There are now around ten million Bengali people living outside Bangladesh and the West Bengal state of India. Many of them can not read the Bangla language. That there is a shortage of written materials in English about the history of the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 became apparent during the Bangladesh50 celebrations in 2021. Through my conversations with people I realised that knowledge amongst the Bengali diaspora about the events of 1971 was limited and at variance with what I witnessed first hand during the turbulent days leading to and during the freedom fight itself. I am not a historian, I have never written a book, however I was an eyewitness to an historical event. I decided to write something for the benefit of the generation who were born after 1971 and for those who were born abroad. I chose to do it in English because most of them live in countries where English is the state language. I did some reading of available materials in English. I came across narratives which were not true. I felt a substantial amount of the material was based on distorted descriptions of events aimed at gaining political advantage. Many protagonists of those events are still alive and politically active. The events of the Bangladesh liberation struggle are still played out to gain political advantage. It remains a live issue. On 16 December 1971, the day Bangladesh was born, I was 21. I was a student at Dhaka University, the hotbed of radical thinking and political activities in which I was a conscious participant. I saw events as they happened. I heard about some of them from people who witnessed them. I heard about them at a time and at a place very close to where the incidents occurred. While misuse of power and state sponsored violence are major obstacles to expressing the truth, I am old enough not to be frightened. Neither am I tempted by reward. I do not seek political office or profitable public contracts. I feel a moral duty to describe events as I saw them. While I was looking for a publisher for my book in Bangladesh, one told me ‘Bangladesh is now more developed than Pakistan; nobody cares about how it all happened. Nobody will read your book’. I hope he is wrong. He also told me ‘It’s an old story; it's history’. I hope he is right. Commenting on the epic tales of the Ramayana, the grand old man of Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore, said ‘All that happens is not true; a poet’s mind is more true than Ram’s birth place of Ayodhya’. He was a philosopher-poet. He was not an historian. He had little understanding of politics. His mind was different from mine. I do not think we can know history or understand the truth if we refuse to accept the facts as they happened, however unpleasant they might have been. I also wanted to give an impression of what it was like to live through a time of civil war, reporting from the battlefield so to speak. I begin.
