Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is a controversial book on the Bangladesh Liberation War written by Sarmila Bose. The book has been accused of flawed and biased methodology, historical negationism and downplaying genocide. Overview. Bose aims for a revisionist reconstruction of the Bangladesh Liberation War in a chronological fashion using material evidence as well as public memory. This was to counter the prevailing multitude of poor and partisan scholarship on the issue, and Bose claimed that hers will be a unique work for years. She notes the war to  have had its origins in a xenophobic and communal expressions of Bengali nationalism. Military operations by Pakistani Army were mostly political reprisals and started in response to provocations by Mujib's movement which engaged in violence despite Yahya Khan's efforts to restore democracy. In the process, Bose also seeks to prove that the death-count portrayed by Bangladesh is often unreliable and aimed at distorting the truth about the nature and number of war-crimes. Reception. Scholars have accused her of flawed and biased methodology, historical revisionism. cherry-picking sources, and downplaying war crimes. Positive reviews. A review over  The Guardian noted it to be a long-overdue study which exonerated the Pakistani Government of planning to rule Bangladesh (East Pakistan) by force and ought to provoke "fresh research and fresh thinking". Atul Mishra, reviewing for Contemporary South Asia, found the work to be "soundly conceptualized and professional", and an ideal read for doctoral students. Pakistan. The book was subject to positive reception in Pakistan. Negative reviews. In a book-launch event at Wilson Center, Arnold Zeitlin, a journalist who covered the '71 war deemed the work to be a "distortion of history" that carried the author's prejudices  and overemphasized the number of casualties, whilst refusing to tackle the underlying themes and issues surrounding the event. Jayanta Kumar Ray accused the author of getting "basic facts wrong" to diminish the number of rapes, and biased in her extensive usage of pro-Pakistan sources. Gita Sahgal, writing for "The Daily Star", found the work to lack any theoretical or political framework and the author to be in adulation of the Pakistan Military and excessively concerned with the number of deaths and burials. She also notes Bose to have skipped several issues — Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Badr etc. — that would  have proved inconvenient for her central thesis and also, engage in a selective usage of sources. A review in "The Hindu" found the book to have created a moral equivalence between the oppressors and oppressed — her work had evident bias in the manner she conducted much rigorous interviews of relevant Bangladeshi figures than their Pakistani counterparts and deemed the ethnic attitude of Bengalis to lie at the root of all issues. Urvashi Butalia, reviewing for "Tehelka", noted the work to be spoiled by her "hubris and irrational biases"; Bose exonerated Pakistani officers of mass-rape and wanton violence by taking  their accounts as "straightforward" truth whilst labeling Bangladeshi accounts as "claims". Nayanika Mookherjee, a social anthropologist studying memories of '71 wartime rapes, found the book to be methodologically inconsistent, informed by a disdain for Bangladeshi Self Determination and extremely biased — Bangladeshis, guided by blind hate against the "fine men" of Pakistan army who had "no ethnic bias", either exhibited "bestial" violence or were cowards. Mookherjee also criticizes Bose for failing to cite post-nationalist scholarship in vernacular, which discussed the role of Bengali Muslims in killing Bihari/non-Bengali collaborators and communities. Srinath Raghavan, an Indian historian of contemporary history , reviewing for "The Indian Express" calls Bose's book a "disturbing misrepresentation of the 1971 war" and further notes that "it is impossible to review the entire catalogue of evasions, obfuscations, omissions and methodological errors that suffuses the book". Chaity Das, reviewing over Journal of South Asian Development, found the book to be an exercise in "glossy revisionism" by an author, who failed to see beyond the number of casualties and had a polemical agenda to discredit the narratives of victims and exonerate the Pakistan Army. Das alleges Bose to have engaged in an opportunistic and inconsistent pitting of memory  against memory to obtain the final results, that she had sought from the outset. Bose's book implies a claim to being the 'first' to dissect the death toll of 3 million in 1971, Zunaid Kazi had already documented 12 different media estimates of death tolls. Response. Bose has responded to Naeem Mohaiemen and others in "The Economic and Political Weekly". She maintains that her research is unbiased and the critics were "those who have profited for so long from mythologizing the history of 1971."