From: bhattach@quip.eecs.umich.edu (sayan bhattacharyya)
Subject: Re: Victory Day / why India intervened in '71
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 04:08:32 GMT

In article <1992Dec21.142125.27327@Princeton.EDU> deb@soil.Princeton.EDU (Arghya Deb) writes:

>Sayan Bhattacharya writes that victory in the Bangladesh liberation war was
>solely the victory of the people of Bangladesh. 

[...]

>As Samit Bannerjee points out in a recent article in SCI, 10000 Indian soldiers
>were killed and an equal number injured. 

[...]

>In this context, any attempt to minimize the sacrifices of the Indian people,
>in particular our brave jawans, is shameful and callous to the extreme. 


I was not calling into question the sacrifice  of Indian soldiers who were 
killed or injured in the exercise. However, that does not affect my contention
that India acted out of self-interest.

Secondly, note that there is a qualitative difference between the death 
of professional soldiers in battle and the death of civilian resistance 
fighters. Professional soldiers are paid to kill and be killed and this 
is part of their job. 

While I am not trying to downplay their bravery, it is nevertheless true that 
they were merely carrying out orders of the GOI. The heroism of the Bangladeshi 
resistance I consider to be of a different order, because the Bangladeshi 
civilians who were involved in the liberation struggle were often without
formal military training and were obeying the call of their heart, not 
mechanically responding to orders. 

Maybe one could draw a useful analogy here with Occupied France during World
War II . It may well be true that without the Allied landing at Normandy,
the liberation of France would not have been possible. Nevertheless, I
would still consider the heroism of the memebers of the French Resistance,
who were ordinary civilian men and women who risked their lives daily
because of their ideological opposition to the Nazis, to be incomparably
greater than that of the Allied soldiers of the British and American 
invading troops.



>I do not know what Mr. Bhattacharya's agenda is, whether he is truly the
>insensitive and shameless lout he comes out across, but I believe the least
>he can do is to express regret for his callous remarks. 
>

Agenda ? I do not have any sinister agenda as Mr Deb seems to presume,
nor do I post on this newsgroup to push any ulterior objective.  My intention
in posting in this newsgroup, as I think are those of most people who post  
here, is honest and forthright exchange of opinion.  I usually present
my opinion with candour, and not with the objective of pleasing anybody 
else. Mr Deb  is not obliged to agree with my opinions, just as I am not
obliged to endorse his. 

I hope Mr Deb realises that in history, unlike in physics, all conjecture
is, by necessity, gedanken experimentation, for we cannot go back in time
and try out experiments and fiddle with parameters. Thus, any discussion
of history is necessarily an opinionated discussion and is coloured by 
the set of beliefs and opinions of the discussing party. 

"Insensitive and shameless lout" ? Again, this is a matter of Mr Deb's
personal opinion, and as I just said, Mr Deb's opinions are his own,
and are of little concern to me (although I would have been happier
if he had desisted from making this ad hominem comment).

I will not express any regret for my remarks because I do not think they 
were callous. (I hope I have sufficiently explained my reasons in the
preceding paragraphs). 


>No country, and particulary a poor one like India, spends millions of dollars
>and sacrifices the lives of thousands of her sons for purely altruistic
>motives. To use this as a pretext to gloss over the Indian contribution is
>a typical act of communist double-speak.
>


Naim has already pointed Mr Deb in his reply to the fact that double-speak
is not the sole prerogative of "communists". In any case, I am confused
why Mr Deb uses this Orwellian term to describe my comments, for surely
my article had a single, unequivocal meaning and no verbal deception was
consciously intended. 



-- 
Sayan Bhattacharyya          |   Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Graduate student             |
Artificial Intelligence Lab  |
The University of Michigan   |
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bangladesh