Did Bangabandhu mean to say only three lakhs died in 1971?

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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