Fourteen years ago, at a time when the internet in India was still young, I had put up a website on the 1971 India-Pakistan War. It was a huge hit. But the site rapidly ran out of bandwidth and I was stuck with a massive bill. I quickly told the server operators to shut down the site, but within
hours I was deluged by emails offering monetary assistance. The response was overwhelming and even after all these years I have never had the heart to take down the site.
One of the …

Dhaka, Dec 15 (IANS) Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami – facing charges of targeting unarmed civilians during the 1971 war – has now accused India of killing a score of academics 39 years ago, a day before the country celebrates its Bijoy Divas (Liberation Day).
The charge by Jamaat-e-Islami leaders came on the day the country paid homage to a group of Dhaka University teachers and artists who were pulled out of their homes and killed on the night of Dec 14, 1971.
This …

A memorial park and museum in memory of Indian soldiers and warriors of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is being built at Chottakhola, a border village about 130 km from Agartala, by the Tripura government.
The forest department has been entrusted with work for the 20 hectare park which encompasses seven hillocks and a lake, state Forest minister, Jiten Chowdhury who hails from the area, told PTI.
A statue of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujiber Rehman would be set up in the park at Chottakhola in South Tripura which …

NEW DELHI — The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to becomeBangladesh.
The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.
Accepting even the lowest set of figures …

NEW DELHI
: The history of the 1971 India-Pakistan war will never be fully written. Most of the official records of the war that led to the liberation of Bangladesh have been destroyed.
The destroyed files include those on the creation of the Mukti Bahini — the Bangladesh freedom fighters — all appreciation and assessments made by the army during the war period, the orders issued to fighting formations, and other sensitive operational details.
Authoritative army sources said all records of the period, held at the Eastern Command in Kolkota, were destroyed immediately …

The country now has a chance to return to the Liberation War’s legacy of secularism, modernity, gender and social justice, political democracy and cultural pluralism, and friendship with neighbouring countries, particularly India. This is precisely the path the voters wanted their country to take.
If one is looking for a single sentence to sum up the significance of the results of the December 29, 2008, parliamentary elections in Bangladesh, it should read: this is a second liberation. The first one, on December 16, 1971, rid it of Pakistan’s colonial rule and …

The 1971 War: 35 Years On, A Flashback – Rediff news