A Ringside View Of History
T.C.A. Rangachari
UNTRANQUIL RECOLLECTIONS: THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT by By Rehman Sobhan Sage, Delhi, 2016, 444 pp., 450.00
September 2016, volume 40, No 9

Pakistan lies dead and buried under a mountain of corpses. Tajuddin Ahmed in the Proclamation of Independence after his swearing-in as PM of the Interim Government of Bangladesh at Kushtia, 17 April 1971.

The idea of a pre-planned Indian conspiracy to break-up Pakistan appeared to us, from our direct exposure to the responses of those in authority in India, to be a figment of the Pakistani imagination. Sobhan, p. 362.

An entire generation—over six hundred million in India and a hundred million in Bangladesh—has been born since the Liberation of Bangladesh forty-five years ago. They have no personal memories of those times and events. Rehman Sobhan’s autobiography is, thus, a timely narrative that should be widely read on both sides of the border as a reminder of the agony and the elation that we went through together in those epochal times.

Pakistan was an artificial entity since inception. 1000-miles of Indian territory separated the two wings. The majority of the population lived in the East but the country was ruled from the West. The majority spoke Bengali but the official language was Urdu. The earnings were in the East but it was the West that got enriched. Essentially, one part of the country was progressively turned into a colony of the other with, ironically, the minority in control. Islam—the basis for the creation of Pakistan—was not adequate as the glue that would hold the country together. Everyone except the politico-military establishment could see that this was unsustainable.

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