In 2010, I was in Gummersbach, Germany, attending a leadership fellowship at the IAF academy as a South Asian and Pakistani participant, alongside Central Asian, Chinese, South American, and Arab fellows. Our revered mentor, Dr Arno Keller, who also served as the Resident Representative of the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation in Pakistan at the dawn of the 21st century, once shared a family story: his grandmother had been horrified to hear that he would be vacationing in France. For her, France was not a neighbour; it was the enemy. As he spoke, I drifted elsewhere. I found myself imagining the women of those war-torn decades—French women who underwent violence under occupation, and others who, for forming relationships with German soldiers, were later humiliated in public squares, their hair shorn, their bodies paraded before their own communities. About 20,000 women bore this punishment, a deplorable deletion of demureness and dignity.
And then my thoughts shifted to German women in 1945—those who faced the Red Army’s advance, when between one and two million were raped, their sorrow forced into silence for decades, concealed under official narratives of guilt and defeat. The appeasement between Germany and France was founded on forgetting as much as forgiving. Women’s woes were disregarded. In that moment, I thought too of India and Pakistan, and how often the Franco-German story is offered as a model for peace in our region. What never occurred to me then was that some would later apply this same analogy to Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Yet, if elite experts like Ikram Sehgal (a former Pakistani military officer of mixed Bengali and Punjabi heritage, who has written widely on security and history) and historians like Dr Bettina Robotka (a German academic who taught history in Pakistan for several years, with expertise in South Asian politics and languages) are to be believed, the said model offers a path for healing the Pakistan–Bangladesh rupture of 1971. Their book Blood Over Different Shades of Green: East Pakistan 1971—History Revisited (2020) explicitly invokes the Franco-German analogy: “Take the example of the German-French rapprochement… Why should something on these lines be impossible in our region?”
Such intellectual spin, subtle but skilful, has begun to surface with revamped zing after the expulsion of Sheikh Hasina Wajid’s regime on 5 August 2024. Many academic, journalistic, and policy voices from Bangladesh and Pakistan (who otherwise were in hibernation in all these five decades or were reaping their own benefits but were never seen as advocates of reconciliation or rehabilitation or repatriation of the stateless and stranded people—the pro-unified Pakistan) are entering the debate on 1971, often reframing the past to chart future ties with Pakistan. But the analogy, in my view, is not only misplaced but misleading too.
Over the years I have identified the following four key arguments against this very analogy:
- Discriminatory Memory: Franco–German reconciliation included admission of atrocities on both sides. In the Bangladesh–Pakistan case, only one narrative dominates—of Pakistani military wrongs—while the genocide of Biharis and non-Bengali Urdu speakers and even pro-Pakistan Bengalis is structurally silenced.
- Dissimilar Histories: France was never part of Germany. It was occupied in WWII, yes, but always a separate sovereign state. East Pakistan, by contrast, was constitutionally part of Pakistan until 16 December 1971. This was a separation through slaughter of the innocents or dismemberment of a state. The Pakistan–Bangladesh case involves civil conflict, secession, and external intervention—not just bilateral wartime enmity.
- Disenfranchised Groups in Reconciliation: Unlike France, which was united in resisting occupation, East Pakistan was internally divided. Some Bengalis wanted autonomy, some secession, and some loyalty to Pakistan. Pro-Pakistan communities, largely the Biharis and some non-Bengali Urdu speakers, faced massacre, displacement, and oppression, and about 300,000–500,000 (an estimated range) of them remain stranded in the ghettos of Bangladesh.More than half a century old, the humanitarian crisis remains unsolved. In Bangladesh’s mainstream narrative, their suffering is marginalised—war museums, curricula, and public discourse highlight only the narrative of liberation while excluding the fate of the stranded. In Pakistan, their very memory was never even allowed to be constructed, so there is no question of any demolishment. This makes reconciliation incomplete: a “Germany–France” type reset cannot bypass these living wounds.
- Discourse is Asymmetrical: Bangladesh has institutionalised 1971 memory through school curricula, war museums, and diplomacy. Pakistan, by contrast, has stayed muted—its younger generations know little or nothing, often only what the internet tells them. A Germany–France-style reconciliation requires parallel acknowledgement and mutual memory work, which is absent here. The role of India in this tragic and complicated chapter of Pakistan’s history and politics needs to be emphasised. It is documented that India cultivated, trained, and armed the Mukti Bahini and then militarily intervened in December 1971. In other words, this can be framed as an Indian proxy war exploiting Pakistan’s internal weaknesses. For Pakistan, 1971 was not just the “liberation of Bangladesh” but a disintegration engineered through a combination of secession and external pressure. Any reconciliation must therefore account for this enduring asymmetry: India is celebrated in Bangladesh as a liberator but remembered in Pakistan as a disintegrator. India’s perceived role may evolve—or even evaporate—following the ouster of Sheikh Hasina Wajid, but the key question remains: what is Pakistan’s current status or perception in Bangladesh? The three demands presented to the Foreign Office delegation in April 2025, and more recently to Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, strongly suggest that although Sheikh Hasina is no longer in power, her policies regarding these demands—including additional compensation tied to aid for the Bhola Cyclone—remain largely intact.
As an ordinary citizen of Pakistan, I must emphasise that I do not in any way endorse or overlook the injustices suffered by Bengalis in 1971. Yet I consciously compartmentalise those undeniable grievances from the political project that turned into an anti-country move.
A thoughtful reset with Bangladesh will require Pakistan to confront its own silences and Bangladesh to acknowledge occluded victimhood especially that of the Biharis so that any dialogue is built on full recognition rather than selective memory
All those development workers who visited Bangladesh—not just Dhaka but also rural areas and urban middle-class communities—between the 1990s and 2010 may recognise my observation: many ordinary Bengalis did not originally desire separation from Pakistan. After all, they were the people who had worked, voted, and sacrificed for Pakistan in 1947. What they sought was fair representation and dignified treatment from the West Pakistani elites. Reflecting on 1971, it becomes clear that the rupture was shaped not only by the Indian-trained Mukti Bahini and subsequent mass mobilisation but also by elite bargaining among Yahya Khan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. U.S. records show how negotiations and tactical delays by these powerbrokers widened the chasm; that dynamic still echoes in the present, where opinion-makers curate compassion lavishly for some victims and sparsely for others.
The recognition given to Bengalis’ mehroomis (deprivations), which has been meticulously highlighted by renowned journalists, academics, and media professionals is remarkable in the present-day Pakistan. Let me confess; it gives me a sense of envy and this deepens due to the continued absence (at the State level and at the societal level) of even basic sympathy—let alone empathy—for the stateless people, whose elders once waited for repatriation and whose younger generations, now grown old in ghettos, are still waiting. This silence compels me to return to another unresolved question: was “liberation” truly the will of all Bengalis, or the product of a divided polity under extraordinary pressures?
The question of how many Bengalis initially preferred autonomy within a federation versus outright secession remains contested in both scholarship and memoirs. Richard Sisson and Leo Rose (War and Secession, 1990) underline that Mujib’s Six Points were framed as a demand for autonomy, not independence. Sarmila Bose (Dead Reckoning, 2011) similarly argues that “liberation” was not a communally willed goal from the outset but accelerated under the pressures of “war” and repression. Srinath Raghavan (1971: A Global History, 2013) underlines the catalytic role of India’s military intervention in transforming a divided polity into an independent state. What is historically accurate, therefore, is that the Awami League’s 1970 mandate was for deep autonomy under the Six Points, with the war and subsequent crackdown hastening a broader secessionist consensus. To treat “liberation” as if it were universally willed from the outset risks erasing those internal gradations—and the fate of communities who remained loyal to Pakistan and paid a heavy price (and are still paying).
A thoughtful reset with Bangladesh will require Pakistan to confront its own silences and Bangladesh to acknowledge occluded victimhood especially that of the Biharis so that any dialogue is built on full recognition rather than selective memory. Reconciliation cannot be achieved through borrowed metaphors from international relations textbooks or imported European models; it demands contextual honesty rooted not only in the lived histories but also in the HerStories of 1971.
Reconciliation cannot be achieved through delaying tactics, commissions of elite academics, technocrats, or lawyers, or borrowed metaphors from textbooks and European models. True reconciliation requires Pakistan and Bangladesh to forget the hurt but not the lessons, recognise the people, start repatriation, and return “enemy properties” to those whose descendants remain in the camps (imagine a teenager of 16 in 1971 now being 71). It demands unflinching political and social leadership—and large hearts, though I wonder where these exist. Above all, it calls for contextual honesty rooted not only in the lived histories but also in the HerStories of 1971.
P.S. Ironically, the current head, Dr Yunus, is a former Pakistani student who went abroad on East Pakistan’s quota and returned as a Bangladeshi. He is also a Nobel Peace laureate—but has done little or nothing to address the plight of the oppressed and stateless people from 1971.