The collapsible history

In Mohammad Nurul Qadir's "Dusho Chcheshotti Diney Swadhinota" (Independence in Two Hundred and Sixty-six Days), that reconciliation stumbles on an honest mistake. In simple terms, he confesses that he didn't know how to count in English. He writes that until his grandson, who studied in Singapore, told him 25 years after the liberation war, he didn't know that the word "million" stood for ten hundred thousand, not one hundred thousand.

By that time Nurul Qadir was pushing history with both hands. As a Roving Ambassador of the Mujibnagar Government, he had mentioned in numerous interviews and press briefings in 1971 that four million people were killed in East Pakistan by the Pakistan army. In the historic letter, which he typed sitting in the office of the Indian Ambassador in Tehran, addressed to Shah of Iran and handed over to the Iranian Prime Minister on 5th September 1971, Nurul Qadir stated that four million people had died in the crackdown since 25th March 1971.

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Then he writes that all that time he was saying four million, he was actually thinking four hundred thousand, not forty hundred thousand (page 346). Unless one would question his credentials, one has to take it as coming from the horse's mouth. The mistake, however, had served us well. According to Nurul Qadir, it helped us sway the world opinion in our favour during the liberation war.

Let us face the fact that history is often goosed up with propaganda. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was hyped up by the Americans to go to war in Vietnam like the WMD was hyped up to go to war in Iraq. There are many incidents in history when truth was tweaked to win a situation. Hamza Alavi, a noted historian of Pakistan, tells us that the creation of Pakistan was rooted in a 19th century crisis, which had nothing to do with religion. It started when the new Anglo-vernacular language policy of the colonial regime was adopted to displace Persian, the language of the Muslim upper class of India. Yet political manipulation sublimated truth and turned it into a history of religious tension between Hindus and Muslims.

I, like many in my generation, grew up in the glory of Pakistani heroism in the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. We memorised the names of heroes who had fought valiantly in that war. Squadron Leader Alam downed 11 enemy warplanes. Aziz Bhatti fought till his end. And there were many others, who had done us proud as Pakistani citizens by defeating the Indian forces.

But I learned something shocking while writing a paper on the Cold War in the 1980s. The Tashkent Agreement between Field Marshal Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan and Lal Bahadur Shastri, Prime Minister of India, was indeed an international bid to save Pakistan's face and integrity. It was news to me that Pakistan was losing, not winning the 1965 war.

Nations, like people, must defend their honour and fabrication of truth is fair game in love and war. If Nurul Qadir said four million instead of four hundred thousand, it was at the time of war, and he admitted his mistake as soon as he found it. When I met him, I asked why that mistake was never addressed. He said that by then the mistake was repeated so many times that it turned into a sacred cow nobody wanted to slaughter.

He must be right. Sometimes history takes an elusive turn on the memory lane, and truth is made to look stranger than fiction. But it also leaves the witnessing generation in confusion, as some of them cannot cope with the defalcation in their account of history by the account of others. It is opposite of repressed memory syndrome. Suddenly, people are under the compulsion to erase what was etched in memory. Suddenly, they must realise that they ought to forget what was remembered.

Professor Salahuddin Ahmed, a leading historian of Bangladesh, observes that our history is fraught with aposiopesis, which has caused many distortions. It is mainly because facts have been disfigured to change context, misleading memories to organised paradox. In the beginning that paradox misled Hindus and Muslims, then it misled West Pakistanis and East Pakistanis, and now it is hitting home, misleading us against each other. We are still fighting over who declared independence in 1971, and who is the father of this nation. We are still busy sorting out square one.

Nations behave like people when that happens, when history gets stuck in a crack that divides its collective memory. If we take a close look, our conflict is not over the future but over the past. We are still dying to perpetuate what can be forgotten instead of what can be remembered. It has been more than thirty years, and the end of this fray is not in sight.

Truth will always be the first victim in war, but we are in peacetime. Yet we are unable to reconcile history with memory, the gap being widened with the passing of time. Every new generation that comes of age adds to the crisis, because they must take sides with those who are already divided. Memory gets diluted with new blood, because bad blood has diluted history.

That dilution gives us a strange history, a history that is collapsible, meaning it can be folded and opened at convenience. And that folding and opening varies with change of power, people and parties switching history like shifting gear. We are going back and forth with what we can forget and what we can remember, treating history like a scratch book that will never be final.

In Jorge Luis Borges' novel Funes, the Memorious, the eponymous character never forgets anything. Every bit of information he apprehended remained etched forever in memory until one day all his knowledge began to jumble in his head. Funes felt congested, and he was no longer accessible to either information or impetus. Too much remembering proves fatal in the end and he died young.

For us as a nation, the concern lies elsewhere. We are remembering to forget and forgetting to remember as we keep changing history from one version to another. It is creating stress on us no doubt, but it is also crea- ting stress on history, which is being erased and etched at our pleasure.

History will get distorted in that stress and that is the minimum we can expect to happen. But here is a warning shot for all of us. If distorted memory makes dysfunctional mind, what will be the impact of distorted history? Think of Funes to know the answer. Having too much to remember and too much to forget might prove fatal in the end, unless we start cleaning up the mess right now.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.