Talk:Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War

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Repetition of Paragraph

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The first paragraph of the International Reactions header is repeated twice. Zargham Ali (talk) 14:51, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Done--❯❯❯Pravega 16:30, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Not All

Not all Imams and Mullahs said that in support of Pakistan, Many Imams and other religious scholars supported the Bangladesh Liberation Cause or condemned the assault. BangladeshiEditorInSylhet (talk) 14:38, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Edits

@Nomian: Do you have any sources to dispute the content you are reverting so far? Just citing the lack of existence of a talk page discussion is not enough. See WP:STONEWALL. Nxcrypto Message 00:14, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

I have restored the status quo version before the edit wars began. This version is more than a year old and much more stable than the version I reverted. There are a lot of issues with the reverted version, some of which I am explaining below:

The version says "Bengali Muslims were targeted in this pogrom due to supposedly retaining Hindu traditions." That is a blatant WP:OR since there is no source that says "Bengali Muslims" were "targeted", it is the Hindus who were targeted according to the sources. The quotation from the cited source says "Muslim Bengali women have been raped by Pakistani soldiers", yes they were raped but the targets were essentially Hindus. see Islam, M. Rafiqul (2019). National Trials of International Crimes in Bangladesh: Transitional Justice as Reflected in Judgments. BRILL. pp. 175. ISBN 978-90-04-38938-0. quote: "The Pakistani occupation army and its local collaborators targeted mostly the Hindu women and girls for rape and sexual violence."

The version also says "Bengali Muslim men were targets of rape by West Pakistani soldiers as well." That is another WP:OR, as I said, there is no source that says Bengali Muslims were the targets. The cited source here says "Oral testimonies I have gathered suggest that Bengali Muslim men were raped", this is a personal opinion of the author, and thus WP:PRIMARY, fails WP:HISTRS. Yet, the source in no part says that they were the "targets".

I would also recommend reading The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass, a breakthrough research on this genocide where he states, there was mounting evidence that among the Bengalis, the Hindu minority was doubly marked out for persecution. Essentially, it is the targeting of the Hindus that makes it a case for genocide. You can also read a review of the book by PTI, here. A.Musketeer (talk) 01:14, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

What you recommend has no bearing on this article. You admit that Bengali Muslim women were raped (which is what the citation says), though you have omitted this entirely from the article.

The University of Florida Press reference says "Muslim Bengali women have been raped by Pakistani soldiers to "cleanse" them of their alleged tendencies to uphold their Hindu traditions." Yet, you removed that as well. Nxcrypto Message 04:32, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

As I see it, Nomnian and A.Musketeer appear to wanting to portray this topic as a religious conflict, when it was in fact an ethnic one. The citations that were added to the article meet the WP:RS policy and if the wording could be improved, that's fine. But to delete the citations and content entirely reeks of POV pushing and censorship. desmay (talk) 16:41, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Leaving the aspersions aside, personal observations are not WP:RS, much less WP:HISTRS. @Nxcrypto: are you sure that the award-winning book by Gary Bass is not relevant here? It is in fact the most authoritative source you could find on this topic. The first two sentences in the lead says "members of the Pakistani military and Razakar paramilitary force raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Most of the rape victims of the Pakistani Army and its allies were Hindu women." It perfectly states that Bengali women of all religions were raped but Hindus were disproportionately affected which is aligned with what the sources say. I would also quote the East Pakistan Staff Study (1972) of International Commission of Jurists, "In our view there is a strong prima facie case that the crime of genocide was committed against the group comprising the Hindu population of East Bengal." A.Musketeer (talk) 21:12, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

A.Musketeer, leave false warnings on my talk page all that you want, but at the end of the day, you have removed material that talks about how non-Hindus were affected from this article. And the citations that you removed are reliable. desmay (talk) 23:33, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

I am not surprised that you have nothing to say about the sources and quotations I have discussed here. Pushing a POV that undermines the genocidal claims by mispresenting the sources, adding WP:UNDUE to the lead, and non-WP:HISTRS sources would always be removed. A.Musketeer (talk) 00:57, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Just because you say something doesn't make it true. Every single one of the citations that you removed meets WP:HISTRS. You cannot just use one source to guide a single narrative of the article. Per WP:NPOV, Misplaced Pages must represent "fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic." You have removed material about Bengali Muslim victims, despite scholarly sources discussing this. Nxcrypto Message 16:45, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

You are right that per WP:NPOV we are supposed to describe the significant views about the event and I have just shown you that both the legal and academic consensus is that Hindus were the main targets of the perpetrators (which includes both the Pakistani military and Bengali Muslim razakars) in that genocide. Undermining this by portraying Bengali Muslims as main victims with random sources out of google while ignoring the authoritative award-winning sources like Bass (2013) would be POV-pushing through false-balancing. A.Musketeer (talk) 20:21, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

You should read up the policy that you linked here. False balancing is when fringe viewpoints (that are debunked by Modern academia) are given equal credibility along with the scholarly consensus in an article. The claim that Muslim women were also raped in the War is not fringe at all but a well documented fact that is covered by scholarly sources and the rest of sources also state that although Hindu women were disproportionately affected they were not the sole victims like you are POV pushing here in a futile attempt at censorship for the past 2 years.

Shirazi, Faegheh (27 September 2009). Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women's Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-5910-5. "Muslim Bengali women have been raped by Pakistani soldiers to "cleanse" them of their alleged tendencies to uphold their Hindu traditions. "
Misra, Amalendu (13 May 2013). Politics of Civil Wars: Conflict, Intervention & Resolution. Routledge. p. 56. ISBN 978-1-134-14130-2. "During the civil war in East Pakistan (Bangladesh, 1971), for instance, an estimated 200,000 Bengali Muslim women were raped by the West Pakistani Urdu-speaking Muslim soldiers. In addition, around 25,000 women were forcibly impregnated in order to crush the demand for a separate homeland for Bengalis. "
Branche, R.; Virgili, F. (2012-10-26). "The Bengali Muslim gendered and racialised". Rape in Wartime. Basingstoke: Springer. p. 72-73. ISBN 978-1-137-28339-9.

This source analyses the motivations behind the atrocities committed by Pakistani army upon Bangladeshi muslims , including the rapes on women.

In fact none of the reliable sources deny that muslim women were raped so your claims that this is "false balancing" are not only false but also a misrepresentation.

Bartrop, Paul R.; Jacobs, Steven Leonard (2014-12-17). Modern Genocide . Santa Barbara, California: Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 1866-. ISBN 1-61069-364-7. "Some estimates suggest that as many as 200,000 women were raped. Hindus were targeted the most. "
Rashid, Azra (2019). "Introduction". Gender, Nationalism, and Genocide in Bangladesh. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-138-34644-4. "In Bangladesh, girls and women experienced the war of 1971 from all of those vantage points and more: as victims of direct violence, girls were raped or killed; Hindu women were doubly marginalized in a nationalist war of liberation in a Muslim country and therefore became more vulnerable "

This source in particular talks about issues faced by Muslim women in Bangladesh with regards to islamic laws and fundamentalists and states that Muslim women also faced stigma and ostracism due to rapes committed by Pakistani army.

Hashmi, T. (2000-01-01). Women and Islam in Bangladesh. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-41180-1. "Muslim women’s rights to obtain divorce through the court, as under Sharia law and the Family Law, also remain unattained in most cases.... Victims of rape are reluctant to go to the police because of harassment and it is difficult for them to prove that they have been violated by men. The social stigma is so intense that thousands of Bangladeshi women, raped by Pakistani soldiers during the Liberation War in 1971, were not accepted by their own family members. " Nxcrypto Message 03:46, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

efn
"As mentioned earlier, in the formation of Pakistan, Islam was the sole principle of nationhood unifying two widely disparate units, separated not only geographically but also by sharp cultural and linguistic differences. Bengali Islam bore the imprint of different historical and social forces and was infused with beliefs and practices which represented the popular culture of Bengal. Revivalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had sought to revitalise and purify Islam in Bengal, campaigning against what they regarded as “innovations, accretions and deviations” of “Indianised”, “half converts”, “nominal Muslims” and therefore “unreliable co-religionists”.19 Successive regimes in Pakistan drew on these precedents when they embarked upon a strategy of forcible cultural assimilation of Bengalis into the new Islamic nation state. The so-called explicit intentions explain the nature of rapes by the West Pakistani army against Bangladeshi women and the publicity they received. It could have been the inevitable “by-product” of poor discipline or of soldiers who were briefly “out of control”. This episode of mass violation was part of a campaign to rescue “Islam in danger” and to populate Bangladesh with a new race of “pure” Muslims and to dilute, weaken and destroy Bengali nationalism.20 The imposition of religious, territorial, racialised and gendered boundaries was primarily marked on women’s bodies and the womb. Rape of women in Bangladesh was apparently justified by the notion of maal-e-gonemat (the booty of war).21 It became the essential means to change the racial makeup of the “Hinduised Muslim”. The Kafer, who were seen to be small-boned, short, dark, lazy, effeminate, bheto (rice and fish-eating and cowardly), half-Muslim Bengalis of the river plains were to be converted into broad-boned, tall, fair, wheat-eating, warrior-like, brave, resilient, manly Muslims of the rough topography of West Pakistan.22 Thus tropes of food, landscape and physicality created a distinction between Bengali Muslims and the West Pakistani army. This arose from historical, racial, religious, cultural and ethnic differences between East and West Pakistan. Ultimately the distinction can be traced back to a racialised characterisation of the Bengalis that had been effected by the British in the later nineteenth century, and which the West Pakistani military elite might have internalised."

efn

"As mentioned earlier, in the formation of Pakistan, Islam was the sole principle of nationhood unifying two widely disparate units, separated not only geographically but also by sharp cultural and linguistic differences. Bengali Islam bore the imprint of different historical and social forces and was infused with beliefs and practices which represented the popular culture of Bengal. Revivalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had sought to revitalise and purify Islam in Bengal, campaigning against what they regarded as “innovations, accretions and deviations” of “Indianised”, “half converts”, “nominal Muslims” and therefore “unreliable co-religionists”.19 Successive regimes in Pakistan drew on these precedents when they embarked upon a strategy of forcible cultural assimilation of Bengalis into the new Islamic nation state. The so-called explicit intentions explain the nature of rapes by the West Pakistani army against Bangladeshi women and the publicity they received. It could have been the inevitable “by-product” of poor discipline or of soldiers who were briefly “out of control”. This episode of mass violation was part of a campaign to rescue “Islam in danger” and to populate Bangladesh with a new race of “pure” Muslims and to dilute, weaken and destroy Bengali nationalism.20 The imposition of religious, territorial, racialised and gendered boundaries was primarily marked on women’s bodies and the womb. Rape of women in Bangladesh was apparently justified by the notion of maal-e-gonemat (the booty of war).21 It became the essential means to change the racial makeup of the “Hinduised Muslim”. The Kafer, who were seen to be small-boned, short, dark, lazy, effeminate, bheto (rice and fish-eating and cowardly), half-Muslim Bengalis of the river plains were to be converted into broad-boned, tall, fair, wheat-eating, warrior-like, brave, resilient, manly Muslims of the rough topography of West Pakistan.22 Thus tropes of food, landscape and physicality created a distinction between Bengali Muslims and the West Pakistani army. This arose from historical, racial, religious, cultural and ethnic differences between East and West Pakistan. Ultimately the distinction can be traced back to a racialised characterisation of the Bengalis that had been effected by the British in the later nineteenth century, and which the West Pakistani military elite might have internalised."

It is very disappointing to see you misrepresenting my comments. I have never said that Bengali Muslims were not raped. Bengalis of all faith were affected, however, Hindus were the main target and were disproportionally affected, your own sources are also saying the same. As I said before, the first two sentences of the lead of this article describes the victims as Bengalis (which includes Muslims as well) and then mentions Hindus as the main victims. Of all religions Hindus are especially mentioned simply because they were especially affected. I don't think it is very difficult to understand. Giving equal weight to both Hindus and Muslims when Hindus were the main target would be WP:UNDUE. A.Musketeer (talk) 21:44, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

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