The Liberation War Museum, Dhaka and my Association with It

I cannot exactly remember since when, but I can say this with a certain degree of confidence that for a long time I had been aware of the fact that a genocide took place in my country India’s immediate neighbourhood just seven years before I was born. This closeness of time and space of the 1971 genocide of Bangladesh hit me even more strongly when I relocated from Greater Noida, a satellite town of Delhi, to Kolkata in 2016, just 242 kilometres from the Bangladesh border. I launched a course in Genocide Studies in the MA (History) curriculum of Presidency University, Kolkata, with the twentieth century to the present as its time frame. The course, naturally, included a discussion of the 1971 genocide of Bangladesh. I found among my students many who had their ancestral roots in Bangladesh, uprooted from there either in 1947 or 1950 or 1971. However, I had to wait for seven years before I could visit Bangladesh for the first time in January 2023. I owe that first visit and the two visits following that to the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, an institution I have come to admire immensely. It is an institution like no other in South Asia, a region that lacks the courage to face history, which suffers from mass amnesia, often selective in nature, paving the way for distortion, manipulation, and fabrication of history. In this respect, the Liberation War Museum is like an oasis of memorialization and remembrance in a desert of amnesia. Not that there are no other museums and institutions in Bangladesh dedicated to the memory of the liberation war, but certainly none like the Liberation War Museum, which has consistently been doing what no other institution or organization has done for remembrance and memorialization in the three countries that emerged out of former British India – Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.

If 1947 was a watershed moment for India and Pakistan, it was 1971 for Bangladesh. India and Pakistan experienced genocidal violence in 1947, but what Bangladesh experienced in 1971 was actually a genocide, even if a large part of the world, including the United Nations, remains reluctant to acknowledge this fact of history. This reluctance is caused by several factors, politics being, perhaps, the most important of all.

I was invited by the Liberation War Museum to present my paper “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Trivialization in Hindu Nationalist Discourse” at its 7th International Conference on Bangladesh Genocide and Justice, whose theme was “Reminiscence, Recognition and Transitional Justice”. It took place in December, 2021. I managed to present at it only virtually and not in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic related international travel restrictions then. However, I managed to visit Bangladesh for the first time in my life just two years later, in 2023, when I was invited as a residential mentor at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum’s 8th winter school, whose theme was “Hatred, Violence and Prevention of Mass Atrocity Crimes”. I gave a lecture titled “Why complacence is never an option: The Criminality of Indifference and Neutrality during Mass Atrocities”. It aimed to underscore that it may not always be possible for us to confront the perpetrator, but that does not free us of our responsibility to act, for inaction is a choice in itself. We do not become bystanders by default, but by choice. While it may be utopian to think of a world without violence, it would only be realistic to realise that our lack of efforts to prevent mass violence makes the situation even worse. The key is to understand how we are responsible in spite of not being guilty of perpetration. For our efforts to be sustainable and effective, we need to focus on long-term investments, the most prominent of them being education. An education that aims to raise awareness of past wrongs, pointing out how those could be avoided and underscoring the need for conviction of the guilty for the sake of justice, but dismissive of revenge – exactly the kind of work that the Liberation War Museum has been engaged in since it came into existence.

I returned from the winter school inspired enough to bring out a special thematic issue of the online magazine Café Dissensus in commemoration of the Bangladesh Genocide Remembrance Day, observed on 25 March. The issue was composed entirely of essays written by my students on the 1971 genocide of Bangladesh. Some of my students also released a commemorative video on YouTube, titled “MA (History) Students of Genocide Studies of Presidency Uni, Kolkata remember Bangladesh Genocide'71”, available on my YouTube channel, “Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi”.

It was the Liberation War Museum’s 8th International Conference, which took place in November, 2023 that took me to Bangladesh again. This time I was not alone, but accompanied by six of my students, each of whom presented at the conference whose theme was “The Politics of Genocide Denial: Global Struggle towards Truth, Recognition and Justice”. The presentations given by my students ranged from “Investigating the Atrocity Crimes against Intellectuals and Modes of Unarmed Resistance: Comparing Bangladesh 1971 and with World War-II Poland” to “In Liberation’s Shadow: Rape, Denial and Silence in the Plight of Victims of Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh Liberation War” to “‘Buried in Oblivion’: Situating the Intellectual Killings of December 14 and Post-Liberation Genocide Denial within the Bangladesh Genocide” to “Other Victims of the Holocaust: Afro-Germans, Differently-abled, Romanies, Homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses”. I spoke on “The Denial of the Bangladesh Genocide of 1971 and the Efforts for its Recognition”.

I returned to Bangladesh in February 2024 as a resource person at the Liberation War Museum’s 9th winter school. Unlike the previous winter school, this time I was not alone, but accompanied by four of my students, who participated in the winter school with a deep sense of gratitude for the fee waiver that had been awarded to them by the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum, Dhaka. All four of them had their ancestral roots in Bangladesh and it was heart-warming to see how they and their Bangladeshi fellow participants bonded.

There are currently three students who are writing their BA Honours (History) dissertations on the 1971 genocide of Bangladesh under my supervision. Their topics are the following:

1. 'Mukher Bhasha' as counter-hegemony: Contextualising the intellectual discourse of the 'Bhasha Andolan' within the National Liberation Movement of Bangladesh

2. Breaking Barriers: Women's Diverse Engagements in Bangladesh Liberation War

3. Silent Echoes: A Comparative Analysis of the Victims and Children Born of Genocidal Rape in Rwanda (1994) and Bangladesh (1971)

I hope my institution, Presidency University, Kolkata and the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka can explore avenues of collaboration and work together to raise awareness of the 1971 genocide of Bangladesh to get it internationally recognised and strive for the trial and conviction of those guilty of that genocide.

The article appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Liberation War Museum Newsletter.