The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War was not merely a military conflict; it was a civilisational rupture that tore through the social fabric of an entire nation, leaving scars that have never properly healed. While we celebrate our victory each December, we have collectively failed to confront the psychological devastation that persists across generations, or to adequately honour those who sacrificed everything in those nine terrible months.
Mujibnagar
One of the most persistent and damaging myths about our liberation struggle concerns the Mujibnagar Government—the provisional government of Bangladesh that operated from April to December 1971. A narrative has taken root, particularly among those who prefer simplified hero-worship over historical complexity, that the leadership of Mujibnagar lived comfortably in exile while freedom fighters died in muddy trenches. This is not merely wrong; it is an insult to those who carried the immense burden of organising a liberation struggle while being stateless and under constant threat.
The Mujibnagar Government, sworn in on April 17, 1971, at Baidyanathtala in Meherpur, operated under extraordinary difficulty. These were not men enjoying cushy exile; they were coordinating a multifaceted war effort while dodging Pakistani intelligence operations, managing a humanitarian catastrophe involving one crore refugees, and conducting desperate diplomacy efforts to win international recognition. Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad worked himself to exhaustion, orchestrating the formation of the Mukti Bahini's eleven sectors, establishing training camps, managing arms procurement, and creating administrative structures for a country that didn't yet legally exist.
The government established a functioning bureaucracy in exile, organised revenue collection in liberated zones, ran a clandestine radio station (Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra) that sustained morale across occupied Bangladesh, and coordinated with the Indian government while maintaining Bangladesh's distinct identity and autonomy. They managed internal political tensions between various factions, dealt with the complications of armed groups operating semi-independently, and planned for post-war governance—all while knowing that capture meant certain death.
To dismiss their contribution as comfortable exile is to fundamentally misunderstand what leadership in crisis entails. Wars are not won by battlefield courage alone; they require logistics, diplomacy, intelligence, coordination, and vision. The Mujibnagar Government provided exactly these elements. Without their organisational framework, the courage of individual fighters would have amounted to sporadic resistance rather than coordinated liberation.
Wounded generation
What we rarely discuss with adequate gravity is the complete dislocation of an entire generation. The 1971 war was not a distant conflict fought by professional soldiers; it was a catastrophe that invaded every home, disrupted every life, and fundamentally altered the trajectory of millions of individual existences.
The exodus of one crore refugees to India represents one of the largest forced migrations in human history, but statistics obscure the human reality. Families that had built lives over generations abandoned everything within hours. The educated middle class, the students who would have been our doctors, engineers, teachers, and administrators, fled across borders with whatever they could carry. Many never returned; others returned to find their homes occupied, their property looted, their professional networks destroyed.
For those who remained, life became a daily negotiation with death. We lost friends whose names now exist only in fading memories. Some were killed outright by the Pakistani military or their local collaborators. Others simply disappeared—picked up at checkpoints, taken from their homes at night, swallowed by a machinery of violence that left no records and offered no closure. Families still don't know where their sons, brothers, and fathers lie buried.
And then there were our women. The systematic campaign of sexual violence during 1971 represents one of the war's most devastating legacies and one we have most shamefully failed to address. Estimates suggest between 200,000 and 400,000 women were raped during the nine months of conflict. This was not incidental violence; it was a deliberate weapon of war, intended to humiliate, terrorise, and break the spirit of Bangalee resistance.
After liberation, these women—Biranganas (war heroines), as Bangabandhu named them—faced not support and rehabilitation but stigma and abandonment. Many were rejected by their families and communities. Some were forced into sex work, having been rendered "unmarriageable" by the very violence inflicted upon them. Others lived in silence, carrying trauma they could never speak about because our society offered no space for their pain. Their children, born of rape, faced their own discrimination.
Untreated trauma
Here lies perhaps our greatest failure: we never healed. Bangladesh emerged from 1971 with a population carrying massive psychological trauma, and we had neither the concept nor the resources to address it. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not yet part of global consciousness, let alone in a newly independent, desperately poor nation struggling simply to feed its people.
But the absence of a medical framework doesn't make trauma disappear; it simply forces it underground. An entire generation carried unprocessed grief, rage, guilt, and terror into the free Bangladesh. They raised children unhealed, and those children absorbed the unspoken wounds. This is how trauma becomes intergenerational—not through genetics but through the emotional environment of families and societies that cannot acknowledge their pain.
We never had truth and reconciliation commissions. We never created spaces for survivors to tell their stories and be heard. We never provided systematic support for rape survivors or their children. We never helped refugees process the loss of homes and livelihoods. We never allowed freedom fighters to discuss what they had witnessed and done. Instead, we rushed towards nation-building, mistaking silence for strength and suppression for healing.
The consequences persist. Our politics remains poisoned by unresolved questions about collaboration and resistance. Families harbour secret resentments spanning generations. Veterans struggle with memories they cannot share. Women carry shame for the violence committed against them. And all of these fester beneath a surface narrative of triumphant liberation.
The unfinished work
Bangladesh was supposed to be different. We were told we possessed a natural unity—a homogeneous population sharing language, culture, and history. This was always somewhat mythical, but it contained enough truth to inspire hope for a cohesive national identity transcending the religious divisions that had torn apart the subcontinent.
Yet we have squandered this potential. Instead of building on our shared sacrifice in 1971, we have allowed that very history to become another site of division. Religion has been weaponised for political gain, creating fault lines where solidarity should exist. The spirit of secular Bangalee nationalism that animated our liberation has been systematically undermined by those who prefer a fragmented population to an empowered one.
The time has come to reclaim what we fought for. This means finally, 53 years later, beginning the healing we should have undertaken in 1972. It means creating spaces for the complex truth-telling. It means honouring all who contributed—from Mujibnagar's exhausted administrators to rural fighters to women who survived unspeakable violence. It means acknowledging our wounds rather than performing strength we don't feel.
Most importantly, it means rebuilding the unity that was 1971's promise—not by denying our diversity or suppressing difficult histories, but by recognising that our shared trauma and shared liberation bind us more deeply than any subsequently manufactured division ever could. We are all children of 1971. It is time we began acting like it.
K A S Murshid, an economist, served with the Foreign Ministry of the Mujibnagar Government during the Liberation War in 1971.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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