During the summer of 2000, a very public controversy arose surrounding the excavation of a 10th century Jain Temple in Fatehpur Sikri where the Archa… - Yvette Rosser

A professor in the History Department at Dhaka University told me about his experiences during the months after the Pakistani Army took control of the country. When the bloodbath began in March, he and his family, along with many other Dhaka professionals fled to their ancestral villages hoping to escape the violence. For a few months, during the monsoon, the Pakistani junta declared an amnesty of sorts and made announcements asking scholars and professionals to return to Dhaka—to their posts in classrooms and hospitals. Promises were made that they would not be arrested. There had been a definite lull in the violence during the summer and many people decided to return to their jobs. This professor, with whom I spoke with a length, told rae that in April he and his family had gone to the home of his wife's relatives in a village in the northern part of the country. Since many professors had been targeted during the early weeks of the crackdown, there had been a mass exodus from the university campuses, which were seen as hot beds of secessionists. In July of 1971, with promises of security, many returned to their homes on the campus of Dhaka University. While on a barge, crossing a river on their way back to Dhaka my friend and his family encountered several Pakistani soldiers. Since the professor spoke Urdu they struck up a conversation. The professor was initially worried that he might be arrested or killed, but soon the soldiers waylaid their fears because, as they explained to the professor and his family, they had been "sent to kill Hindus". The professor and his family were Muslim. The soldiers complained that "for the past few months they had not been able to find many Hindus". He confided to the professor that he felt frustrated that "the Pakistani government had sent them to East Pakistan to kill Hindus" but he found mostly Muslims. He added that he "didn't mind killing Hindus but killin g Muslims was against [his] religious beliefs". Needless to say, the professor was relieved, if horrified by the implications.

Professor Mubarak Ali, a repected historian living in Lahore, asserts that Akbar has been systematically eliminated from most textbooks in Pakistan in order to "divert attention away from his 'misplaced' policies". Where they exist, discussions of Akbar are short and superficial...

The new editions have re-embraced the view of Bangladeshi nationalism that was promoted by the military regimes. However, the BNP's efforts to vindicate the perpetrators of genocide have gone considerably further than even the former textbooks of Zia and Ershad's periods where the word "razakar" still appeared in reference to the murderers of the intellectuals on December 14, 1970. In 1996 era textbooks, the Awami League added "al-badars" and "al-shams" to the list of collaborators, specifically naming the "Jamaat-i-Islami" as culpable in the murder of the intellectuals. The new 2001 genre textbook leaves all of these names out of the narrative and simply blames the deaths of the intellectuals on themselves and on the Pakistani Army. After October 2001, eliminating references to razakars and certainly the Jamaat-i-Islami was an imperative since former razakars and members of the Jamaat are now part of the ruling coalition. ... An important impact of the omissions and extractions is that the genocidal excesses of the infamous collaborators, the razakars are ignored and thereby excused. This deflection of guilt by the Jamaat-i-Islami was one of the first orders of business for the BNP/Islamists political dispensation that came to power in October 2001.