It seems that Shehbaz Sharif, in a moment of fanatical oratory amid the valleys of Pakistan occupied Kashmir, has declared the recent military clash with India to be an act of divine retribution – a celestial settling of scores for the events of 1971. One recoils not at the audacity of the Pakistani prime minister’s claim, but at its tragic inanity. For it is not merely a historical distortion; it is a criminal desecration of the memory of those who suffered in that grievous chapter of the subcontinent’s history.
Let us then, in the spirit of those who have looked into the abyss of the past with unblinking eyes, speak with the clarity that truth demands. The dismemberment of East Pakistan in 1971 was neither the result of divine wrath nor the cunning orchestration of foreign powers. It was the inevitable consequence of a state turning upon its own people. The land that would become Bangladesh was saturated with the blood of its own – poets and professors, mothers and soldiers, peasants and students. The sons and daughters of the same soil were betrayed by a government that saw cultural identity as sedition, linguistic pride as treason, and federalism as a mortal threat to an imagined religious unity.
It was not gods who abandoned Pakistan in 1971. It was generals, presidents, and ideologues – men for whom power meant the silencing of difference. General Ayub Khan’s imperious centralism and General Yahya Khan’s bungled brutality did not merely provoke rebellion; they institutionalised it. By the time Indian troops crossed the border, the Pakistani state had already sown the seeds of its eastern half’s departure. India did not carve Bangladesh into being; it stepped into a conflagration already ignited by callous misrule, and propelled by the tidal force of a people determined to survive.
Pakistan’s hollow assertions
To now claim that a brief military conflict with India – one that dismantled terror infrastructure and inflicted significant damage on Pakistan’s military assets – constitutes “revenge” or “divine justice” is intellectually hollow and politically fraudulent. It is akin to a man striking a match in the middle of a thunderstorm and declaring that he summoned the lightning. No matter how grandly such assertions are made, they neither impress the divine nor mislead the judgement of history.
Indeed, Shehbaz Sharif’s declaration epitomises much of contemporary Pakistan’s political performance. In a nation where history is not studied, but staged, where tragedy is not remembered, but repurposed for applause, the ghosts of Dhaka are not laid to rest. They are periodically resurrected, paraded as props in a spectacle of patriotic grandiloquence.
This is not statesmanship; it is choreography. And the intended audience is not the nation, but the military chief before whom all prime ministers must still genuflect. Sharif’s authority neither derives from popular sovereignty nor the ethical seriousness of democratic leadership. It is tethered to the nods and silences of General Asim Munir, the Field Marshal whose real estate in Rawalpindi commands more power than any elected chamber in Islamabad.
To appear defiant is, for such leaders, more important than to be effective. Thus, battles are imagined where none exist; victories are declared where none have been won; and the stage is lit, not for action, but illusion. But history, that unsentimental witness, does not rest quietly in the archives. It spoke again last month in Dhaka. In the first high-level diplomatic talks between Pakistan and Bangladesh in 15 years, Dhaka issued a statement not of nostalgia, but of moral insistence: a formal apology for the crimes of 1971, and compensation totaling $4.5 billion. It was a demand for justice – the kind of justice that seeks to anchor diplomacy in memory.
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Real wars lie within
Even as Bangladesh seeks warmer ties with Pakistan and recalibrates its regional posture away from India, it refuses to grant Pakistan the comfort of historical amnesia. While Pakistan rewrites textbooks and stages choreographed displays of nationalist pride beneath the Himalayas, Bangladesh continues to inscribe its history in the sober ink of truth. The 1971 War was not a product of Indian meddling. It was the inevitable consequence of internal collapse – political, moral, and administrative. The true agents of Pakistan’s disintegration sat in the barracks of Rawalpindi and mansions of Islamabad. India’s obligatory intervention came not as a deliberate aggression, but as a reluctant response to a human tragedy too immense to ignore.
So, when Shehbaz Sharif speaks of “divine justice,” he evokes the naivety of a courtier. The world sees a child splashing in puddles, thinking he commands the tides. For India, the birth of Bangladesh is not a painful memory, but a verdict rendered. And history has already delivered its judgement.
Pakistan’s real wars, one must insist, lie not across the border, but within. The threats to its future reside not in Indian airspace, but in the backstreets of Quetta and Karachi, in seminaries where doctrine becomes dogma, and in institutions hollowed by fear, corruption, and self-deception. Until the nation faces these inner demons – its treatment of Baloch citizens, its persecution of religious minorities, its subjugation of women, its subservience to military authority – the language of “revenge” will remain a sad euphemism for deflection.
True redemption will not come wrapped in the flag. It will come when Pakistan learns to honour the plurality of its people, to confront its past without evasions, and to lead without disguises. Until then, let Shehbaz Sharif wave his flag in imaginary victories, wrapped in the faded trappings of lost wars. History, after all, does not remember the speeches shouted from mountain tops. It remembers the rivers that ran red with the blood of the silenced.
Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs and Security Studies, at the Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice in Rajasthan. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)