While the Mukti Bahini of the Awami League fought the Pakistan army with support from India and the international community, a civil war was raging within Bangladesh in which the Islamist collaborators — with the active support of the Pakistan army — carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, of a magnitude that resulted in a million dead within Bangladesh and 10 million refugees on Indian soil. Many Pakistanis still argue that this campaign had in fact subdued the Bangladeshi freedom struggle and, but for the Indian intervention, with Soviet support, Pakistan would still be ruling East Pakistan. While all genocides after the mid-’70s have been subjected to UN investigation, the Bangladesh massacre is yet to be investigated and fully accounted for. Even the Cambodian war crimes trial on the Khmer Rouge massacres of the ’70s has at last begun in Phnom Penh. The dimensions of the Bangladesh killings are so stupendous and are such distant memories that when I referred to those figures in an article post-2000, a young assistant editor of a national daily cut down my figures to a small fraction on the ground they were highly implausible. I had to refer him to the original documents from the period.

Today the Awami League has been voted back to power with an overwhelming majority. The government has indicated its intention to bring the collaborators of 1971 to trial. This could not be done earlier for two reasons: first, except for one term when the Awami League was in power, for the rest of the period since 1975 the regimes in power in Bangladesh were collaborator-friendly. Second, the present army leadership, commissioned at the earliest about 1971, is free from the taint of collaborationism. The way in which the army conducted the elections also shows that it has no Islamist, Wahhabi bias. Its leadership has come out strongly in support of the present Awami League government after the uprising; its own assessment of the uprising’s significance does not differ from the government’s. The army understands that the uprising was targeted not only at the Awami League government but also at the army which is today against Wahhabi Islamism and collaborationism. The army clearly demonstrated its commitment by hanging those who carried out the serial terrorist bomb attacks three years ago.

... contd.