No country "India" before 1947

 

Sir Charles Wilkins: The founder of "Hinduism."

 

Refutation of anti-Chinese propaganda regarding Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang by the Western and Indian medias

Is Pakistan the biggest "begger state" as commonly propagated?

 The purpose of this post is not to insult other countries, but rather question the commonly propagated claims against Pakistan.

IMF bailouts do not mean that Pakistan always needs them. Efforts are being made to improve economic stability, attract investment, and implement long-term structural reforms to reduce the need for repeated bailouts.

 However, other countries have received more foreign aid than Pakistan for multiple decades: (open link in new tab by right clicking and click to enlrage):

 

We the people of Pakistan, irrespective of religion, are the true Indians

Pakistan was created to allow Muslims to live as free citizens without the fear of being dominated by a resurgent, occasionally hostile, Hindu majority. However, not feeling secure even in independence, Pakistani people have driven themselves to a social and historical narrative that strives to align our genetic origins with our religious roots in the East.

In pursuit of this goal, we have also shed our heritage; the very values and customs that defined a nation. 

Some of these trends to de-link from the indigenous Indian society started a millennium ago in an atmosphere of insecurity due to frequent armed incursions from the Western passes. 

After independence, the Pakistani nation should have felt secure enough to display affinity with this land but then the religious zealots took us on a confounded and misleading trajectory.

At the outset, let it be clear that there is no illusion about religion being an important factor in the lives of people all over the world. 

Even in this age of relative atheism, “living together” and secularism in the liberal Western countries, where people have been estranged from religion, the church continues to hold a visibly important place in society.

 Irrespective of the level of affinity with religion, births, deaths and marriages are often solemnized as religious events in the church by a priest. 

Even under the communist regimes, where religion was officially abolished and legally suppressed for a hundred years, people continue to find solace in divine convictions.

We in Pakistan have employed religion as a pivot to distance ourselves from our own land, culture, history and heritage. 

There has been little realization that in attempting to be what we are not and in rejecting what we are, we will be lost as a people. Being neither here nor there implies that we are nowhere. 

We have an apt proverb in Lashkari for this situation that describes a creature as one half partridge and the other half a quail. That is our true description too.

In trying to move away from being Indians, we have induced ourselves to be Arabesque or Persianate. 

Now, of course, the Arabs, Persians and especially Turks are our closest social and religious kith and kin, our natural allies and we feel a natural affinity for them. 

A large section of our people carries their genes, as well as habits of dress, food, culture and surnames. 

However, we belong to the South Asian Subcontinent. We are neither Arabs, nor Turks, nor Persians. Even if we try to be one of them, we shall become unacceptable intruders and imposters. 

Try telling an Arab that in being a Syed, one is an Arab; or telling a Turk that one’s surname of Bokhari entitles one to be a Turk; or a Persian that being a Shirazi by name, one is Persian.

Instead of acceptance, such a claim can only raise a mocking smirk!

 One staggering loss in this identity crisis has been a name that has been appropriated by our Eastern neighbor. 

We are children of the Indus. 

Most of the country and its nearly entire grain producing farmlands are drained by this river and its numerous large and small tributaries.

 There are three major geographical divisions of the Subcontinent.

 One of them is the Vindhya Hill ranges that separate North and South India. 

The second is the gentle hump separating the east-flowing Ganges and its tributaries and the West-flowing Indus and its tributaries – this distinguishes the modern nations of Pakistan and Bharat.

The Persians called the land Hindush, a Sanskrit equivalent of Sindhu, which was the historical local reference to the Indus River. 

Even the ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as “The people of the Indus”. 

We, the people of Pakistan were therefore in error in simply relinquishing the name ‘India’ to our eastern neighbor. It is our name.

The great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata tells us that Bharat, meaning the ‘Cherished’, was a descendant of the Lunar dynasty and was the ancestor of Kauravas and Pandavas, two antagonists of that epic battle. 

We are also told that he sacrificed horses on the banks of the Yamuna, the Saraswati and the Ganges, but none for the Indus. 

Bharat, therefore, is the proper religious, cultural and natural name of a country that reveres the Mahabharata and the Ganges.

That the people beyond the Indus were called Indoos or Hindus, who happened to be of a different religion, is a geographical allusion and not a religious one. 

Nevertheless, we the people of Pakistan, irrespective of their religion, are the true Indians; the inhabitants of the land of the Indus. 

Of course this cultural loss has now gained permanence as Bharat and India are the official names of our eastern neighbor but we need to be mindful of our cultural loss in losing our rightful alternate name.

The second loss is that of historical narrative. This is a great loss and has multiple dimensions. 

The Subcontinent was ruled by Sultans of Turkic and Persian origin for seven hundred years, from the Ghaznavid raids in or about 1000 AD to Nader Shah’s invasion in 1739 AD. 

These ruling families, their fellow migrant noble compatriots and their chroniclers legitimately traced their history to their own lands of origin. 

Unfortunately, this trend, fueled by the religious class, crept in the psyche of most of the Subcontinent’s Muslims. 

My paternal grandfather’s great grandfather converted to Islam. He was a migrant from Kashmir to Amritsar. My family had lived in the valley for centuries since the Aryan irruption from Central Asia. 

How do I shun or escape this history and at what point do I cut short my past and dishonestly develop factitious links to some prominent town or personality of the erstwhile Abbasid province of Khorasan? 

This is not to say that those who do so, believing that to be their factual lineage, are wrong but the question still stands: at what point in time does one start belonging to the land that has nourished one’s forefathers and delete the various prefixes and suffixes that indicate them to be progeny of intruders and raiders of this land?

When renouncing the history of our part of the land, we have become alienated from some of the sons of this soil who should have done us proud.

The first of these is the dignified Raja Porus who was born in the Punjab and his kingdom extended over the Chaj Doab – the land falling between the rivers Jhelum and Chenab. 

His blood descendants are more likely to be living amongst us rather than across the border. We should claim him as one of our heroes.

There is hardly any reason for repudiating his legacy from our national narratives especially when the famous battle of the Hydaspes, between the ancient Punjabi armies of Porus and Greek forces of Alexander the Great was fought in 326BC. 

That happened 900 years before Islam and 300 hundred years before Christianity came into being. 

We live on an ancient land that was a thriving concern much before these religions came into existence. We should be proud of that.

Taxila – Takshashila – of the ancient world- was the centre of a great civilization. One of its greatest luminaries was Chanakya, also known as Kautilya. 

He was a philosopher, a political scientist and an economist. 

His Arthasastra is perahps the first ever treatise on politics, statecraft and economics, predating Machiavelli’s The Prince by 1,800 years. 

He mentored Chandragupta, the architect of the Mauryan Empire and served as his Chief Minister. 

He was in his 40s when Alexander traversed from north to south through the land that constitutes all four provinces of Pakistan. 

He helped in defeating and expelling the Greeks from Punjab to well across the Indus. 

He is perhaps the greatest Indian of the ancient world and he was born and raised in Taxila; on the northern slopes of Islamabad’s Margalla Hills.

For some reason, we in Pakistan today portray Chanakya as a villain and a demon whereas he was a realist and understood the complexities of governing a large empire populated with diverse nationalities.

 He was a great philosopher of political science and laid the foundations of this discipline of scholarship. 

His appearance in the sketches available on the internet casts him as a typical temple priest. 

They are images conceived by a Brahmanical mindset and may or may not bear any similarity to the historical Chanakya. However, that is immaterial.

 He, too, lived much before the advent of Islam or Christianity and Pakistanis should not hold a religious grudge against persons of pre-Islamic times.

We should be proud that our land – in the neighborhood of our capital city – gave birth to this sage.

 We could even establish a department in Taxila university in his name to teach political science and political economy, the subjects that he conceived.

Among so many others, another local achievement of great significance that we have neglected to tell our children is the fact that the oldest mathematical manuscript in the world was found at Bakhshali, a village north-east of Mardan.

The document, carbon dated to AD 224-383, contains the first recorded zero in history. 

The 70 leaves of birch bark contain mathematical rules, problems and their solutions in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, on topics of fractions, square roots, progressions and equations of linear and quadratic type. 

That is a lot of modern calculations. 

No wonder that India is acclaimed as the original home of numerals  and mathematics!

 It flourished in the regions encompassing the Taxila civilization from where it spread eastwards to the rest of the Subcontinent and westwards to the Iranian plateau and beyond.

The cultural and scientific achievements that are the legacy of the Gandhara civilization are primarily our heritage and not necessarily that of the people of the Ganga-Yamuna or trans-Narmada regions who now take the overwhelming amount of credit for these inventions.

It is actually the ancestors of modern-day Pakistanis who have given numerals and mathematics to the world. 

We should feel that pride and claim the honor.

The next part of this series will discuss our lost heritage in terms of festivals, names and religious figures.

Author of the article, Parvez Mahmood, retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and historical issues.

 

The concept of Pakistan in the Vedas

 By Koenraad Elst

 Many northwestern tribes were are at war with Vedic kingdoms from the rest of India, similar to Pakistan's position in today's time.

Note:  Some faulty terminology has been edited but everything else is the same.

 Introduction
The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus river, seem ill-chosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign “5000 years of Pakistan”. The “king-priest” apparently is an officiant of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison d’être for Pakistan’s very existence, he was a leading figure in a false religion belonging to Jahiliyya, the “age of ignorance”. Like the seated yogi surrounded by animals, “Śiva Paśupati”, he must be burning in hell now. As for the “dancing girl”, stark naked and in a defying pose, in today’s Pakistan she would be stoned to death right away.

And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with me, as I will take the reader through a convoluted array of scriptural and historical data, and you will see why this conclusion is anything but far-fetched. Indeed, it is inevitable.

Foreign
The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. Thus, R. Siddhantashastree (1978: History of the Pre-Kali-Yuga India, Delhi: Inter-India Publications, p.11) writes:

“The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as an unholy region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe antagonistic to the civilized Aryans until the time of Sambarana, (...) the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He was the first Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal non-Aryans to a considerable distance.”

The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) by positing an antagonism between “Aryans” and “aboriginals”, contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated by the same author, which has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and then to Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan origins. Then again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this received wisdom while the author has a different scenario in mind: the Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors to subdue the natives of other parts of the Indian subcontinent, notably the Northwest. 

 As Shrikant Talageri (The Rigveda, an Historical Analysis, and The Rigveda and the Avesta, the Final Analysis, Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000 c.q. 2008) has argued, the ancient Vedic suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Brahmanistic veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.

Battle of the Ten Kings
By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the Northwest is already populated by cognate tribes speaking a Eurasian ("Indo-European") dialect: first, the Druhyu tribe, still remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pūru tribe, but largely already emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the Vedic people themselves at the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking related dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into the Vedic horizon as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the region’s negative aura.

Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pūru tribe from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the Ṛg-Veda (7:18-33-83). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of the tribes and kings, we recognize Iranic (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be “without Indra” and “without the Devas”, who were indeed demonized in Mazdeism; and “without fire-sacrifice”, because in Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldn’t pollute it by throwing things into it. It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic history, Mazdeism had its distinctive features.

 This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathuštra, the supposed reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three generations later, another battle confirms the division of power and territory. In that more even battle, Ṛjāśva, descendant of Vṛṣagira (hence the “Vārṣāgira battle”), and Sahadeva, descendent of Sudās, face the Iranic king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court priest Zarathuštra’s own hymns: Kavi Vištāspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100, 1:122) and the Avestā. 

The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varuṇa, god of the night sky with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (ṛta/aša, seen in Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a “lord” or “mighty one”. The Iranic, who often replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom”. After the Iranic peoples had demonized the Devas/Daēvas, the Indo-Aryans started to demonize the Asuras, and Varuṇa gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much as so-called "Hinduism" and Islam do today.

In theological respect, the Iranic religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic, and in popular publications this account still persists. This was not entirely correct (SkjaervØ, Prods Oktor: “Zarathustra: a Revolutionary Monotheist?”, p. 317-350, in Pongratz-Leisten, Beate: Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake IN 2011), it remained a polytheism, and Zarathuštra with his hyperfocus on one god was strictly speaking a “henotheist”, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding monotheism, their preferred god Varuṇa was the moralist in the Indo-Iranic pantheon (as is apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathuštra’s henotheism. His religion, and possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn-out conflict described in the Ṛg-Veda.

So, Pakistan, which has a Persianized form of Hindui -Lashkari- as national language, can really be said to be the heir of the proto-Iranic tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Brahmanistic worldview.

Other considerations
The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics, the troublesome characters typically come from the Northwest. The Rāmāyaṇa intrigue is caused by Kaikeyī, a co-wife of Rāma’s father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gāndhārī, mother of the enemy Kauravas, and her brother Śakuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of Draupadī, come from Gandhāra in Afghanistan. Mādrī, who triggers the death of king Paṇḍu, cause of the whole war, belongs to the Iranic Madra tribe (apparently related to the Medes).

The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislike’s relevance to the Aryan Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of the Northwest was so consistent and unadulterated that this could not possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the above and other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own Saraswat Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice was not eaten, but wheat products were. They did not consider wheat, which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest, as real food, and treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri 2008:102-106) The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as Pakistan now is to India.

For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, “barbarian”. The word is generally taken to come from Meluhha, the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in Pakistan. So, long before Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called “barbarians” by orthodox Dravidic religions.

Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas is called the Guṅgu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Guṅgu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon, the crescent. And what country has the crescent in its flag?
 

Territorial claims
The ancient Ānavas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already, such wars typically ended in Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they immigrated from Kashmir, after taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was known in the Mazdean Videvdād as the Airiiānām Vaējo, the “seed of the Iranic peoples”, their intermediary Homeland. It was the place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated westwards from Prayāga as part of Yayāti’s branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947, the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.

This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with Pakistan. So, if all else fails, Pakistan can justify its separate existence, its hostility to India and its territorial demands by invoking Vedic testimony.

A breakthrough slogan
The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu hostility to the Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to the territories now constituting Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies shedding the AIT, so much the better.

Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: “Five thousand years of Pakistan!”


 

Refuting the claim of 200,000 rapes during the 1971 'liberation' war

 Lets take a look at what the Bangladeshi journalist Jauhari said soon after the war on the basis of his survey:

"I have spoken to no less than five hundred peoples of different districts and have asked them, ‘Has anyone in your family or among your relatives, friends or acquaintance been raped by Pakistani soldiers?’ None affirmed, everyone said ‘no’. It may be that some of them were ashamed to disclose. Besides, it is not impossible for the Pakistan Army to have a few characterless soldiers. But, how could these produce the figure of two hundred thousand? Moreover’ how was this figure arrived at within a week of the liberation of the country? Who did the survey?" 

 Reference: Tirish Lakher Telesmat (The Riddle of Thirty Lakh), Asha Prokashani, 435 Elephant Road,Dhaka -1217, 1994: 14.

So its clear that rape was not endemic or the rule in 1971. The Pakistan Army had to run the civil administration of East Pakistan, feed its people and fight Indian infiltration as well as Mukti Bahini.

Its obvious that the number and stories of rapes have been exaggerated, like the numbers and stories of killings. Dr Sarmila Bose couldn't find any rape cases in her case studies and field work in Bangladesh. Even though she had heard from others that there had been rapes in the cases and villages she was studying, but the on-the-ground witnesses told her the Army did not harm women and children. That also supports the fact that rape was not endemic in 1971 and that there are a lot of lies and exaggerations floating about.

But where did this 200,000 figure come from?

It comes from a certain Australian surgeon called Dr Geoffrey Davis who came to Bangladesh in 1972 for six months to perform abortions. He estimated that 470,000 women were raped and 200,000 became pregnant. This medically impossible claim of almost 50% pregnancy rate gives away his lie. Anyone with a minimum training in female physiognomy would know that conception rates are 20-25%. He also repeated his absurd hypothesis of 50% pregnancy rate resulting from the "war rapes" more than once in his diary "The Changing Face of Genocide - Bangladesh." Bangladeshi academic Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury in his book "Behind the Myth of Three Million" cited Davis' medically ludicrous claim of 50% pregnancy rate to show that Davis was lying. Dr Chowdhury also wondered where all these women were. Despite being a Bangladeshi, he didn't know any woman who had been raped.

In his diary he also claimed that 150,000-170,000 of the 200,000 women had already had abortions by the time he got there.[1] That contradicts his earlier claim in a 1972 New York Times article that 5,000 pregnancies had already been terminated by "crude" methods.[2] He also made other preposterous claims like the Bangladeshi population was 90 million (it was actually ~70 million). He claimed in his 2002 interview with Bina D'Costa that he was doing 100 abortions a day while a "variable number" were happening in other towns.[3] Yet in a New York Times article from 1972 he said he did 100 abortions in Dhaka in his first month while a "variable number" were happening in other towns..[3]

His self contradictions, medically impossible claims and wrong statistics completely nullify his value as a credible source for any claim. His allegations about Tikka Khan also reveal a certain prejudice against Pakistan. He made a number of wild claims, jumping from one wildly high figure to the next using faulty methodologies. In one instance he claimed that since 1.1 million women were of childbearing age it was fair to assume that a third of them were raped. He also claimed that there were 1500 pregnancies per thana. This is contradicted by Jauhuri (a Bangladeshi) who found that he couldn't find anyone in any district who knew about any rape incident. Its obvious that Geoffrey Davis (a foreigner to Bangladesh) was lying.

The National Board of Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation Program (BWRP) used the following method. It claimed that two women had gone missing from each thana (police station) each day between 26 March and 16 December (270 days). Since there were 480 thanas at the time they multiplied 480 x 270 x 2 to arrive at a figure of 268,200. It then subtracted 68,000 to allow for women who might have been missing for "other reasons." This is how it arrived at a figure of 200,000 women raped.[4]

 But this is a baseless methodology. It depends on the premise that 2 girls went missing each day from each thana. This premise has no evidence. How did the Board figure out that 2 women were going missing each day everywhere? Were the thanas keeping records? Moreover, it discounts the fact that women would have been going to India as refugees. As we have seen the Bangladeshi journalist Jauhuri toured the various districts and couldn't find anyone who knew a case of rape.

Nevertheless the claim of 200,000 women has been repeated everywhere just because it was claimed by the Bangladeshi government (with no proper count). It was mentioned by Susan Brownmiller in her 1975 book "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape." That book was important because it changed how the world viewed rape in general. But she only wrote 7 pages in her book on the 1971 rapes. And she gave no source for her assertion of 200,000 rapes and 25,000 pregnancies. She also gave no source for most of her other assertions. The closest reference she gives to any primary source are some quotations of a couple of girls' cases mentioned by the journalist Aubrey Menen in her New York Times article in 1972.

 The Bengali Hindu academic Bina D'Costa (who confesses in her book that she abhors Pakistanis) cites Brownmiller for her claim of 25,000 pregnancies. But she cleverly adds the words "Official documents suggest" to give a veneer of documentation to the unsourced and baseless claim of "25,000 pregnancies."

Its also interesting that the Australian feminist Germaine Greer announced back in 1972 that she was going to Bangladesh to interview Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers. She even wrote an article called "The Rape of the Bengali Women" for The Sunday Times back in 1972. Its been cited by feminist scholars such as Nayanika Mookherjee in their works on the 1971 rapes. Yet the same Germaine Greer now says that the story of 300,000 raped women in Bangladesh was "not true." She also says that the idea that the Pakistani commanders used rape in Bangladesh as a policy "was never stood up" and an "urban myth."[5]

Bangladeshis don't know what has happened to most of the "raped women." There are no records of the rehabilitation centres for the rape victims or information of how long they lasted or what happened to their inmates. This shows that the Bangladesh is hiding something. Bangladeshi academic Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury suggests that all this information has been hidden/destroyed because the data does not support the claim of mass rape at the scale which Bangladesh officially alleges. According to Dr M Abdul Mumin Chowdhury one of the later day "myth-makers" in 1974 could only report that 100 of these women had been given into marriage. Sarmila Bose also could not find any report from the rehabilitation centres.

  In her book "Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia" Bina D'Costa mentions it was extremely difficult for her to find any rape victim or war baby. Another researcher of the same topic, Yasmin Saikia, had the same problem finding "rape victims" and "war babies." Both assumed that this was because rape victims don't want to expose themselves. However, there is also the explanation that they just do not exist at the scale which is alleged, which is why they can hardly find anyone.

A similar explanation can also be given for why, when ten thousand Bengali "freedom fighters" came forward to marry these women, hardly any marriage was reported to have taken place. The Bangladeshi government, according to this New York Times report, [6] blamed it on high dowries demanded by the grooms. But the true reason is probably because the women just did not exist, in those numbers at least.

 There are still some survivors of course who testify to being raped. But their existence does not in any way support the claim of 200,000 women raped. With the scale of rape being alleged, one would expect to find many, many more survivors. Especially in a country like Bangladesh where the rape of women during war is still more openly talked about than a more conservative country like Pakistan. In East Punjab we lost an estimated 50,000 girls during Partition of whom around 20,000 girls came back yet its more common to hear of their stories in Pakistan than it is to hear of the supposedly "much larger number" of raped women in Bangladesh.

He says his colleague Geoffrey Davis "estimated" that 100,000 women had been raped.[9] Actually, Potts was wrong. His friend Davis had actually estimated at least 470,000 rapes. But note how much these figures of "100,000" and "200,000" and "400,000" vary wildly from each other. It shows a lack of serious accounting and wild estimation. These estimates are all a result of bias. Its natural that seeing the "sheer human suffering" of the few girls who actually had abortions, caused these doctors to become overly emotional and sympathetic for them and start exaggerating the extent of Bengali suffering. It was the same sort of Western sympathy for Bengali suffering after the 1970 Bhola cyclone which caused Western journalists in East Pakistan in March to not fully emphasise in their reports the Bengali nationalist attacks on West Pakistanis and Biharis before 25 March

 Malcolm Potts is only a reliable source for the knowledge he is an eye witness of. Not the information he has got and based off hearsay. In his book he says "we offered them abortions and performed hundreds of the operations over several months."10 Note the word "hundreds." Not "thousands." Not "tens of thousands." But "hundreds" only. And that too "over several months." Moreover, its unclear how many of these pregnancies were caused by Pakistani soldiers as opposed to Razakars. For example, he himself in his book gives an anecdote of a Bengali girl who had been impregnated by a Bihari.

In his address to the United States Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session [-Ninety-fourth Congress, First Session] (p.582)[see link] to the US Senate, Leonard Laufe, who was part of the IPPF team which did abortions in Bangladesh, said that 200,000 women had been raped. Then he added these were the Bangladesh government figures. Then he says "of these, 20,000 were pregnant."

Of course, he didn't count the pregnancies. He was merely repeating one of the popular estimates, which all differed wildly. For example, the International Commission of Jurists in its 1972 report on East Pakistan merely relayed that the Bangladeshi government claimed that there 70,000 pregnancies. Susan Brownmiller says in her book said that "25,000" is the generally accepted figure of pregnancies. Of course neither counted. As said earlier when reading Laufe's testimony it is essential to separate the facts he directly observed from those which he was told about by others. For instance, he says that the week before his team arrived "300 new-born babies were found floating down the Ganges River." In the next paragraph he says that he knows of at least 250 suicides within the 2 weeks before he arrived.

The question is, how does Dr Laufe know of these cases. He obviously does not know these suicide cases personally since he himself admits they happened before his arrival nor did he himself see or count those babies in the river. Who told him? And how do we know that whoever told him were not exaggerating figures and stories like in so many other things in this conflict? Likewise. Dr Laufe says that "we are aware of literally thousands of criminal abortions that were performed by midwives out in the villages in which breen branches or sticks from trees were cut, inserted through the cervix as a foreign object, and we saw many who came in with these sticks protruding out of their abdominal wall, so that its sights were not nice" Now Dr Laufe obviously also did not see these "literally thousands" of criminal abortions that he claims to be aware of.

All we know from his testimony is that many women came to his team's clinic with sticks protruding out of their abdominal wall. He doesn't specify how many when he says "many." Meanwhile, an obituary in the Los Angeles Times by Elaine Woo [see link] for Harvey Karman, the other doctor who was part of the IPFF team, says that he "was part of a humanitarian mission to terminate the pregnancies of 1,500 Bangladeshi women and girls who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers." Its obvious that the various statistics on the number of pregnancies are all wild speculation and lack an accounting basis. So almost nothing can be reliably said.

In her journal article "Available Motherhood: Legal technologies, `state of exception' and the dekinning of `war-babies' in Bangladesh" [11] Nayanioka Mookherjee says:  

 ‘Medical help’ was organized under the auspices of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF London) and USAID. These organizations donated money, set up abortion clinics, provided medicines and retained the services of abortion providers and gynaecologists from the US, the UK and Australia – people who not only provided safe abortions for thousands of women who had become pregnant through rape, but also trained local doctors. Notable among them were Harvey Karman, Malcolm Potts (then the medical director of IPPF), Geoffrey Davis and Leonard Laufe, who set up ‘industrial scale procedures’ (Murphy, n.d.) of abortion. These ‘abortion centres’ were set up in middle-class residential areas in Dhaka. They alone terminated 95 percent of the pregnancies in Bangladesh occurring as a result of wartime rape. The centres performed more than 100 abortions in the first month of their existence, and 2500 overall. 

So overall there were only 2500 abortions? Yet we have been hearing false claims of 25,000 pregnancies. Going by Mookherjee's word that these were 95% of the pregnancies resulting from wartime rape in Bangladesh, that increases the number of abortions/pregnancies to 2632. Justice Sobhan, who apparently headed War Rehabilitation Organisation in Bangladesh also gave a figure of overall 2,300-2,500 abortions. (But keep in mind that Justice Sobhan might be exaggerating. He is an involved source). The probability of exaggeration even in these figures of 2,300-2,500 abortions is possible. After all when Marcus Franda did ‘Random checks at the local level’ in 1972 he saw that Awami League functionaries had ‘invariably’ exaggerated victim numbers between three and ten times. That was for deaths. It is possible that the same applies for the number of rape victims. If Awami League officials had a habit of exaggeration, such that a foreign observer had to say they had invariably inflated casualty figures, then it is also not far-fetched that a Bengali judge would do the same. 

Next comes the issue of war babies. There were Western reporters in early 1972 estimating that 5,000 war babies would be born. However, foreign couples who came to Bangladesh looking to adopt war babies found that the number of "war babies" born was way lower.12 For example, there were only 21 "war babies" in Mother Teresa's shelter of whom 15 were adopted by Canadian couples in July 1972. The remaining 6 were reported to have died later. Its also known that children born in shelters like Deva Sadan and Shishu Bhavan were not necessarily war babies, but also included orphans, foundlings, "illegals" (not necessarily fathered by Pakistani soldiers).[13]

 By December 1973 one newspaper article claimed that nearly 200 war babies had already been adopted abroad and about another 50 were still awaiting adoption.[13] Its unclear how the paper figured out that these babies were fathered by Pakistani soldiers (as opposed to others like Razakars). The paper also mentions what I referred to above; that over 2000 pregnancies were terminated in the clinics. (Although we can't be sure that all women seeking abortions were pregnant from soldiers or were seeking abortions for other reasons).

The 15 war babies adopted by Canadian couples in 1972 were obviously part of the 200 "war babies" mentioned above. But it gets fishy when one reads the accounts, in Mustafa Chowdhury's book,[14] of how these 15 children were born in Mother Teresa's shelter. Their mothers who gave birth to them were anonymous women who came to the shelter to give birth and left. They might not have all been rape victims. They might just have been poor mothers trying to get rid of unwanted children or orphans. Could be any reason. Bangladesh did not exactly have a transparent and accurate recording system. Sarmila Bose gives an example in her article "Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh War" of a mental girl (with no memory or recollection of herself) who we really know nothing about but she is still paraded around without evidence as a woman "raped by Pakistan Army."
 

 

While Champa was supposed to have received treatment at the rehabilitation centre for two years (the centre was set up in 1972), the register of the mental hospital showed her admission there to be in 1972. The hospital register noted that Champa "might have been raped by the Pakistani army", while Champa said she remembered nothing about that year or how she ended up at the mental hospital. Mookherjee, clearly worried about the implications of what she has discovered, writes, "I must hastily add that I draw attention to these minute disjunctions to explore the assumptions that might have influenced the narrativisation of Champa's 'story' on the part of the journalist."

Mookherjee refers more than once to "200,000 women" raped in East Pakistan with- out questioning the basis for this number, and with regard to Champa, she argues that if forgetting is her way of expressing her trauma (of rape by the Pakistan army - which Mookherjee has just shown is a claim made by others and without evidence), then she should be allowed to remain silent. In conclusion she writes, "This paper should not be read as a negation of the violence of sexual violence of 1971". But, of course, Mookherjee's paper is a negation of the sup posed rape of Champa by the Pakistan army!

All we really know about Champa after reading Mookherjee's paper is that she is a mentally ill woman who has spent several decades at the Pabna Mental Hospital. She says she remembers nothing about 1971 or how she came to be at the hospital. The available evidence does not indicate whether she was raped by anyone. Nor is there evidence that she ever came into contact with the Pakistan army. The elaborate newspaper story about her "rape" and her "eyes brimming with tears" written by the journalist was a fabrication, as Mookherjee conclusively shows. The journalist had not even met Champa. His source was the non-governmental organisation which was trying to remove Champa from the only place she knew as home - the mental hospital - and parade her in Dhaka as a rape victim.

  In another interesting anecdote mentioned about Mother Teresa, it is said she went to one of the Pakistan Army's supposed "rape camps" but she could not find any girls. All she found was hair and coats.[15] But we can't take the hair and coats as evidence of anything, There were a lot of forgeries in this war. For example, a Bihari author Aquila Ismail once said in an interview to The Express Tribune newspaper that she and her mother and sister were put in a refugee camp before migrating to Pakistan where the camp organisers told Western reporters that they were Bengali women who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers.[16]

In his book Blood and Tears, Qutubuddin Aziz also mentions how Indians showed some pictures to Western correspondents which "were claimed to be of the Bengali female victims of the Pakistan Army’s alleged atrocity; a close look at the physical features and dresses of the pictured females disclosed that they were West Pakistanis, not Bengalis" God knows how many more fabrications and misrepresentations are out there. Its a very poorly documented and misrepresented conflict where a lot of propaganda went in.

 Conclusion
Assuming that there were 2632 abortions + 250 war babies adopted by 1973 + (guessing here) an equal number of war babies who were kept that would bring us to around 3132 pregnancies. Given that the average conception rate is 20%-25% we arrive at a figure of between 12,000 and 15,000 rapes.

And this is of course assuming that these figures of two and a half thousand pregnancies and 200-250 war babies for adoption were not in themselves forgeries by the government of Bangladesh which has destroyed all the documents about the women in 1971.

Moreover, its also known that, especially while the Pakistan Army was fighting at the border, the Razakars were active inside. There seem to have been more razakars (135,000?) active than there were Pakistani soldiers. Much or perhaps even most of these pregnancies may have been a result of rapes by Razakars and not Pakistani soldiers.