—Syed Badrul Ahsan—

There are often the bloopers we come across in the media as well as in the ordinary lives we lead. Some years ago, on an afternoon spent in the pleasant company of a reputed person, the discussion turned to the politics and life of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. At some point, one of the persons present on the occasion (he had not been invited but somehow made his way there) asked the gentleman as to what Suhrawardy did for a career.

The question left us all embarrassed. The gentleman at whom the question had been directed looked him sternly in the eye and said, “Nothing much, really. He was prime minister of Pakistan.” See what happens when ignorance is in the air? I recall a senior journalist once bravely informing a roomful of listeners that John F. Kennedy had handled the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 remarkably well. Missile crisis in 1963? That was the year Kennedy was assassinated. How did this journalist not remember the crisis as it unfolded in October 1962?

Only the other day, a newspaper in Bangladesh noted in its headline, and that was in reference to a speech by a politician, that the politician was Bangladesh’s Luther King. Who is Luther King? It seems someone quite forgot that the reference was to Martin Luther King Jr, the American civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner assassinated in 1968. Citizens and sometimes political figures make mistakes, but why should journalists not remember facts and names? Why can’t they go for a correct headline to be put across to readers?

In our country, for a very long time, there has been the charge against Henry Kissinger that he had described Bangladesh as a basket case. The truth is that he did not. The phrase came from his deputy U. Alexis Johnson at a meeting in Washington on 6 December 1971, ten days before the liberation of Bangladesh. “They (Bangladesh) will be an international basket case,” said Johnson. Kissinger’s response was simple: “But not necessarily our basket case.”

We have before us, courtesy of the late Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, a statement attributed to Muhammad Ali Jinnah (and Nayar heard it from Tahera Mazhar Ali who in turn had heard it from her husband, the influential journalist Mazhar Ali Khan). Apparently, while surveying the agonising flow of refugees from a low-flying aircraft across the border in the aftermath of Partition, Pakistan’s founder plaintively murmured, “What have I done?”

The problem with that statement is that there is hardly any way of verifying it. We are quite sure there were other people on that aircraft with Jinnah. They too must have heard Jinnah’s words. But they kept quiet. Or did Jinnah really say that? Never mind. What matters is for the media, in the past as well as in this more difficult present, to reassure people that what they see in print or hear on radio and television is the unvarnished truth.

The media must not deceive or undermine a government or indulge in propaganda. And yet that misleading picture in 1974 of Bashanti, a young Bengali woman clothed in nothing but a fishing net as a way of informing the world of the dire straits Bangladesh was in, damaged Bangabandhu’s government to no end. Many years later, the photographer responsible for the picture admitted that it had all been a set-up.

Justice, even if late, should have been administered. Some heads should have rolled at the newspaper which carried this photo. Nothing, however, was done. Newspapers sometimes tend to invent tales that have no link to reality. In February 1971, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made it known that his party would not be attending the National Assembly session in Dhaka in March, he gave his own strange spin on the political situation.

He told his audience that while the Awami League was the majority party in East Pakistan, the People’s Party had the majority in West Pakistan. A correspondent working for an Urdu newspaper let his imagination go wild. He produced the headline which was to be attributed, falsely, to Bhutto. And what was the headline? “Udhar tum, idhar hum (you over there, me over here).” Bhutto did not say that, but neither did he take that Urdu newspaper to task for such a falsification of facts.

A historically important photo we often come across is of Shere Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq administering the oath of office to a young, newly appointed minister who happens to be the future Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The caption accompanying the photograph has always been misleading. Shere Bangla, Governor of East Pakistan at the time, is mentioned as Chief Minister of East Bengal. That ministers are not sworn into office by chief ministers or prime ministers but by governors and presidents is a fact not remembered. It was as governor that Shere Bangla was swearing in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as a minister in the provincial government of East Pakistan.

It is not merely the media in our part of the world that commit blunders. In the late 1990s, a British weekly journal known for its thoroughness and integrity committed the faux pas of referring to both Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda as the widows of Bangladesh’s assassinated Presidents. It remained for me to get in touch with the editorial staff of the journal and inform them, in writing, that Sheikh Hasina was not the widow but the daughter of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The letter was carried in the following week’s issue of the journal. An egregious mistake often committed by the media abroad comes into light when they refer to the 1971 war as an India-Pakistan war. Of course it was an India-Pakistan war, but on the western front.

On the eastern front, it was a war waged against Pakistan by the Mukti Bahini and the Indian army for the liberation of Bangladesh. These days, you will find some elements ready to ‘enlighten’ you with their version of the surrender ceremony on 16 December 1971 in Dhaka. To them, it was a case of the Pakistan army surrendering to the Indian army. They have either forgotten history or are deliberately engaged in falsifying history. They do not see that the document of surrender clearly notes that Niazi and his men laid down their weapons before the India-Bangladesh Joint Command.

And here’s another instance of how the media, especially in the West, have almost always misread the nature of our struggle for freedom in 1971. The War of Liberation is often termed a civil war in Pakistan. Was it? When Bangabandhu declared Bangladesh’s independence before he was taken under arrest by the Pakistan army in the early hours of 26 March 1971, the glaring truth could not be ignored that we were no longer part of Pakistan.

From that very moment Bangladesh and Pakistan had become embroiled in a military conflict that was fundamentally a war between two countries. A civil war has no space for the freedom struggle of a part of a country against the rest. We in 1971 were not waging war to claim our rights within Pakistan; we were at war as an independent people waging a guerrilla struggle to force Pakistan’s forces out of our occupied country.

Ah, yes. The other day I was surprised, as I flipped through the pages of a work written some years ago by an eminent scholar, that she got the name of the party which won Pakistan’s December 1970 election wrong. She referred to Bangabandhu’s party not as the Awami League but as the Awami National Party. How did that happen? Why did that happen? Well, let it be.

By the way, let us not forget that during our struggle for freedom, the Soviet Union stood steadfastly by us in the way India did. It will linguistically not be quite proper to say that Russia helped us. Certainly Russia was there, but as part of the Soviet Union, which unfortunately does not exist anymore.

On that note, let this discussion draw to an end.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history