"Mas-ca-ren-has?" queried a curious Chat Ramilo, obviously struggling
with the many syllabyles of the name, as I showed her the book cover.
Given the Philippines' Spanish colonial heritage, she might have found
the name faintly familiar. But, seeing it at Dhaka, Bangladesh obviously
caused the astonishment.
Actually, one wasn't personally surprised. Like Radharao Gracias, the
maverick legislator from South Goa, my hobby too has been (or should I
say had been?) to keep track of POGs (people of Goan descent) across the
globe, doing all kinds of odd and unusual things.
When I saw Anthony Mascarenhas' book "Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood" at
the Dhaka airport, I didn't think twice before picking it up. That I
wanted to get done with the few Taka left in my pocket, before leaving
back for home, further convinced me to take along a copy of the book. It
was priced at Taka 490, and the Taka-Rupee exchange rate is roughly
ten-to-seven favouring the rupee.
Quite unexpectedly, it didn't end up in my collection of unread books.
Maybe one has long underestimated how fascinating contemporary history
(particularly that pertaining to living memory) can be to me myself.
Maybe one was just bored and had a lot of time to catch in between
journeys (thanks to the navy control of Dabolim and the few slots they
allow for incoming flights, in reality). Maybe it was just that Anthony
Mascarenhas writes so well, in a gripping almost-cinematographic format.
As I waited through a four-hour delay for the Bangladesh Biman
to Kolkata, while rushing to catch the last evening flight to
Mumbai, and also while killing time till the 4:30 am check-in
procedures start at the unearthly hour for the flight to Dabolim,
one kept reading. This exciting story was another excuse to take
a slow bus home, and avoid adding to the (already heavy) load of
fossil fuel emissions. On reaching home, one was within 20 pages
of finish!
Mascarenhas is a journalist of Goan origin, who was based in Pakistan,
went on a tour with the military, and was shocked by what was going on
in Bangladesh. He subsequently shifted to the UK, wrote for some major
papers there, and told the story of what was going on in then East
Pakistan. By some accounts (using this term because I'm not sure), he
was *the* journalist who broke the story about the genocide in East
Pakistan.
There are differing perspectives of how many people were killed in the
civil war that led (with some nudging by India, for its own
geo-political interests) to the break up of Pakistan and the formation
of Bangladesh.
My colleague Partha Sarkar, who co-founded the crazy experiment called
BytesForAll almost seven years ago with me, drew attention to the
slaughter of Bangladeshi intellectuals just before the Pakistani army
moved out of that country. But whether it was three million killed in
East Pakistan/Bangladesh (seen by some as an exaggerated figure) or one
million, the figure is huge enough to warrant serious concern. If you
keep in mind the "five million Jews" figure of World War II, things fall
into context.
This book is about how, after the break-up from Pakistan, the
Bangladeshis themselves ruined things for themselves. It promises to
reveal issues like who killed Mujib (many who grew up in India in the
'seventies would find this a familiar name), who was responsible for the
jail killings, and how General Zia was assassinated.
It is a shocking story of how Bangladesh went in for so many coups in
such a short period, the elected rulers ruined things and betrayed
aspirations, and how military men went in for coup after coup.
Mascarenhas writes in a fascinating style. This book (Hodder and
Stoughton, UKP 4.95 net in the UK, ISBN 0-340-39420-X, pp 186, first
published in 1986) is a follow-up to his 'The Rape of Bangladesh', which
I'm still waiting to read.
Says the cover: "Anthony Mascarenhas, a veteran journalist, has been
closely associated with Bangladesh from the start of its freedom
struggle. In 1971, he left Pakistan to expose in The Sunday Times the
atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in the province which is now
Bangladesh. That article, and his subsequent book, The Rape of
Bangladesh, created a world-wide sensation. In 1972 he won Granada's
Geraldl Barry Award ('What the Papers Say'), and the International
Publishing company's Special Award for reporting the genocide in
Bangladesh. After serving 14 years on The Sunday Times, he is now a
freelance writer."
Anthony Mascarenhas' work about Bangladesh is linked to quite a few
pages in cyberspace. In my favourite collaboratively-crafted Wikipedia
itself, there are links to:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh:_A_Legacy_of_Blood
and other pages also offer references to his work, such as
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_coups_in_Bangladesh
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Mujibur_Rahman
Mascarenhas writes in his preface to his book: "This is a true story; in
many ways a text
