating the intellectual basis of [East] Bengali nationalist consciousness & expression; writers, poets, doctors, professors, university students, lawyers and all minorities, almost anyone who voiced the just demand for democracy and secularism. The murderous reasoning of the jackbooted Pakistani military junta was, hardly new in the unhappy twentieth century and eerily similar to what the Nazis did in Poland and elswhere during the Second War, that once the intellectual leaders of East Bengal and thus Bengali nationalism were exterminated, the others would fall into line and accept their roles as subhuman subjects of "West Pakistan." Instead, the East Bengalis, after the initial shock of the onslaught, regrouped, East Bengal was declared "Bangladesh" ("the country of the Bengali-speaking peoples"-although strictly speaking the term "Bangladesh" applied to United Bengal, for example when it was used by the Poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1905) by a Provisional Government, and an armed liberation struggle enjoying the support of the majority of the people took shape. Jahanara Imam's eldest son, Rumi, also took part, one of countless thousands of university students who gladly took up arms to free the Motherland (or at least the eastern part of United Bengal) from a brutal full-scale repression by a foreign occupation army. There was an international dimension to this Third World Struggle as well, played out in the hallways and debating chambers of the United Nations, in the midst of the tense Cold War, although this is not discussed in any great detail, and neither does that detract from the telling of the writer's story. In December, India, sheltering the East Bengali liberation fighters and hosting the massive East Bengali civilian exodus caused by the indiscriminate murder, rape and torture by the barbaric and unrestrained Pakistani military forces, finally intervened, under the all-encompassing diplomatic & military umbrella of the USSR, the path of the joint Indo-East Bengali forces made considerably easier by the softening up of Pakistani defenses by East Bengali guerrilla formations. On 16 December 1971, the joint East Bengali-Indo forces entered the capital of East Bengal, Dhaka. It had been a long time coming since June 1757 when Bengali freedom had been extinguished, in that encounter against the forces of European world-imperialism at Plassey that will live long in infamy, and although not as part of a free, independent, secular, socialist United Bengal, as the dreamers of a free United Bengal had dreamed, the then secularist East Bengal nevertheless raised the banner of Bengali sovereignty on its own once again on the world stage as 'Bangladesh'. Civilized sensibilities had been outraged by the unrestrained war crimes that had been committed by the vile military forces of "West Pakistan" and its local East Bengali collaborator quisling Einsatzgruppen-like formations which operated without impunity in East Bengal. On a final note, amongst the countless writers, thinkers and activists abroad who supported the East Bengali Liberation Movement and its Provisional Government was Dr. J.K. Banerji, who was the "living link" in the truest sense between the South Asian struggle against the British Empire and the East Bengali struggle. Dr. J.K. Banerji had been one of the closest revolutionary associates of Netaji ("respected leader") Subhas Chandra Bose, who formed and led the Provisional Government of Free India (1943-1945) including its revolutionary army. Dr. J.K. Banerji would provide invaluable assistance to the East Bengali Liberation Movement in the United States. Jahanara Imam's journal is a fine example of the eyewitness accounts of the bloody struggles for self-determination, emancipation and dignity in the Third World in the post-1945 era, clinical, precise, devoid of sentimentality or excess, and written from the viewpoint of the quintessential staunch secular Third World nationalist.

Product details Hardcover Publisher University Press Ltd ,Bangladesh (December 1, 2010) Language English ISBN-10 9848815260

Tags : Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh's War of Independence [Mustafizur Rahman] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The year 1971 saw the eastern half of Pakistan (now Bangladesh) rise in revolt against the military regime of the country which had unleashed a reign of terror to crush the people's demand for independence. There were indiscriminate killing,Mustafizur Rahman,Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh's War of Independence,University Press Ltd ,Bangladesh,9848815260,History Military History
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Of Blood and Fire The Untold Story of Bangladesh War of Independence Mustafizur Rahman 9789848815267 Books Reviews

The origins of the bloody national liberation struggle that saw East Bengal emerge as an independent entity lay in the incomprehensible departure of the British Raj in the aftermath of the titanic struggle of the Second World War. Whereas Bengal had been the first to fall to the covetous and aggressive British East India Company in the 18th century, it completely disappeared from the maps when the British Empire left South Asia, horribly mangled and partitioned in bloody fratricide, the western half incorporated into the state of India, and the eastern wing, composed mainly of Muslims, subsumed into a new state, called "Pakistan," purportedly for the Muslims of India, with a western wing separated by hundreds of miles.
Who exactly was to blame for this calamity? The British Empire certainly did not carry out its promised mandate of implementing a just resolution before its quick exit from the stage. Then again, where have the British left things intact before departing? Ireland? Cyprus? Palestine? What about the South Asian politicians and their role in the partition of Bengal? Most had compromised themselves with the colonial master long ago to have any sway in the matter, and that is even if they had genuinely wanted to see a just settlement. The few Bengali leaders of note and integrity, who could have bridged the ever-widening religious divide and prevent the dive into the abyss, were tragically not present in 1947. "Deshbandhu" Chittaranjan Das, the cultured and educated politician who was highly regarded and trusted by both Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims, affectionately known as the "Friend of the Country" had passed away unexpectedly in 1925.
His tragic passing was a body blow to secular & rational thought in the upper echelons of the South Asian anti-imperialist struggle. His protégé, the intellectually gifted Cambridge-educated Subhas Chandra Bose, took upon himself the responsibility to carry the banner of secular leadership, but it was not to be an easy task by any means, assailed as he was by both bitter South Asian opponents and the British Empire and its agents. Bose was the one South Asian politician during the anti-British struggle who was cognizant of, and willing to utilize, the international situation for the pursuit of liberation. He was essentially the forerunner of the idea of using intra-imperialist struggles and conflicts in the world-system to strike for Third World National Liberation, especially using armed struggle, the idea that gained currency and was utilized by the colonized peoples in the post-1945 period to gain their freedom from imperialist occupation in the Third World. Bose's singular distinction was subverting the loyalty of South Asian mercenaries of the British Empire and using them and South Asian civilian volunteers(from Southeast Asia in areas that had been cleared of the various European imperialist powers for the duration of the Second World War) including a military unit composed only of women, to raise a revolutionary army to fight the British Empire.
An indefatigable, rational, incorruptible and uncompromising revolutionary, Bose died, or disappeared according to an alternative narrative, in controversial circumstances in 1945 in the dying days of World War Two. The salient point is that apart from Bose's certain, bitter and determined opposition to partition, his genuine secularism, a rare trait amongst South Asians then and now, was to be sorely missed during the horrors of 1946 - 1947. What about the Bengali people themselves? By 1946, the twin specters of communalism and class ensured that the people themselves were in no mood to reason about the logic of nationalism, i.e., for it to survive all other considerations had to take second place to the nation-state. One of the ironies of the British departure therefore was that Undivided Bengal, one of the most linguistically and culturally homogeneous areas of the subcontinent, did not reemerge as an independent state (after the disappearance of its independence in 1757). And so it came to pass, in August 1947, when two new states were created in South Asia, the third, which, with the logic of history and national identity behind it, should have also emerged, was strangled. What was more, adding insult to injury, India and Pakistan did not achieve "liberation" in 1947 but first became Dominion States, owing allegiance to, and with His Britannic Majesty as Head of State for both dominions. This success on the part of the Attlee Government, which the British Premier had insisted upon as one the conditions for the departure of the Raj, says all that needs to be said about the success and failures of the Gandhiite 'anti-colonial' civil-disobedience movement. In fact, years after the events of 1945-1947, Clement Attlee would concede that Gandhi and his so-called civil disobedience movement had played no part whatsoever in British imperial considerations. However, the actions of Subhas Chandra Bose, and his subversion of the South Asian mercenaries which had fatally undermined the British trust in their minions, was a critical factor in the imperial decision to weigh anchor from Southern Asia after nearly two hundred years of loot, plunder and devastation. The absence of Bose and his leading associates however, meant that despite the gallant efforts of the armed revolutionaries and their supporters the British would before leaving play their role in the despicable partition of the subcontinent, especially of United Bengal. So, after the partitions of Bengal & the Punjab, the horrors of fratricide and displacement, if there were still those who thought the passing of the Raj in this manner would still herald some mythical nirvana they were soon rudely awoken from their dreams of wishful fancies. For East Bengal, a new more horrific colonialism lay in store in the post-1947 period. Whereas British brutal colonial rule had been tempered, in some instances, by Britain's democratic traditions and rule of law, the new and sinister colonialism engulfing East Bengal post-1947, after the departure of the British Empire, was purely malevolent, its putrid, militaristic, undemocratic and decidedly noxious stench emanating from "Western Pakistan" was devoid of any of the considerations which had restrained British imperial rule (This is not to excuse by any means all the horrors of British fascist-imperialist tyranny; wars of aggression against independent South Asian states, the wholesale slaughter of South Asian innocents during the revolution of 1857, the famines from 1770 onwards, and other war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide visited upon South Asia by the British from 1757 to 1947). The gradual realization on the part of the East Bengali people, that they were essentially seen as sub-human colonial subjects by "Western Pakistan" whose only intent was to parasitically siphon away the resources of East Bengal, saw the Bengali nationalist consciousness remerge amongst secular Eastern Bengalis, along with demands for parity if this unnatural state was to exist at all, and the immediate implementation of democratic rule, espoused brilliantly by the leading East Bengali politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would become affectionately known as "Bangabandhu" or "Friend of Bengal." The refusal of the military junta to accept the democratic results of the first free election in both wings, which would have meant that East Bengal and its progressive democratic leadership would rule at the center, finally led to the East Bengali fight for liberation. It is this fateful year that the noted writer & activist, Jahanara Imam has faithfully recorded in the form of a diary, spanning the months of March to December in the year 1971. In a carefully planned systematic aggression against unarmed civilians, the Pakistani military hordes & their local quisling death-squads (undoubtedly modeled on the German "Einsatzgruppen" or "action groups" in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during World War II) in East Bengal, struck in late March, with the single purpose of annihilating the intellectual basis of [East] Bengali nationalist consciousness & expression; writers, poets, doctors, professors, university students, lawyers and all minorities, almost anyone who voiced the just demand for democracy and secularism. The murderous reasoning of the jackbooted Pakistani military junta was, hardly new in the unhappy twentieth century and eerily similar to what the Nazis did in Poland and elswhere during the Second War, that once the intellectual leaders of East Bengal and thus Bengali nationalism were exterminated, the others would fall into line and accept their roles as subhuman subjects of "West Pakistan." Instead, the East Bengalis, after the initial shock of the onslaught, regrouped, East Bengal was declared "Bangladesh" ("the country of the Bengali-speaking peoples"-although strictly speaking the term "Bangladesh" applied to United Bengal, for example when it was used by the Poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1905) by a Provisional Government, and an armed liberation struggle enjoying the support of the majority of the people took shape. Jahanara Imam's eldest son, Rumi, also took part, one of countless thousands of university students who gladly took up arms to free the Motherland (or at least the eastern part of United Bengal) from a brutal full-scale repression by a foreign occupation army. There was an international dimension to this Third World Struggle as well, played out in the hallways and debating chambers of the United Nations, in the midst of the tense Cold War, although this is not discussed in any great detail, and neither does that detract from the telling of the writer's story. In December, India, sheltering the East Bengali liberation fighters and hosting the massive East Bengali civilian exodus caused by the indiscriminate murder, rape and torture by the barbaric and unrestrained Pakistani military forces, finally intervened, under the all-encompassing diplomatic & military umbrella of the USSR, the path of the joint Indo-East Bengali forces made considerably easier by the softening up of Pakistani defenses by East Bengali guerrilla formations. On 16 December 1971, the joint East Bengali-Indo forces entered the capital of East Bengal, Dhaka. It had been a long time coming since June 1757 when Bengali freedom had been extinguished, in that encounter against the forces of European world-imperialism at Plassey that will live long in infamy, and although not as part of a free, independent, secular, socialist United Bengal, as the dreamers of a free United Bengal had dreamed, the then secularist East Bengal nevertheless raised the banner of Bengali sovereignty on its own once again on the world stage as 'Bangladesh'. Civilized sensibilities had been outraged by the unrestrained war crimes that had been committed by the vile military forces of "West Pakistan" and its local East Bengali collaborator quisling Einsatzgruppen-like formations which operated without impunity in East Bengal. On a final note, amongst the countless writers, thinkers and activists abroad who supported the East Bengali Liberation Movement and its Provisional Government was Dr. J.K. Banerji, who was the "living link" in the truest sense between the South Asian struggle against the British Empire and the East Bengali struggle. Dr. J.K. Banerji had been one of the closest revolutionary associates of Netaji ("respected leader") Subhas Chandra Bose, who formed and led the Provisional Government of Free India (1943-1945) including its revolutionary army. Dr. J.K. Banerji would provide invaluable assistance to the East Bengali Liberation Movement in the United States. Jahanara Imam's journal is a fine example of the eyewitness accounts of the bloody struggles for self-determination, emancipation and dignity in the Third World in the post-1945 era, clinical, precise, devoid of sentimentality or excess, and written from the viewpoint of the quintessential staunch secular Third World nationalist.