The fire storm on Sarmila Bose’s recent findings continues…. rebuttal from Zafar Sobhan. Thanks to AC for forwarding me this response:

Unconvincing. One of the peculiarities of academia is the somewhat perverse
incentive scholars have for problematizing existing understandings and
presenting novel and contrarian reinterpretations of history, however
tortured.

It is clear that the author went into her study with her conclusion already
decided, and then has cherry-picked her facts to fit. The fact that her
conclusion is a contrarian one and that contrarian viewpoints tend to gain
more notice and acclaim than ones that reiterate established scholarship,
is, I am sure, merely coincidental. There’s a lot of that going around
these days. (See, e.g., In Defence of Internment, by Michelle Malkin or
anything by David Irving).

The moral equivalence she draws between the two sides is certainly novel
(though no one disputes that there were atrocities on both sides). The mere
fact that violence and atrocity were perpetrated by both sides does not
render them equivalent and the author’s absurd argument that the only thing
keeping the pro-liberation side from committing equal atrocity was lack of
fire-power and opportunity, if accepted, can surely be extrapolated to any
conflict at any place and any time in history to show that there is always
moral equivelence on both sides of all conflicts.

The author’s conclusions are rendered problematic even within her own
writing and taking her research at face value (which would be extremely
generous). For instance, she continually conflates atrocities committed by
pro-Pakistani Bengalis or “loyalists” with those committed by pro-liberation
Bengalis to prove her point about Bengali brutality, when the more
meaningful interpretation would suggest the opposite. In addition, facts
such as that some students at DU were armed with .303 rifles and resisted
(indeed true) hardly supports the point that the author is attempting to
make.

I am not a historian and will leave a fuller rebuttal to others, but one
final point I would like to make is that the author’s point “No rape of
women by Pakistan army found in any of the cases of conflict” if true would
make the conflict unique in the history of war and is so outlandish that the
author is even forced to sheepishly qualify her findings. Perhaps she
should contemplate that the fact that her findings in this one instance are
so bizarre that they might call her entire research methodology into
question and problematize her findings in other areas as well.