We came across this rather lousy letter sent last year to The Guardian by Serajur Rahman, a retired deputy head,
BBC Bengali Service. He claims that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
mistranslated "lakh" as "million" or was confused in saying
that three million people died in the war in 1971.
Mr. Serajur Rahman claims that "when I explained to him
that Bangladesh had been liberated and he was elected president in his absence.
Apparently he arrived in London under the impression that East Pakistanis had
been granted the full regional autonomy for which he had been campaigning.
During the day I and others gave him the full picture of the war. I explained
that no accurate figure of the casualties was available but our estimate, based
on information from various sources, was that up to "three lakh" (300,000)
died in the conflict."
According to Serajur Rahman, when Sheikh Mujibur met David
Frost later that day, he announced, "three millions of my people"
were killed by the Pakistanis. From that point, the controversy over the number
of death in 1971 started.
Bangladeshi authorities always claimed that three million
people were killed. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission, an official Pakistan
Government investigation, put the figure
at as low as 26,000. The international media and reference books in English by
authors and genocide scholars such as Samuel Totten have also published figures
of up to 3,000,000. It is also a claimed that a further eight to ten million
people fled the country to seek safety in India.
Did Mr. Serajur Rahman write this letter with any particular
intention? Is it possible for a man like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to twist the
number just like that? Or Mr. Serajur Rahman was high when he met Mujib in 1972
or drunk when he wrote this letter?
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