Bangladesh War Research Articles

Agami (The Time Ahead, 1984), the First “Short Film” of Bangladesh: Toward a New Cinematic Aesthetic of Imaging Time and Nation

Morshedul Islam’s Agami ( The Time Ahead, 1984), focusing on the theme of the Liberation War of Bangladesh, is Bangladesh’s first “short film” or independent film, made outside the domain of commercial film production. The film pioneers in investing the memory of the Liberation War with allegorical potential in order to interpret the socio-political condition of Bangladesh under the military dictatorship of Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad. His regime lasted for eight years, from 1982 to 1990. Linear progression of time is interrupted in this film by a constant collapsing of the past, present, and future into each other through the treatment of storytelling, flashbacks, and flashforward. This disruption of time’s flow, I will argue, is employed to serve a nationalistic purpose, offering an insight into the psychic condition of contemporary Bangladesh and its socio-political crisis under the military dictatorship of General Ershad. In analyzing the film, my main concern is to understand how a film like Agami, with its oppositional socialist commitments and with the aspiration of creating an alternative mode of cinematic language, constructs the ideas of gender, nation, and memory during a period of pronounced political turmoil. I will also explore its new cinematic aesthetics as a “short film” or independent film of Bangladesh.

Socio-economic Conflicting Issues Embedded in Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971: Coverage of the New York Times

This study explored the impacts of the coverage of the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 by the New York Times. In the backdrop of the Cold War phenomena the United States reportedly took a position against Bangladesh’s liberation while the war created a humanitarian orgy of killings, rapes, and the dislocation of millions of people. The war impacts still haunt the nation as the incumbent Bangladesh government began trials of “war crimes” and already executed some opposition leaders for alleged collaboration with the Pakistani Army. As the first textual analysis of the Times’ coverage of the Bangladesh War in the postcolonial era, the study revealed that the Times played a humanitarian role but was seemed influenced by the confrontation with the Nixon Administration on secret papers and policies of wars, popularly known as “Pentagon Papers.”

1971

Abstract The formation of Bangladesh in 1971 coincided with the death of three million people and rape of two hundred thousand women (according to official and contested figures) by the West Pakistani army and local East Pakistani collaborators. Yet 1971 rarely exists in any public form in Pakistan and there is no “will to architecture” in relation to it. This essay explores the phenomenon of “apparent amnesia” of the past that is 1971 in Pakistan. What implications does consigning 1971 to oblivion have for Pakistan's history? This essay seeks to examine the politics of knowing what not to narrate in relation to the disavowed pasts of 1971 in Pakistan. It draws on long-term ethnographic research on the public memories and nationalist narratives of sexual violence during the Bangladesh war of 1971, along with discussions with various Pakistani scholars and students and engagement with historical sources, government documents, textbooks, blog posts, press articles, and other secondary materials. This gives us an insight into what implications 1971 has for the understandings of apology and forgiveness in relation to the shadowy pasts of Pakistan.

AN ANALYSIS ON INDIA-BANGLADESH BORDER KILLING

Bangladesh and India, geographically two neighboring friendly countries located in the South Asia. The total length of border is about 5138 kilometers with 4427-kilometer land border and 711-kilometer water border. Bangladesh has 4,096-kilometer common border with India. Bangladesh has 32 border districts whilst India has five border provinces. Bangladesh and India both the countries have bilateral issues from the emergence of them. The economic relations between two countries is growing rapidly since the early 1990s. Amongst various issues between these two countries, border issue has come in the front line, because of the smuggling, human trafficking and border killing by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF). In 2013, US based news agency “Global Post” opines that the border line between Bangladesh and India is the worst border line in the world. They are showing uncontrolled behavior in the border line by killing, abducting Bangladeshi people, violating human rights and offence relating to push-in etc. This is an interesting issue for research for finding out the reasons for mass killing of civilian even though the two countries claim to be in friendly relationship at least after creation of Bangladesh.

Reading Allen Ginsberg’s September on Jessore Road: An Attempt to Ruminate over the Horrific Reminiscences of the Liberation War of Bangladesh

Allen Ginsberg’s ‘September on Jessore Road’ captures the blood-stained history of the creation of Bangladesh through highlighting the unflinching struggle of the Bangladeshi people and their appalling plight that they went through during the country’s war of independence in 1971. This poem mainly reports on Ginsberg’s visit to the refugee camps located in the bordering areas of Jessore of Bangladesh and Kolkata of India in mid-September, 1971. Those camps sheltered millions of Bengalis who fled their homes fearing persecution and violence inflicted by the Pakistani occupation forces during the liberation war of Bangladesh. Ginsberg’s first-hand experience of encountering the refugees in those camps is reproduced in this poem where the poet very meticulously pens the untold sufferings that every individual experienced during that war time. The poem also criticizes the US government and all its state apparatus for not supporting the freedom loving Bengalis in that war. His original intent of composing this poem was to express solidarity with the Bengalis’ resolute craving for freedom on the one hand and to create awareness among the masses and form public opinion against Pakistani atrocities on the Bengali people on the other. This paper thus attempts to depict how Ginsberg puts all these aspects into words with a view to reminding us of the gory history behind the establishment of the modern state of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh-Pakistan relations: hostage to a traumatic past

ABSTRACTBangladesh-Pakistan relations reached a low point in December 2013 when the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh convicted nine persons of war crimes pertaining to Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, and imposed a death sentence on senior Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Molla. This paper examines the trials in connection to their impact on Bangladesh-Pakistan relations. The analysis in this paper shows that the traumatic break of East and West Pakistan continues to haunt bilateral relations and now has spill-over effects on South Asian regionalism. It also argues that the Awami League-India nexus is another historically persistent factor precluding better Dhaka-Islamabad relations.

Indian Military Involvement in the 1971 Crisis of East Pakistan: A Justification of Level of Analysis

The liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971 was a watershed moment in the page of South Asian history and the trajectories of the then Cold War politics. Although many people of East Pakistan jumped into the liberation war taking whatever they had in hand inspired with the flammable 7th March speech of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and started guerilla fight against West Pakistan army, the then Indira Gandhi government sent Indian military in favor of East Pakistan was also vital. It is till now a matter of interest that why Indira Gandhi sent military for liberating Bangladesh despite many studies have been carried out on this issue. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate the factors causing Indian military involvement in liberating Bangladesh from West Pakistan. In doing so, this article applies Kenneth Waltz’s three levels of analysis- Individual, State and International. Moreover, this paper focuses on the conceptualization of the Level of Analysis and describes the background of the liberation struggle of East Pakistan and the Indo-Pakistan dissension. Based on secondary data, this paper takes the Indian military involvement as a case study of the Level of Analysis. By sincere exploration of previous history and utilization of Waltz’s Level of Analysis in International Relations, it is found that the shrewd leadership of Indira Gandhi, the internal organization of India, and the then bipolar system were vital factors influencing the Indian military involvement in the 1971 crisis of East Pakistan. It is also argued that the military involvement of India was shaped by the combination of the three levels of analysis.

Geospatial multi-criteria analysis for identifying high priority clean energy investment opportunities: A case study on land-use conflict in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a globally important emerging economy with rapidly increasing energy demand. The Bangladeshi government's primary capacity expansion plan is to install 13.3 GW of new coal by 2021, including the 1.3 GW Rampal coal power plant to be developed in the Sundarbans. Inadequate geospatial and economic information on clean energy investment opportunities are often a significant barrier for policy makers. Our study helps fill this gap by applying a new method to assess energy investment opportunities, with focus on understanding land-use conflicts, particularly important in this context as Bangladesh is constrained on land for agriculture, human settlements, and ecological preservation. By extending a geospatial multi-criteria analysis model (MapRE) we analyze the cost of various renewable energy generation technologies based on resource availability and key siting criteria such as proximity to transmission and exclusion from steep slopes, dense settlements or ecologically sensitive areas. We find there is more utility-scale solar potential than previously estimated, which can be developed at lower costs than coal power and with minimal cropland tradeoff. We also find significant potential for decentralized roof-top solar in commercial and residential areas. Even with a conservative land use program that reserves maximum land for agriculture and human settlement, there is more renewable energy capacity than needed to support Bangladeshi growth. This study provides critical and timely information for capacity expansion planning in South Asia and demonstrates the use of geospatial models to support decision-making in data-limited contexts.

Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies of East Pakistan

The short-lived geopolitical entity, East Pakistan (1947–71), left a deep impact on its successor state, Bangladesh, through the networks of intellectual kinship it enabled for its young elites who subsequently became Bangladesh’s nation-builders. Drawing on memory studies and literary critical reading methods, I examine the testimonies of nine such elites interviewed by the ‘Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project’ (BIOHP), alongside their writings published before and after the creation of Bangladesh. This first sustained account of East Pakistan’s intellectual legacy thus also illustrates how a post-colonial intellectual history may be extracted from oral histories as the private and inchoate domain of memory.

The Blame Game: War and Violence in Dilruba Z. Ara’s <I>Blame</I>

Contemporary studies pertaining to the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh by South Asian women writers have ignited reinvestigation into the intensity of violence, rape and attribution of blame. Ethnicity based gendered violence in 1971 and the sudden shift in the attribution of the blame are some of the issues that have also been dealt with by a few Bangladeshi diasporic women novelists such as Tahmima Anam and Dilruba Z. Ara in their post-2000 novels written in English. Dilruba Z. Ara, a Swedish-Bangladeshi novelist, in her novel Blame (2015) emphasises that the blame game is a significant repercussion of war. Ara clarifies that Bengali people blamed Pakistanis for the 1971 genocide whereas Pakistanis blamed Bengali nationalists for not abiding by the Pakistani nationality. This novel, in the form of a Bildungsroman, is divided into three parts which narrate the journey of the female protagonist from the bondage of patriarchy towards a liberal life, her engagement in the war and her sexual victimisation in the same war. The mass killing of civilians, plundering of the country and victimisation of women do not end with the war; rather the blame game continues during the war resolution process. Courageous women in the war such as Ara’s protagonist Laila and her friend Gita are blamed for their own victimisation. In the context of how the blame game became an important tool to nullify gendered violence in the 1971 war, the paper intends to reread Ara’s novel Blame.

Bangladesh economy and its future prospectus

Purpose of the case study is to understand current economy scenario of Bangladesh. What all sectors contribute in growth of its economy? How we can define growth of economy? As Bangladesh was formed in 1971 and since then its very less time for an economy to grow from stretch. However, through GDP as a parameter through which I tried analyzed the current economic situation of this country. It is country situated in South Asia. Bangladesh formed in 1971 after Bangladesh Liberation War. Its market based is 42nd largest in the world. Its economy is second fastest growing with 7.1%. Its economy is largely driven by garments, remittance and agriculture. Other sectors which contributed to country’s GDP are; textile, seafood, leather goods and shipbuilding. It also helps Indian, Nepal and Bhutan with its seaports. GDP is monetary measure of the market value of final goods and services produced in a year. Nominal GDP is calculated to determine the economic performance of a country for international comparisons.

The Changing Face of a Megacity's Key Industrial Hub in Bangladesh: Towards Assessing its Emerging Transformation Pattern for Pertinent Future Urban Development

Dhaka, the 8th largest megacities of the world, along with its dense and ever-increasing influx of urban population has experienced significant urban growth during the last fifty years. Land uses have undergone a massive unplanned development since the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971. This resulted in an outward expansion of Dhaka city toward its peripheral vicinity. Eventually, Tejgaon becomes the major attraction for immense industrial activity to meet the mounting demand of emergent population and finds its location in the core of the city from the peripheral location as designated in 1959 master plan of Dhaka city. Incessant changes in land uses have altered the physical characteristics of the area from the state as it was designed by Dhaka Improvement Trust (DIT) in 1968. A Government decision from the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in 2015 to develop the area as a commercial cum residential hub has strike the issue again questioning the potential of that particular area for proposed urban gentrification. Therefore this research explores the development potential of Tejgaon industrial area from land use perspective for urban gentrification and hence project the development pattern in conformity with the planning of surrounding. As a major outcome, this research has revealed that there exists an increasing trend of commercial activities and the rate of growth of commercial activities in this area is greater than that of an industrial one. Furthermore, with detail updated and scrutinized information of existing land use and contemporary development trend of this particular expanse, this research can act as a major reference study for forthcoming development planning decision making and further policy implications related to the study area under consideration.

Stealing Shahbag: A Re-Legitimization of Islamism in the Aftermath of a Secularist Social Movement

The Shahbag movement emerged in early February of 2013 as a sit-in protest in the Shahbag square of Dhaka city on the demands of capital punishment of war criminals of the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. This paper evaluates the movement as case study for the framing tasks theory of social movements and explores how faulty framing of the movement grievances led to counterproductive consequences for the movement constituents. The theoretical analysis is supported by the empirical findings of an original public opinion survey of up to 300 movement participants. Key movement leaders and movement critics were also interviewed through open-ended questions to further inform the survey data. The paper provides a genealogy of the secularist civil society framing tasks and shows how Shahbag, after originating from that frame, eventually shifted away from it under the a politically coopted leadership. As a consequence, the Islamist civil society mobilized a countermovement under the banner of Hefazat-e-Islam, which lead to the re-legitimation of Islamism as a political ideology and reestablished Islamists as an influential interest group.

Impact of urbanization on land use changes in Agartala City, India

Urbanization indicates the growth and development of the human civilization in terms of economy, culture and bettern infrastructure. It creates opportunities as well as challenges for better livelihood or and better lifestyle to the urban dwellers. Agartala, Capital city of the state of Tripura is located on the bank of River Haora one of the most developing urban centres of North-Eastern states, India. The urbanization process of Agartala City has been controlled and shaped by physiographic condition as well as socio-economic factors. Close proximity to the Indo-Bangla International Border on the western side checked the direction of growth of the city. Agartala has experienced rapid population growth due to migration in the 1949’s (partition of Bengal) and 1970’s Bangladesh War (Bangladesh Liberation war) which led to imbalance in man-land ratio in Agartala city. Since last few decades, the urban area of Agartala Municipal Corporation has repeatedly increased from 16 sq. km to 76 sq. km expanding towards north south direction. With passage of time the marshy land, forest cover have been converted into residential and commercial build-ups under the influence of rapid urbanization. The present study focuses on the nature and pattern of urban expansion of Agartala city including the factors responsible for indicing the land use change. Man land ratio, population growth, Spatio-temporal change in land use etc. have been identified through the analysis of secondary data as well as Geographical Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technique

The politics of extractive industry corporate practices: An anatomy of a company-community conflict in Bangladesh

This article analyses a case of mining company-host community conflict in Bangladesh. It focuses on the corporate strategies of a British mining company. The company and its allies framed it as a landmark foreign investment project and a vital project for Bangladesh’s energy security. Such a narrative fits a neoliberal policy agenda, i.e. privatizing resource extraction and creating a favorable environment for export-oriented foreign investment projects. A coalition of local, national, and transnational activist groups challenged this dominant policy agenda and the coal mine project was contested for more than a decade (2005–2015). Eventually, the project was shelved. Many existing studies on mining conflicts emphasize various exogenous factors, but this article draws attention to corporate practices. I argue the underlying factors in the death of the Phulbari coal project were rooted within the organizational culture of extractive industries, namely, the use of: 1) corporate science to misrepresent risks; 2) corporate communication strategies to take advantage of a crisis; 3) rhetoric to disregard the reality and glorify myths invented by the extractive industry. These factors resulted in the failure of the mining company to earn either a social or a legal license to operate in Bangladesh.

Agricultural and Food Policy Framework in Bangladesh: An Assessment

Since the liberation of Bangladesh, the government of Bangladesh introduced a series of policy measures in agriculture and food sectors to encourage pro-market distribution of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and diesel fuel for irrigation. The dominant feature of the policy reform had been the government’s liberalisation of the fertilizer and irrigation equipment markets. These reforms can be reasonably credited with the success in rice production during the 1984-1992 period. Reforms in the foodgrains market in the 1990s reduced the public sector involvement in these markets. Public procurement to stabilise prices and provide production incentives to farmers suffered from certain inefficiencies, although the overall impact of public procurement and price support programmes could be considered positive. The policy reforms were surprisingly smooth partly reflecting the absence of organised lobby by peasants and partly the fact that the policy reforms have benefitted, by and large, all groups of farmers.

The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. By Nayanika Mookherjie. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. By Sarah Deer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. By Nayanika Mookherjie. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. By Sarah Deer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.Elora Halim Chowdhury and Amy E. Den OudenElora Halim ChowdhuryUniversity of Massachusetts Boston Search for more articles by this author and Amy E. Den OudenUniversity of Massachusetts Boston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 43, Number 1Autumn 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692486 Views: 190Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Topography of Loss: Homeland, History and Memory in Sorayya Khan’s Fiction

The paper explores the interplay of memory and history in the three novels of Sorayya Khan – Noor (2003), Five Queen’s Road (2009) and City of Spies (2015). In each of these novels, the writer explores the violence of history. In the first novel it is the liberation war of Bangladesh, in the second, the partition of India and in the third, it is the international control over Pakistan, in this case, the American presence. Not necessarily concerned with chronological histories she centre-stages individual actions and the causes and effects behind them. Based in the States, Khan is born of a mixed marriage but her fiction is concerned with her paternal legacy. The loss of the “homeland” the process of rehabilitation and the values that hold human beings rooted in the past are all dominant concerns in her fiction.. Individual choices are very often overpowered by political realities.

Thinking Beyond Nationalism in South Asia: Reading the Local as Postcolonial in Fault Lines: Stories of 1971

Although the idea of “postcolonial literature” has been contested by scholars like Aijaz Ahmed (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), Tabish Khair (2001), and Graham Huggan (2001), the growing geography of global Anglophone literatures continues to contribute to the discussions of literatures from non-Western spaces. While the accusation of misrepresentation against post-colonial literature exists in academic debates, the post-colonial, as Robert Young (2012) has argued, continues to complicate issues of identity, representation and in particular, misrepresentation of Islam in a post 9/11 world. Postcolonialism may still be relevant to re-read the conflict of nationalisms in South Asia. By focusing on the events of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, we can trace the local variant of the postcolonial. The silenced stories of 1971-especially stories dealing with the problematic of minority identity, genocide, and divided political allegiance-can question national narratives. By investigating the otherwise unspoken accounts of the war, which lie hidden under the Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalist narratives, we can recast the inadequately captured local stories of national conflict. This paper engages the short story collection Fault Lines: Stories of 1971, to complicate Young’s conceptualization of the postcolonial in the essay, Postcolonial Remains. I will analyze events of 1971 as localized narratives with an aim to complicate Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationalisms and to look beyond the nationalistic propaganda literatures from Bangladesh. This strategy of postcolonial engagement with local narratives aims to inform the discussion surrounding the plight of the Bihari community in Bangladesh, the Bengali collaborator of the Pakistan Army, and Bangladesh genocide in the paper.

Indian Art and the Bangladesh War

In the visual realm, the Bangladesh war of 1971 is bound up with images of communal violence and mass migration that recall the trauma of 1947 when Bengal was divided between West and East Bengal, India and Pakistan. As in the case of the 1940s famines and the Partition of India and Pakistan, the birth of Bangladesh churned out a large number of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘naked images’. Yet, contrary to Partition, the body of works that resulted from this war, whether in documentary photography or in formally experimental painting and print, is seldom examined, and that despite considerable artistic mobilisation. By analysing the responses of Indian artists, including that of Bhupen Khakhar and K G Subramanyan, this article asks crucial questions on the enduring role of partitions within South Asian artistic production. The article also probes India's changing role within the hierarchies of the international system and considers Indian artists' position vis-à-vis the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement and Third-Worldism.