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A War Within a War: Mizo rebels and the Bangladesh liberation struggle*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2015

WILLEM VAN SCHENDEL
WILLEM VAN SCHENDEL*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands Email: h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl
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Abstract

In 1971 a war led to the creation of Bangladesh. Instantly three narratives sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. Today more layered interpretations are superseding these ‘first-generation narratives’. Taking the case of insurgents from neighbouring India who, against their will, became embroiled in the war, this article seeks to contribute to ‘second-generation narratives’ that challenge the historiographical apportioning of blame and the national/ethnic framing of the conflict. The article uses hitherto-unpublished photographs from private collections to demonstrate how the war for the liberation of Mizoram (India) and that for the liberation of Bangladesh became entangled. Jointly they produced a ‘war within a war’ that unsettles common assumptions about both these struggles.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 75 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Introduction

Wars leave lifetime scars, scores to settle, and intense emotions to deal with. They are historically important, not least because they act as markers of meaning for the societies they bring into being. Telling such stories is rarely the preserve of academic historians. The insights of professional historians usually impinge less on popular interpretations than do the views of politicians, the claims of victims seeking justice, or the war stories that parents tell their children. It is only with the passing of time—as those who have experienced the war fade away and, with them, the scars, emotions, myths, and self-justifications that were part of their mental make-up—that professional analyses come to play a more prominent role. This pattern is clearly visible in writings on the war that broke out in East Pakistan in March 1971. Nine months later the state of Pakistan had ceased to exist. Its eastern wing became the independent state of Bangladesh; its western wing turned into a new state that continued under the name of Pakistan.Footnote 1

Writing the history of the war: first-generation historiographies

Immediately after the war three complementary but incompatible genres of history writing sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. These became the dominant ‘first-generation historiographies’.

Story 1: a national triumph

This approach to the war has been the most influential, right from 1971. It is centred on the idea that the best way of understanding the war is to see it as a Bengali war of emancipation. It constructs a straight historical trajectory from initial unease about the notion of Urdu as Pakistan's state language in 1947Footnote 2 to a series of events and incidents grouped as the Language Movement, and from there to the crackdown by Pakistan armed forces on a popular movement in March 1971. The war itself is a story of sacrifice, suffering, and valour for the Bengali nation in the face of a vicious attack on a helpless people. The focus is on the brutality of war and the suffering it caused. The Mukti Bahini (Bangladesh Freedom Fighters) are the principal heroes. It is a story that legitimizes the existence of Bangladesh, and consequently it has been near unassailable.

Story 2: betrayal and shame

The counterfoil to this interpretation is Story 2, which denies the legitimacy of Bangladesh. It sees the war as the outcome of a process of radical provincialism in which East Pakistani politicians sought power at the expense of the Pakistan state—and with help from Pakistan's archenemy, India. Using their influence over an emotional and ill-informed populace, these politicians swayed some to engage in anti-Pakistan activities. This betrayal could not be curbed by political negotiation, so swift military intervention became unavoidable to rescue the nation. This was done rather successfully between March and May 1971. The authorities reasserted order, and East Pakistan would have been saved were it not for India's interference. This country used the pretext of disturbances in East Pakistan to break Pakistan's back, first by international propaganda and the provision of military support to the rebels, and then by illegally invading East Pakistan. This story focuses on another betrayal as well: the failure of Pakistan's allies, China and the United States, to come to the rescue. It was India's military force, not the Mukti Bahini, which triumphed over Pakistan's valiant armed forces. It is a story that legitimizes the actions of the Pakistan authorities during 1971. It portrays Pakistan as the ultimate victim of the conflict.

Story 3: a glorious campaign

A third reading stresses the role of India as a benevolent intervener in domestic violence next door. It organizes itself around the last weeks of the war, when India stepped in and deftly removed the abusive spouse from the scene. The previous eight months are presented as a moral justification of this invasion, highlighting Pakistan's obstinacy and the international community's cowardice in the face of immense human rights abuses and refugee suffering. This is a kick-ass story with Indian generals and politicians as heroes and the Mukti Bahini in a supporting role. The war was a glorious campaign, which entitles India to everlasting Bangladeshi gratitude.

Each of these first-generation historiographical traditions constructs a perspective that clearly distinguishes between good guys and bad guys. Each has its code words and taboos.Footnote 3 For example, Story 1 talks about ‘Bangladesh’, Story 2 about ‘East Pakistan’, and Story 3 about ‘East Bengal’.Footnote 4 Are we to talk about a liberation war, a civil war, or foreign-instigated secession? Do we refer to the war as the Bangladesh Liberation War or the Indo-Pakistan War? The ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘aggressors’ (hanadar) of Story 1 are the ‘mischief-makers’ and ‘authorities’ of Story 2. Those who study the war understand these semantic minefields, but we need to map these more critically and systematically. And beyond the minefields are the unexplored deserts of silence where few have ventured at all.Footnote 5

There are good reasons for this reticence. Take Story 1. It has the full force of the Bangladesh state behind it and has been the main ideological prop of all post-war governments.Footnote 6 It has become a state narrative that highlights the unity of the people under the guidance of the middle class. It seeks to inflate and legitimize the wartime heroism of post-war power holders (and members of their families who claim to have inherited their charisma). As a result, over 40 years of accretions have added layers of emotion and obfuscation to this interpretation. These make it hard for academic researchers to play their role as myth-busters.Footnote 7

The first-generation narratives of the war formed a hermetic universe: complementary, contradictory, and unflinching. For some 25 years historians were happy to work within the parameters set by these narratives, or, if they were not, they found their room for manoeuvre to be very restricted.Footnote 8 In Bangladesh the war became the centrepiece of nation-building. Its foundational and legitimizing role became coded in the name by which the conflict is known: the Bangladesh Liberation War. By contrast, in Pakistan the war was elided. A generation of historians shied away from its particulars, reflecting public sentiments in Pakistan that considered the war to have been a painful episode in which the country's allies (China and the United States) had let it down, thereby contributing to Pakistan's ignominious defeat at the hands of India. The Indian invasion of East Pakistan and the last two weeks of the war overshadowed all other aspects—hence the name that the war received here: the (Third) Indo-Pakistan war.Footnote 9

Second-generation historiographies

It was only a matter of time, however, before inquisitive minds would begin to nibble away at the first-generation historiography, looking for a more usable past and fresh perspectives. Creative writers, film-makers, and journalists took the lead, and from the late 1990s academics followed suit. They began to produce what can be called second-generation historiographies of the war. Most of the war literature that is now available, in Bengali and English, takes the form of memoirs, creative writing, compilations, and media commentary. Scholarly contributions form only a minute fraction of this voluminous literature, but their impact is not marginal. Research-based studies are important because they have moved war narratives beyond the main themes that continue to dominate public discussions in Bangladesh: heroism, betrayal, war crimes, and victimhood. More than anything, scholarly analyses demonstrate the need to rise above attempts to impose a single hegemonic reading of the war.Footnote 10 What is emerging is the conviction that earlier interpretations have been too reductive and monolithic—and that trying to package the war as a single master narrative amounts to misrepresenting it.

For this article, two strands of these second-generation studies are of special interest. The most dynamic and influential strand approaches the war through memory.Footnote 11 It insists on the multiplicity of experiences as told by those involved and on decentring state narratives, and it highlights the relationship between history, memory, and forgetting, as well as the ethical issues concerning representation.Footnote 12 Nayanika Mookherjee and Yasmin Saikia are prime examples. Both are concerned with freeing the narratives they study from the stultifying national framework of the first generation. Whereas Mookherjee seeks to nuance Story 1, Saikia also takes on Story 2. The main themes through which they approach these issues are sexual violence, gender, and public memory, although other themes and contexts (perpetrators’ recollections, communal and state violence in post-colonial South Asia, and ethical issues in representing oral history narratives) are also developed.Footnote 13

A second strand of special relevance to this article is what we could call ‘getting the fighting sorted’. Military men and administrators have provided many accounts of the actual fighting that took place during the war.Footnote 14 These memoirs are firmly couched in first-generation rhetoric and they tend towards the self-glorifying. It is only recently that more impartial military historians have begun to piece together how the war was actually fought. Studies by Gill (2003) and Mohan and Chopra (2013) concentrate on the endgame and should be followed by detailed studies on the previous, even more chaotic, guerrilla phase of the war, including the role of many independent groups of local fighters and the fact that there were considerable regional differences in the levels of fighting and destruction.Footnote 15 This is much harder to reconstruct, but still possible on the basis of oral evidence and local written and visual source material.Footnote 16

Second-generation narratives have begun to loosen the stranglehold of the old narratives, despite political pressure to fall in with the parameters set by power holders. The future success of the new narratives depends on several factors: their historical accuracy and critical attitude to source material, proper training in oral and visual history methods, and international teamwork.Footnote 17

Beyond the national frame

The history writing of the second generation has demonstrated that the Bangladesh Liberation War (as we shall call it from now on)Footnote 18 is best understood as a multi-layered nexus of processes and experiences. The way forward is to analyse this great human tragedy—which directly affected tens of millions of lives—from many different angles. In this article I present one such angle. I take up a small thread in the vast tapestry of the war to challenge a number of biases in the historiography. I am especially concerned with exploring three of these: the national context, the apportioning of blame, and the ethnic framing of the conflict.

First, the Bangladesh Liberation War has been understood overwhelmingly in national terms. The protagonists are the states of ‘Pakistan’, ‘India’, and ‘Bangladesh’; national political leaders are credited with abundant agency; and the high politics of nation-states are the focus of attention. In this article I seek to demonstrate that we need to take into account other realities of the war that blur the borders between national units, highlight cross-border dynamics, and involve actors that do not fit the national container concepts. This approach also points to another interpretation of the international aspects of the war, one that does not concentrate merely on statesmen and -women playing on a global chessboard, but also considers the agency of non-state transnational actors. Such an approach requires us to use other sources of historical evidence.

Second, most history writing on the Bangladesh Liberation War remains hostage to moral narratives separating ‘heroes’ from ‘villains’. Such narratives satisfy the urge to apportion blame and to legitimize political choices during and after the war—but they are not particularly helpful in explaining the huge range of human actions, dilemmas, and strategies that powered the conflict. The case that I present in this article challenges the overly familiar good/bad dichotomy by focusing on a group that defies easy categorization.

Third, the historiography of the Bangladesh Liberation War is habitually framed in ethnic terms: this was a revolt by Bengalis against an oppressive regime and it resulted in their emancipation under a Bengali state. In this article we will see that thinking of the war in terms of a single ethnic group is unhelpful, not only because Bengalis took various positions with regard to the war, but also because there were regional war scenarios in which Bengalis played no obvious role.

Visual sources from Mizoram

This article presents historical evidence on the war that has not been explored before. This material is from Mizoram, the Indian state wedged between Bangladesh and Burma (Myanmar). It refers to guerrilla fighters from Mizoram who had sought refuge in East Pakistan and who became embroiled in the Bangladesh war and its aftermath. Although some written sources on their experiences are available, these are mostly ex post facto, in the form of memoirs. In this article I present visual sources that were created during the war. In the course of a larger research project, Joy Pachuau and I collected thousands of photographs from over a hundred, mostly private, collections in Mizoram.Footnote 19 Among these are hundreds of photographs that evoke the events of the Mizoram Independence War (1966–86) and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971). Here I present only a small selection from the collections that ex-combatants have shared with us.Footnote 20

The importance of this visual record is manifold. It provides a uniquely contemporaneous entry point into the life of military migrants from Mizoram in East Pakistan and Bangladesh, and it complements and complicates the limited written source material. It is well known that visual sources come with their own challenges. The problematic veracity of photographic images is the subject of important debates among historians, anthropologists, and scholars of cultural studies, but these are beyond the scope of this article.Footnote 21 Here I employ photographs to explore a subplot of the Bangladesh Liberation War for which few other contemporaneous sources are available. Together these images highlight some of the complexities of grasping what war is—an enormously multifaceted jumble of processes at a variety of levels that takes historians generations to disentangle and interpret.

A Mizo revolt

Five years before the Bangladesh Liberation War began, another war had broken out in the mountainous region of Mizoram in India, just across the eastern border of East Pakistan (Maps 1a and 1b). At that time the region was known as the Mizo Hills of Assam, and before that as the Lushai Hills.Footnote 22 It was home to various ethnic groups, among which the Mizos formed the clear majority.

Map 1a.

The location of Mizoram in India.

Source: The author.
Map 1b.

Bangladesh and Mizoram.

Source: The author.

In 1966 a rebellion against Indian rule rocked Mizoram. A combination of grievances against the Indian authorities had accumulated there over the 1940s and 1950s. At the time of decolonization in 1947, the inhabitants of Mizoram had been divided in their hopes for the future. There was a strong lobby to retain British rule in Mizoram and the other mountainous regions of northeast India and Burma, and to form a ‘Crown colony’ that eventually would become an independent state.Footnote 23 A second lobby was in favour of joining Burma, which became independent in early 1948. A third lobby favoured incorporation into independent India. This strategy was championed by a new political party, the Mizo Union, mainly with a view to ridding Mizoram of the colonial system of chiefly rule. Even this party stated, however, that their choice was ‘subject to revision according to the future trend of events to the extent of seceding [from India] after ten years’.Footnote 24 As it turned out, Mizoram had no choice in the matter. Decisions in faraway Delhi simply allocated it to India, leading to intense local frustration.Footnote 25 On Independence Day, 15 August 1947, the Indian flag was not raised there, and many inhabitants considered the merger to be both conditional and reversible.

Post-independence policies did little to appease Mizo sentiments. Vexation turned into indignation when the Assam authorities ignored warnings from Mizoram in 1958 that a ‘bamboo famine’ was looming. Ignorant of conditions in Mizoram, the Assam government scoffed at the idea of predicting a famine, and completely failed to prepare. ‘Such a rejection not only betrayed the Assam government's total lack of understanding of the society and the environment of one of its constituent districts, it also reflected the basic lack of empathy with its tribal population.’Footnote 26 In 1959 the crops were doing well—and yet, as expected, famine struck the land. All over Mizoram a specific bamboo variety came into flower and produced fruit. Bamboo rats proliferated by feeding on the fruits, and then they started ravaging human crops and food stocks. The result was widespread starvation. Estimates of the number of deaths suggest that 5 per cent of the population of Mizoram perished.Footnote 27 The Assam authorities had no idea how to respond to the calamity. Many in Mizoram questioned anew the wisdom of joining India: what was the point of being under a state that treated you with disdain and took no account of your needs? Adding insult to injury, the Assam government introduced a law making Assamese—a language not spoken in Mizoram—the state language. This led to demands for administrative separation from Assam. Some advocated the creation of a new ‘hill state’ within India, but others began to prepare for complete independence.Footnote 28

In 1966 this dream was put to the test. After a long period of planning, the Mizo National Front, a political party that had evolved from a voluntary famine relief association, took the decision to defy the Indian state.Footnote 29 They launched Operation Jericho, a name that one of the leaders explained as follows: ‘The operation was called Jericho, because we were kept oppressed within the fortress of Indian governance and administration and we wanted to fight it with righteousness, faith and hope.’Footnote 30 The military wing of the Mizo National Front, the Mizo National Army,Footnote 31 occupied the main towns and declared the region independent from India.Footnote 32 The name they chose for the envisioned independent country was Mizoram (Maps 1a and 1b).

The Indian armed forces were taken completely by surprise. In the words of the army general in charge: ‘We were caught with our pants down.’Footnote 33 They retaliated massively, memorably bombing Mizoram's main town and villages, which remains the only time that the Indian Air Force has attacked its own citizens. The rebels were in shock: ‘The government sent jet fighters. We never quite imagined that the government would do such a thing [and we realized that] the people we were fighting were not normal human beings but evil spirits inhabiting the earth.’Footnote 34 Thus began a 20-year period—remembered as Buai (The Troubles)—in which Mizoram became completely militarized. The Indian armed forces made it a policy to target civilians, most notoriously by driving over 80 per cent of the population into military-controlled settlements and destroying their villages and townships.Footnote 35

These extreme measures did not, however, quash the rebellion; it soon turned into protracted guerrilla warfare that would continue for 20 years.Footnote 36 The Mizo National Army was active all over Mizoram, and it documented its prowess visually. Figure 1, a war-weathered photograph of a unit posing with their arms, provides an example.

Figure 1.

A group of Mizo guerrilla fighters lined up in front of their cave hideout in rural Mizoram in 1967.

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.37

The Mizoram government in East Pakistan

As fighting in Mizoram continued, the Mizoram government (Mizoram Sawrkar) found it difficult to stay on. The leaders crossed the border and established their capital and military headquarters in the Sajek region (the Chittagong Hill Tracts) in East Pakistan.Footnote 38 By 1969 most Mizo fighters had also crossed the border and they launched their attacks on Indian troops from there. The Pakistan authorities welcomed the Mizo rebels and supported them with funds, arms, training, and advice. The Pakistanis had supported the Mizo insurgency from its earliest stages because it fitted their policy of destabilizing India's northeastern region; providing shelter to the rebels was a logical step.Footnote 39

The Mizo settlements in East Pakistan were anything but temporary military encampments. They soon developed into established communities with complex social relations. Thus the photographs in our collection document everyday events: sports matches, weddings, births, funerals, group singing, communal labour service, and so on. Figures 2, 3, and 4 exemplify this genre. Residents took photographs both to memorize social events and to inform relatives and friends back home that they were doing well. All three figures can be read as visual markers of Mizo-ness. Figure 2 shows a wedding that is instantly recognizable as Mizo because of the customary line-up of the bridal couple flanked by four bridesmaids in Mizo sarongs and four best men in business suits. Figure 3 also presents an image that is fairly standard in Mizoram. The construction of village churches is a community effort and it is sometimes captured on camera in this way, with some neighbourhood volunteers posing up in the rafters. In Figure 4 we see a group of young men and women, wrapped in warm clothes against the winter mountain air, ready to engage in an established tradition. During the Christmas season, back home in Mizoram, ‘carol parties’ visited houses in their neighbourhood at night to sing carols and bring good cheer. Note the oil lamps—essential night-time equipment in a settlement without an electricity supply.

Figure 2.

Mizo exiles’ wedding party in Mahmuam (East Pakistan), the capital headquarters of the Mizoram government-in-exile, in 1969.Footnote 40

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.
Figure 3.

A group of Mizo volunteers constructing a church in Chhantlang (East Pakistan) in 1970.Footnote 41

Source: Mizo National Front collection (hereafter MNF collection).
Figure 4.

Armed with a guitar and songbooks, young Mizos get ready to go carolling around Mahmuam (East Pakistan), Christmas 1970.

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.

Importantly, exile in East Pakistan created a space to elaborate the notion of an independent Mizo nation-state and develop the trappings of state power. State symbols (for example, the national flag) and ceremonies (for example, the installation of the cabinet, elections, state funerals) gave independent Mizoram more substance across the border than back home. Figure 5 exudes the gravitas required of a function celebrating the birthday of a state at war. Military men of different rank protectively surround the president, who is wearing civilian clothes.

Figure 5.

Mizoram Independence Day (1 March) commemorated the beginning of the Mizo revolt in 1966. Here we see the president of Mizoram, Laldenga, inspecting the national guard of honour in Mahmuam (East Pakistan) on 1 March 1969.

Source: MNF collection.

The Mizoram government and the Bangladesh Liberation War

Under the protection of Pakistan's military, the Mizoram government flourished and it engaged India's armed forces across the border on a regular basis. It was still operating from East Pakistan when this region descended into war in March 1971. The Mizo rebels were very concerned. The Pakistan authorities moved their leader, Laldenga (who had been given a residence in Dhaka,Footnote 42 the capital of East Pakistan), back to the Chittagong Hill Tracts. ‘The upsurge in East Pakistan troubled the MNF [Mizo National Front] chief deeply. What would happen to them? The Pakistani Military Intelligence had assured the Mizos in Dacca that things would never get out of control. The Mizos could remain where they were and continue their movement.’Footnote 43

This assurance proved correct. Surprisingly, at first the hostilities in East Pakistan hardly affected the Mizos who were ensconced in the northern borderlands of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. There were no Bengalis in their part of the country and the Pakistan armed forces were in firm control. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were home to a number of ethnic groups that had been administratively separated from the Bengali population of the lowlands since the mid nineteenth century.Footnote 44 Very few Bengalis had been allowed to settle there. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, Bengali rebels did seek refuge in the area and engaged in clashes with Pakistani troops—but the Sajek region, where the Mizos were established, remained largely outside their orbit.Footnote 45

Thus, for the time being, the Mizoram War of Independence and the Bangladesh Liberation War remained contemporary but unconnected struggles. The process of their entanglement is of particular interest with regard to how we conceive of the layering of armed conflict. To this end, we will look at three distinct phases: business as usual, flight, and the return to Bangladesh.

Phase 1: business as usual

It was easy for the Mizos to carry on as before, secure under the protection of the Pakistan Army. Bizarrely, despite the bloodshed around them, this phase lasted until the very end of the war (26 March–16 December 1971). Photographs from that period contrast sharply with the usual images of carnage and despair that we associate with the Bangladesh Liberation War. The Mizo photographs exude a carefree attitude and no sense of impending danger.

Figure 6 shows this business-as-usual attitude. In an image that reveals nothing about the storm raging all around, it presents a quite remarkable spectacle: democratic procedure in a war-ravaged country under military rule. Here we see the new Mizoram parliament-in-exile being sworn in after elections.

Figure 6.

Newly elected members of parliament giving the oath of allegiance to V. L. T. Muana, the election commissioner, in the Mizoram government's headquarters in New Chhantlang (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 9 April 1971.

Source: MNF collection.

Six months later, the Mizoram government celebrated its tenth National Day in style with a ceremony in Rangamati, the district headquarters of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.Footnote 46 Smartly dressed and looking relaxed and confident, the highest officials addressed the meeting and had their photographs taken (Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 7.

Mizo National Day celebration in the town hall of Rangamati (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 21 October 1971.

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 8.

The leaders of the Mizoram government pose for a state portrait in Rangamati, 22 October 1971.Footnote 47

Source: MNF collection.

These photographs present the civilian face of the Mizoram government—but the Mizo National Front was almost indistinguishable from its military machine, the Mizo National Army. Mizo leaders donned military outfits as easily as statesman's attire, and the rank and file usually had themselves portrayed in uniform. In two images from the middle of 1971 we see them in happy circumstances. A cheerful group of friends smile at the camera in Rangamati in July (Figure 9), and three self-confident Mizo police officers solemnly pose for a studio portrait in the city of Chittagong the following month (Figure 10).

Figure 9.

Four officers of the Mizo National Army during a light-hearted moment at Rangamati College, 23 July 1971.Footnote 48

Source: R. Zamawia collection.
Figure 10.

Mizo police officers pose in a photo studio in the city of Chittagong, 30 August 1971.Footnote 51

Source: MNF collection.

These images may convey the impression of exiles living in their own political bubble, completely detached from the war that was raging around them.Footnote 49 But this was not the case. During this phase the Mizos did become more actively involved in the Bangladesh Liberation War. They had been under the protection of the Pakistan Army from their first arrival in 1967 and they kept in close contact during the war. They received most of their information, arms, and cues from Pakistani officers (Figure 11).Footnote 50 Not surprisingly, these officers tried to use the Mizos in their struggle against the Bangladesh Freedom Fighters who aimed to turn East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh.

Figure 11.

A Pakistan Army man surrounded by Mizo fighters clad in various uniforms in Barkal (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 29 September 1971.

Source: R. Zamawia collection.

The military role of Mizos in the war in East Pakistan appears to have been restricted. The Pakistan Army considered their expertise in guerrilla tactics an asset and employed them as porters and guides in Rangamati during the early stages of the war.Footnote 52 The Mizo intelligence unit, the State Security Agency, cooperated with the Pakistan Army's commando unit the Special Services Group, in an operation on 1 July 1971. They attacked a Bangladesh Freedom Fighters’ camp in the eastern Chittagong Hill Tracts, capturing 28 rifles and 3 Bren guns.Footnote 53 State Security Agency–Special Services Group cooperation also took Mizos beyond the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to lowland settings (Figure 12). They acted as advisors to the army commander in the district of Sylhet and had their photographs taken with Pakistani soldiers. One of these is Figure 13, an icon of martial camaraderie and prowess. To what extent their advice actually played a role in the hostilities in Sylhet is unclear. Throughout the Bangladesh Liberation War most of their activities continued to be directed across the border, against Indian armed forces. In that sense, too, it was very much business as usual for the Mizos in East Pakistan.

Figure 12.

Mizo rebels (State Security Agency) and Pakistani commandoes (Special Services Group) with their arms and a transmitter, East Pakistan, 1971.Footnote 54

Source: R. Zamawia collection.
Figure 13.

Mizo advisers and Pakistan Army men in Sylhet, 1971.Footnote 55

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.

According to Brigadier Uban, who headed the Indian invasion into the Chittagong Hill Tracts at the end of the war, Mizo fighters played a small role in the final skirmishes. They joined Pakistani soldiers in their attempts to thwart the Indian advance; his troops killed four Mizos.Footnote 56

Phase 2: flight

The end of the Bangladesh Liberation War signalled a new phase for the Mizo rebels. Indian soldiers had entered East Pakistan in November 1971.Footnote 57 In early December India formally declared war on Pakistan and a large-scale invasion crushed the Pakistan Army, which surrendered on 16 December 1971. Now Bangladesh emerged as an independent country.

Suddenly, the tables had been turned on the Mizos in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. They found themselves in an extremely perilous situation. Their military and political protection had vanished and they faced two hostile and heavily armed forces: the Indians and the Bangladesh Freedom Fighters.Footnote 58 On the afternoon of the surrender, Mizos living in the city of Chittagong scrambled to join their fellows in the hills. One of them recalled: ‘There were shootouts on the way as some [Indian] paratroopers had landed near [the road to Rangamati]. But we got through all right. None was hurt.’Footnote 59 That night in Rangamati they debated whether to surrender or flee. After heated deliberations a plan emerged to try and reach Arakan (Burma)Footnote 60 to the south. Here they were sure to be out of reach of both Indian and Bangladeshi armed forces. For tactical reasons, they decided to split up. The main guerrilla force of about a thousand fighters was to cross the border into India. They would surreptitiously make their way to the southern tip of Mizoram and enter Burma. There they planned to rendezvous with the entourage of the president, a smaller group that could not risk travelling across Indian territory but had to remain on the Bangladesh (which had until the day before been the East Pakistan) side of the border. This group was to leave Rangamati by river in a convoy of motor launches.

The main guerrilla force was lucky. After re-entering India they moved southward through Mizoram with great speed and little obstruction and crossed the Indo-Burmese border into Arakan. The president's party was not so lucky. They travelled south in seven motor launches on the RainkhyangFootnote 61 river, on the Bangladesh side of the border, and had to fight their way through several ambushes.Footnote 62 They made the final stretch on foot until they reached the ungoverned trijunction point where the territories of India, Burma, and Bangladesh meet. Despite their distress they took some photographs of the march, although they hardly convey the intense pressure that they were under during this fraught episode.Footnote 63Figures 14 and 15 can be said to portray the notion of pasal-tha, manly bravery, a mind set that is highly valued among Mizos.

Figure 14.

Mizo men bathing in the Rainkhyang (Tatkawng) river in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh) during their flight to Burma, circa 18 December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 15.

President Laldenga and his entourage marching towards Burma in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh), circa 18 December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.

Reunited, the Mizos regrouped in the village of Salopi on the Bangladesh side of the trijunction point. Unknown to them, Indian and Bangladeshi armed forces had now occupied their old camps in the north.Footnote 64 But, for the time being, they were safe in Salopi. Two images testify to their time there. Figure 16 shows the leader addressing his team, and Figure 17 gives us a glimpse of Christmas celebrations that year.

Figure 16.

President Laldenga addressing his cadres in Salopi village (Bangladesh) during the flight to Burma, late December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 17.

Mizos roasting a pig in Salopi village (Bangladesh), Christmas 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.

The Mizos knew that for now the heavily forested mountains of the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts would keep them beyond the reach of their foes, but they also knew that it was only a matter of time until the infant Bangladesh government would extend its control. Therefore, they moved further south, just across the Burmese border. Here they were safe because they could count on protection from the Burmese Communist Party, an insurgent militia that controlled the borderland. With foresight, the Mizo National Front had concluded an agreement of mutual support with this party in 1970.Footnote 65 The smiles on the faces of the two men in Figure 18 betray little about their doubts as they left behind the dangers of Bangladesh and stepped into an unknown new world.

Figure 18.

Captains Lalthlana and Lalsangliana Sailo on their way to Arakan (Burma), January 1972.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.

Phase 3: return to Bangladesh

In early 1972 the Mizo movement was in disarray. Not only had they been uprooted from their sanctuaries in Bangladesh, but Burmese troops also attacked them in their hideouts in the Chin hills, east of Mizoram. Those who were in northern Arakan were safe, however, because the Burmese Communist Party, and not the Burmese Army, controlled that part of the borderland. In fact, in May and June 1972, Mizo fighters joined the Burmese Communist Party in forays within Burma, overwhelming the Burmese army post in Bathidaung (Arakan) and the police post in Tanthaung (Chin State).Footnote 66

At the same time the Mizoram rebellion faced a political challenge back home in India. The Indian government made a move intended to frustrate the rebels by detaching the Mizo hills from Assam and upgrading them from a district to a union territory, administered directly from Delhi. The new union territory was officially named ‘Mizoram’.

Meanwhile, not all Mizo fighters had left Bangladesh, and their relationship with local Bangladesh security forces was not all hostile. Clashes certainly occurred: in March 1972 small Mizo units attacked police stations in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts in order to capture arms and ammunition. They were successful in Ruma, killing 11 people in the process.Footnote 67 But the Bangladesh authorities soon had a new use for the Mizo armed presence in the area. After 1971 the local population of the Chittagong Hill Tracts—overwhelmingly non-Bengali and non-Muslim—became disillusioned with the way the Bangladesh state elite treated them. Their grievances fuelled an insurrection.Footnote 68 In a replay of the scenarios across the border in both Mizoram (India) and Arakan (Burma), the national armed forces of Bangladesh now turned against regional insurgents but also targeted the entire civilian population. The Chittagong Hill Tracts War had started, and it would last until 1997.Footnote 69

By 1974 units of the Mizo National Army, operating from Arakan and Bangladesh, had once again become very active in Mizoram.Footnote 70 Such operations became even easier in 1975 after a series of coups-d’état had rocked Bangladesh. The upshot was the emergence of a military government that saw political advantage in needling India. This new government saw Mizos as convenient allies in the Chittagong Hill Tracts War.

As we have seen, the relationship between Mizos and their ethnic affiliates in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (especially Lushai and Pangkhua) was good—but these were only small minorities in the region. It was larger groups who led the revolt. Mizos shared a history of distrust with these groups, the result of nineteenth-century Mizo raids into the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The well-armed Mizo rebels hiding in the Chittagong Hill Tracts from the late 1960s had only deepened this distrust by stealing paddy from the fields; displacing thousands of local families in the northern Chittagong Hill Tracts; extorting money, paddy, and medicines—and even massacring the men of a village that refused to pay.Footnote 71 There was no love lost between the Mizo rebels and the rebels of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Thus the Mizo government-in-exile was doubly useful to the Bangladesh government: as a tool of foreign policy directed against India and as a tool of domestic policy directed against the Chittagong Hill Tracts uprising. Once again the Mizos received state support in their fight for Mizoram's independence, and they were quite safe in their re-established headquarters in Bangladesh (Figure 19 ).

Figure 19.

Arms instructor H. Zoramliana poses with two flags (of the Mizo National Front and Independent Mizoram) in the Mizo military training school, Sunsawng (Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh) in 1979.

Source: H. Zoramliana collection.

It was only a decade later that the Mizoram War of Independence came to an end. After negotiating a peace accord with the Indian government in return for full statehood within India, the Mizo rebels returned to a heroes’ welcome in Mizoram in 1986. Their life in the Chittagong Hill Tracts was over.

A war within a war

We can use this little-known story from the Bangladesh Liberation War to assess a number of common assumptions about that war. First, as anyone familiar with the historiography will notice, this story fits none of the three master narratives that were elaborated in the aftermath of the war. As we have seen, Bangladeshi writers understood the war as the triumph of the nation, Pakistanis as betrayal and shame, and Indians as a glorious campaign. The Mizo angle cannot be accommodated into any of them, hence its importance: it forces us to push beyond these ‘first-generation’ historiographies.

Second, the Mizo story challenges the framing of the war in terms of national and state units. ‘Bangladesh’, ‘Pakistan’, and ‘India’ (as well as ‘China’ and the ‘United States’) are container concepts that may help organize a narrative at the highest level of abstraction, but they conceal much of the reality of warfare on the ground. By foregrounding smaller organizations, such as the Mizo government, war dynamics come to light that national narratives disregard. The Mizo story forces us to consider two dimensions in particular: territorial thinking and regional variation.

The involvement of this cross-border group in the Bangladesh Liberation War is not compatible with the assumption of territorial exclusivity that is inherent in analyses that take states to be the only actors on the war stage. Here we are confronted with a group of Indian citizens who had renounced their citizenship by claiming independence. Even though Pakistan did not officially recognize the Mizoram government, Pakistani officials had given the Mizos sanctuary in defiance of Pakistan's own very strict rules regarding the presence of Indian citizens in its territory. After the war the Bangladesh authorities initially pursued the Mizos as accomplices of a defeated enemy (and not because of their illegal entry) but soon welcomed them back, once again with complete disregard of their own laws restricting the acceptance of foreign nationals in their territory. The Mizos themselves disregarded territorial boundaries all the time, crossing with ease from Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and Burma into India, and vice versa, without the required passports and visas. Here state boundaries cannot contain the story: territories bled into one another, insurgents were mobile across several national domains, and state agents were encumbered by their spatial confinement within state borders.

Third, the Mizo story calls attention to the fact that the war meant different things in different regions of the country. ‘Bangladesh’ cannot be treated as a uniform entity. Unlike other parts of Bangladesh—in which liberated zones burgeoned during the war—the area in which the Mizos had settled remained firmly in Pakistani hands until the very end. Nuanced analyses of the Bangladesh Liberation War should move beyond the celebration of zones of early liberation to take into account regional differentiation, including zones of unchallenged Pakistani control.

A fourth feature of the historiography of the Bangladesh Liberation War is its concern with apportioning blame and distinguishing between good and bad. Historians have distanced themselves from the ideals that inspired the combatants—be it liberating the motherland (Bangladesh), defending the fatherland (Pakistan), or invading for humanitarian and geopolitical reasons (India)—and from the incompatible ‘truths’ of the first-generation historiography.Footnote 72 The Mizo story forces us to re-examine the judgementalism of historical accounts that divide war actors into good and bad guys. Those who did not support the cause of Bangladesh are usually portrayed as traitors to Bangladesh and as collaborators with its enemies. Mizos do not fit that picture. They were sojourners who had no stake in the war, or in the territory that was being contested. Although they depended on their Pakistani patrons and were enlisted by them in some ways, they were basically disinterested in the conflict. Their eyes were turned east, to their home across the border. Where do they figure in the pantheon of war heroes and villains?Footnote 73

A fifth challenge is ethnic. The most influential historical writings on the Bangladesh Liberation War are still dominated by the ‘Bengali gaze’: they present the war as an episode of Bengali emancipation and they base themselves primarily on Bengali sources, whether in the Bengali language or in foreign languages. It goes without saying that the war was a struggle in which large groups of Bengalis—the overwhelming majority of East Pakistan's population—tried to rid themselves of Pakistani oppression. But a closer look brings out distinctions that qualify the ethnic labelling. First, as in any conflict, many people tried to ride it out by sitting on the fence. Many Bengalis (no one knows how many) took sides only when it was safe to do so, at the very end of the war. Other Bengalis (again, no one knows how many) actively supported the Pakistan side, and among them were armed militias. It is misleading to portray the war as ‘the Bengalis’ confronting the Pakistani enemy. Moreover, there were dozens of other ethnic groups in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. All of them were numerically far smaller than the Bengali majority, but individuals from these groups showed the same range of stands regarding the war, some supporting the Freedom Fighters, some the Pakistan armed forces, some avoiding taking sides.

This was especially significant in the area in which the Mizos happened to find themselves. The Chittagong Hill Tracts was the only region of East Pakistan that had a population that was over 90 per cent non-Bengali, and it had long been administered separately. Not surprisingly, the local population had a variegated response to the movement for Bangladesh and its ethnic framing, which ignored and excluded them. Their preferred position was non-involvement in the conflict, but this was not an option that all could choose. They based their political choices on calculations of the advantages and disadvantages that a Bengali-dominated state might bring them. Many thought that such a state would be even less favourable to them than the Pakistan state—misgivings that they saw confirmed in the post-1971 period. Some local leaders supported the movement for Bangladesh, and they and their followers were later categorized as ‘good guys’. Others sided with the Pakistan authorities; post-war, they and their followers were painted as traitors to the nation.Footnote 74 The war's ethnic framing meant that not only these leaders and their followers, but also all who belonged to the various ethnic groups of these leaders—and by extension, all non-Bengalis in the region—were generally categorized as having been against Bangladesh. This misreading set the stage for callous post-1971 state policies that would trigger the Chittagong Hill Tracts War in the mid 1970s.Footnote 75 The ‘Bengali gaze’ has proved to be particularly unhelpful in understanding the dynamics of the Bangladesh Liberation War in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. These regional dynamics, distinctly different from those in Bengali-dominated parts of Bangladesh, require another perspective.

A final challenge of the Mizo story is that it points to the need for historians to reconsider their practice of constructing the war as a distinct period of extraordinary and incomparable violence, bracketed between March and December 1971. War is politics by violent means, but obviously political violence is not restricted to war. State formation always involves force and coercion, and the consolidation of Pakistan after 1947 certainly was no exception.Footnote 76 It makes sense to analyse the Bangladesh Liberation War as straddling a longer period. Violence figured prominently in the politics and administration of East Pakistan; it altered during the war, and those who won the war employed it to establish their hold over the new state of Bangladesh. For example, state-created militias—Ansars (1940s–60s),Footnote 77 Peace Committees and Razakars (the 1971 war),Footnote 78 Jatiyo Rokkhi Bahini (1972–75),Footnote 79 and Rapid Action Battalions (2004–present)Footnote 80—all served the same function of intimidation and extrajudicial state terror. By the same token, the Mizos’ entanglement in the Bangladesh Liberation War is best understood in a longer time perspective, as an intermezzo between two phases of military sanctuary and struggle, one preceding the war and one following it. Thus the Mizos’ experiences allow us to discern hitherto unexplored links between the Mizo War of Independence (1966–86), the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), and the Chittagong Hill Tracts War (1975–97).Footnote 81

An unsettling story

The Mizo story is unfamiliar in Bangladesh. This is partly because it is contained in memories, writings, and images that have not been available within Bangladesh.Footnote 82 But more importantly, this story is an uncomfortable one. Even though it is only a very minor thread in the immense tapestry of war events, it unsettles the structure of current understandings of the Bangladesh Liberation War. The concepts that conventionally frame the historiography—national units, ethnic categories, and heroism versus villainy—do not suffice here.

Crucially, the Mizos were waging a war of emancipation that actually mirrored the Bangladesh Liberation War in many respects. Both had their roots in the partition of British India, which had not taken into account their interests, and in their allocation to post-colonial states whose elites were impervious to their needs. Both dreamed of secession and, to this end, took on a much more powerful national army. Both used guerrilla tactics and shared the experience of non-combatant populations being attacked by their respective national armed forces. The Indian government turned the Indian Air Force and Army loose on the inhabitants of Mizoram in much the same way as the Pakistan government unleashed the Pakistan armed forces on the inhabitants of East Pakistan. The two historiographies also mirror each other: like its Bangladeshi counterpart, the historiography of the Mizoram War of Independence also leans heavily on national units, ethnic categories, and heroism. Thus the Mizos’ emancipation struggle could have earned them the sympathy and support of Bangladeshi Freedom Fighters and, later, war historians. But the way in which their struggle became intertwined with the Bangladesh war made this impossible. Identifying with their cause became awkward: Mizos were fighting another state (India), they were non-Bengalis (and many Bengalis look down upon Mizos as ‘less civilized’ than themselves), and, worst of all, they sided with the Pakistani enemy and therefore fell into the category of villains.

But the very awkwardness of how these two struggles coincided, meshed, and produced a war within a war can be productive. More than 40 years after the event, the narrative of the Bangladesh Liberation War is still dominated by the raw emotions, traumatic experiences, and political splits that it produced. This is bound to change, because such a war narrative cannot be sustained by generations who did not experience that war. Three quarters of the current population of Bangladesh was born after 1971. Historians among them are producing more nuanced readings of the calamity, and these delve into variation rather than uniformity. In dialogue with colleagues abroad they reach beyond the first-generation historiographies and promote more inclusive interpretations of the war. The Mizo story is one of many wartime accounts that can contribute to this endeavour.

Footnotes

*

This article is part of a research project on the usefulness of visual sources for new understandings of social change in Mizoram (India) and surrounding areas now in Bangladesh, India, and Burma/Myanmar between the 1860s and the 2000s. This project was carried out jointly with Joy L. K. Pachuau (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), assisted by Lalhlimpuii Pachuau Mimi. We have reported our findings in Joy L. K. Pachuau and Willem van Schendel, The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (Delhi and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), as well as in co-curated photo exhibitions in New Delhi (2013 and 2014), and in Mizoram's two main towns, Aizawl (2014) and Lunglei (2015). I would like to thank Joy Pachuau for her comments and an anonymous Modern Asian Studies reviewer for helpful suggestions.

References

1 There is a vast literature on this war. For various introductions, see Sisson, Richard and Rose, Leo E., War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Zaheer, Hasan, The Separation of East Pakistan: The Rise and Realization of Bengali Muslim Nationalism (Karachi: Oxford University Press, and Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1994)Google Scholar; Biswas, Sukumar (ed.), The Bangladesh Liberation War: Mujibnagar Government Documents 1971 (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2005)Google Scholar; Biswas, Sukumar (ed.), History from Below, 1971: Accounts of Participants and Eyewitness (Dhaka: Muktijuddho Gobeshona Kendro, 2007)Google Scholar; Chowdhury, Afsan (ed.), Bangladesh 1971 (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2007)Google Scholar, 4 vols; Husain, Syed Shahid, What Was Once East Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Saikia, Yasmin, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bass, Gary J., The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)Google Scholar; and Raghavan, Srinath, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 First recommended by the Pakistan Educational Conference in November 1947, a few months after Pakistan came into existence.

3 As Afsan Chowdhury (author of the four-volume study Bangladesh 1971) has said, the war of 1971 has long been approached as a ‘sacred’ topic and not intellectually explored, so ‘taboo’ is not an inappropriate term. ‘Afsan Chowdhury's four-volume history of 1971—interview with Farhad Ahmed’, The Daily Star, 19 May 2007.

4 India used the term ‘East Bengal’ at least from October 1971.

5 On the need to ‘expand the archive’, see Saikia, Yasmin, ‘History on the Line: Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh’, History Workshop Journal, 58 (2004), pp. 275–287CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cilano, Cara, ‘Editorial: Too Soon? Pakistan and the 1971 War’, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, 2:3 (2010), pp. i–ixGoogle Scholar.

6 This is true even of the military regime of General H. M. Ershad, which could not point to its leader's glorious role in the war—Ershad served the Pakistan Army in West Pakistan throughout and he even got a promotion during the war. van Schendel, Willem, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 195–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 277; Mohan, P. V. S. Jagan and Chopra, Samir, Eagles over Bangladesh: The Indian Air Force in the 1971 Liberation War (Noida: Harper Collins Publishers, 2013), p. 37Google Scholar.

7 Nayanika Mookherjee speaks of the ethical dilemmas of presenting more complex narratives in the face of both statist and activist agendas. Researching themes that fall outside the scope of Story 1 remains a challenge. For example, the killing of non-Bengalis in East Pakistan (before 25 March 1971) and Bangladesh (after 16 December 1971) targeted not just ‘Biharis’ (now known as ‘Stranded Pakistanis’) but also other ethnic minorities. Other themes are the poor planning and internal rows among pro-Bangladesh leaders; the middle-class bias of the historiography; the numerous Bengalis sitting on the fence throughout the war; the West Pakistanis who supported the Bangladesh side in the conflict; and so on. Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘Friendship and Encounters on the Political Left in Bangladesh’, in Armbruster, Heidi and Laerke, Anna (eds), Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 65–87Google Scholar; Chowdhury, Afsan, ‘1971 History: Letting the Memories of the Majority to Die’, The Daily Star—Independence Day Special 2012, 26 March 2012, p. 1Google Scholar.

8 Examples of such interference and obstruction by administrators and politicians—as in the Bangladesh War of Independence Documents (Muktijuddher Dolilpatra) Project and stalled Bangla Academy initiatives—offer an important subject of future research on these restrictions. See ‘Afsan Chowdhury's four-volume history’.

9 This name has stuck: ‘Special Issue: The 1971 Indo-Pakistan War’, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, 2:3 (2010).

10 Often such attempts have diverted attention from the larger dimensions of the war by redefining trivial issues as being of crucial importance. For example, dualistic party-political interpretations after 1971 have enshrined a conflict about the authorship of the declaration of independence as a prime marker of significance, generating heated debate. Thus the Awami League foregrounds the short declaration that their leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, wrote just before he was arrested on the night of 25–26 March 1971. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, on the other hand, extols the radio message that their leader, Ziaur Rahman, broadcast on 27 March. For the texts of these two declarations, see Guhathakurta, Meghna and van Schendel, Willem, The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 225–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 The third direction that second-generation war historiography has taken is that of debunking the myths. This is an inevitable approach that emerges after all wars to sort the facts from war propaganda and to work towards a more unified understanding of events. In a way, it is the exemplary second-generation historiography because war historians have an important role to play as myth-busters. But they can be convincing only if they are scrupulously careful in presenting the current state of knowledge production, weighing the evidence, critiquing their sources, and referencing their data. Only then can they hope to persuade knowledgeable others; a successful debunker must adhere to the highest professional standards. As yet the one example of this genre that we have for the 1971 war is, however, the polemical and controversial work by Sarmila Bose. It has been received with indignation in Bangladesh and has been sharply criticized on methodological grounds and for its lack of professional rigour. Her ‘Anatomy of Violence: Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971’, Economic and Political Weekly, 40:41 (8 October 2005), pp. 4463–4471; ‘Losing the Victims: Problems of Using Women as Weapons in Recounting the Bangladesh War’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42:38 (22 September 2007), pp. 3864–3871; and Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (London: Hurst & Company, 2011) have triggered numerous disapproving reviews. See, for example, Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘A Prescription for Reconciliation?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41:36 (9 September 2006), pp. 3901–3903Google Scholar; Mandal, Akhtaruzzaman and Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘“Research” on Bangladesh War’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42:50 (15 December 2007), pp. 118–121Google Scholar; Mohaiemen, Naeem: ‘Flying Blind: Waiting for a Real Reckoning on 1971’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46:36 (3 September 2011), pp. 40–52Google Scholar; Bose, Sarmila, ‘“Dead Reckoning”: A Response’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46:53 (31 December 2011), pp. 76–79Google Scholar; Mohaiemen, Naeem, ‘Another Reckoning’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46:53 (31 December 2011), pp. 79–80Google Scholar.

12 Such scholarship can build on impressive documentation projects of which the results have been published only partially. See, for example, Hafizur Rahman, Hasan, Bangladesher Swadhinata Juddha—Dalilpatra/History of Bangladesh War of Independence: Documents (Dhaka: Hasan Hafizur Rahman on behalf of the Ministry of Information, 1982–85)Google Scholar, 15 volumes; Biswas (ed.), History from Below, 1971; Chowdhury, Bangladesh 1971; and the oral history project carried out by Ain-O-Shalish Kendra (ASK; Legal Aid and Human Rights Organization). See also eyewitness accounts at www.genocidebangladesh.org, [accessed 22 August 2015].

13 Mookherjee's work is especially groundbreaking with regard to public memories of sexual violence during the war, whereas Saikia has strongly contributed by situating the war within historical processes of state violence and othering in South Asia and by dislodging received ideas about victimhood and transgression. Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘“Remembering to Forget”: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 12 (2006), pp. 433–450CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘The “Dead and Their Double Duties”: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Martyred Intellectual Memorials in Bangladesh’, Space and Culture, 10:2 (2007), pp. 271–291CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘Gendered Embodiments: Mapping the Body-Politic of the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh’, Feminist Review, 88 (2008), pp. 36–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mooherjee, Nayanika, ‘“Never Again”: Aesthetics of “Genocidal” Cosmopolitanism and the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 17 (2011), S71–S91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘The Absent Piece of Skin: Gendered, Racialized and Territorial Inscriptions of Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh War’, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (2012), pp. 1572–1601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saikia, ‘History on the Line’; Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh. These themes are also addressed in D'Costa, Bina, Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

14 For example, Palit, D. K., The Lightning Campaign: The Indo-Pakistan War 1971 (Salisbury: Compton Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Singh, Lachhman, Indian Sword Strikes in East Pakistan (Sahibabad: Vikas Publishing House, 1979);Google ScholarUban, S. S., Phantoms of Chittagong: The ‘Fifth Army’ in Bangladesh (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1985)Google Scholar; Salik, Siddiq, Witness to Surrender (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1977])Google Scholar; Rahman, Abdul, East Pakistan—the End Game: An Onlooker's Journal 1969–1971 (Karachi, etc.: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Niazi, A. A. K., The Betrayal of East Pakistan (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1999)Google Scholar.

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16 Recorded oral evidence from different regions and localities comes in many forms. Some examples are Biswas (ed.), History from Below; Md. Mahbubar Rahman, Ekattore Gaibandha (Dhaka: Bangladesh Charcha, 2005); and Tareque and Catherine Masud's documentary film Muktir Kotha (1999).

17 It is especially urgent to interest young historians with a Pakistani background in this topic. It was a West Pakistani–East Pakistani conflict, and Pakistani–Bangladeshi teamwork is needed to rise above the incompatibility of Stories 1 and 2—and to bridge the gap between the focus on war crimes and devastation (Story 1) and the focus on high politics (Story 2).

18 This is the usual translation of the Bengali term Muktijuddho (literally, ‘Liberation War’).

19 See footnote 1.

20 I would like to thank them all for their generosity and their permission to reproduce these images. The photographs included in this article are from the collections of H. Zoramliana, K. Lalthansangi, Lalsangliana Sailo, the Mizo National Front, and R. Zamawia.

21 For introductions, see Burke, Peter, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001)Google Scholar; Edwards, Elizabeth, ‘Objects of Affect: Photography beyond the Image’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012), pp. 221–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pinney, Christopher, ‘Seven Theses on Photography’, Thesis Eleven, 113:1 (2012), pp. 141–156CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Up to 1952 Mizoram was known as the Lushai Hills, a name British administrators gave it after the military annexation of the region in the 1890s. Administratively, it was part of the province of Assam. In 1947 the Mizo Union, the first political party, submitted a memorandum demanding that the area be known as Mizoram and its inhabitants as Mizos. In 1952 it was renamed Mizo Hills District, and in 1972 it was separated from Assam to become the union territory of Mizoram. In 1986 its status was elevated to that of a state of the Indian Union. ‘Memorandum Submitted to His Majesty's Government, Government of India and its Constituent Assembly Through the Advisory Sub-Committee by the Mizo Union on 26.4.1947’, in Zorema, J., Indirect Rule in Mizoram 1890–1954 (The Bureaucracy and the Chiefs) (Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2007), pp. 189–194Google Scholar; Bareh, H. M., Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5—Mizoram (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2001), pp. 179–180Google Scholar.

23 Also known as the Reid-Coupland Plan. Reid, Robert, ‘The Excluded Areas of Assam’, The Geographical Journal, 103:1/2 (1944), pp. 18–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Syiemlieh, David R., ‘The Crown Colony Plan for the Hills of North East India: Concept to Collapse 1941–1946’, in Nag, Sajal, Gurung, Tejimala, and Choudhury, Abhijit (eds), Making of the Indian Union: Merger of Princely States and Excluded Areas (Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 2007), pp. 241–248Google Scholar; Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, p. 177.

24 ‘Memorandum Submitted to His Majesty's Government’; Sangkima, Mizos: Society and Social Change (1890–1947) (Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 1992), p. 138.

25 These sentiments found expression in a private letter of the period: ‘In fact the whole Mizo people are unwilling to be directly under Pakistan or Hindustan. But they were given to understand that is quite hopeless for them to call for the British Govt. to stay on, so as to lead them at least for some years more . . . Some of the Mizos are thinking to find out way [sic] so that they may join Burma. But that too appears to be rather uncertain to be really practicable although the Mizo-ram never was within India proper either before British Govt or after the British Govt. Before the British Govt the Mizo-ram was quite independent from either India or Burma.’ Letter from Saptea, Thakthing, Aijal, 5 July 1947, to Archibald Ian Bowman. The ‘case of the Mizo people for self-determination’ was also made in ‘A Memorandum of Mizo Union Council Submitted to His Majesty's Government . . .’, Aijal, 1 July 1947, signed by R. Vanlawma (secretary) and Pachhunga (chairman). Both documents can be found in Papers of Archibald Ian Bowman, Indian Civil Service, chiefly relating to the Lushai Hills Total Defence Scheme and ‘V’ Force 1942-44. MSS Eur F229/19, British Library, London.

26 Sajal Nag, ‘Tribals, Famine, Rats, State and the Nation’, Economic and Political Weekly (24 March 2001), p. 1029. The Indian state defines over 90 per cent of the population of Mizoram as ‘tribal’.

27 Nag, ‘Tribals, Famine, Rats, State and the Nation’, p. 1029; Aplin, Ken P. and Lalsiamliana, James, ‘Chronicle and Impacts of the 2005–09 Mautam in Mizoram’, in Singleton, Grantet al. (eds), Rodent Outbreaks: Ecology and Impacts (Los Baños: International Rice Research Institute, 2010), p. 25Google Scholar.

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29 The radicalization of the Mizo National Front in the years leading up to 1966 is described in Zamawia, R., Zofate Zinkawngah (Zalenna Mei a Mit Tur a Ni Lo) (Aizawl: The author, 2007), pp. 171–265Google Scholar. I am grateful to Joy L. K. Pachuau for translations from this book.

30 Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, p. 266. Christianity is the majority religion in Mizoram.

31 Before the revolt, the Mizo National Army had been known as the Mizo National Volunteers. Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, p. 379.

32 Lalthakima, ‘Insurgency in Mizoram: A Study of its Origin, Growth and Dimension’, PhD thesis, Mizoram University, 2008; Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 208, 212–232.

33 Lieutenant-General Sam Manekshaw, General Officer Commanding, Eastern Command of the Indian Army, at a press conference in Kolkata in 1966. Quoted in Subir Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire: North-East India (New Delhi, etc.: Lancer Publishers, 1996), p. 151.

34 Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, pp. 295, 297.

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36 Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah gives the most detailed account of the various campaigns, clashes, and encounters.

37 I am grateful to all the ex-combatants who shared their images (see footnote 20) for the information they provided about depicted locations and individuals, as well as about dates.

38 A few villages in the Sajek borderland are inhabited by ethnic affiliates, notably Lushai (known as Mizo in Mizoram) and Pangkhua (known as Pang in Mizoram). The Mizo rebels’ capital was established in Mahmuam, a Lushai village. Kim, Amy, Roy, Palash, and Sangma, Mridul, The Kuki-Chin Communities of Bangladesh: A Sociolinguistic Survey (Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2011)Google Scholar.

39 Hluna, J. V., ‘MNF Relations with Foreign Powers’, in Prasad, R. N (ed.), Autonomy Movements in Mizoram (New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 1994) p. 190Google Scholar; Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire, pp. 145–149; Lalthakima, ‘Insurgency in Mizoram’, pp. 81–82.

40 From left to right: Commissioner Thangkima, Pu V. L. T. Muana, Brigadier General Muankima, R. Zamawia, Commissioner Vanlalzika (groom), Muani (bride), Zohmingi, Zangi, Tinsangi, Nurse Rami. Mahmuam Baptist Church, 7 October 1969.

41 Among the men are Senator L. M. S. Colney, Chawnglianthuama, V. L. T. Muana, Chawnghnuna, and Tlangrawta.

42 Then spelled ‘Dacca’. Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, p. 478.

43 Nirmal Nibedon, Mizoram: The Dagger Brigade (New Delhi: Lancers Publishers, 1980), p. 157.

44 See van Schendel, Willem, Mey, Wolfgang, and Dewan, Aditya Kumar, The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2000)Google Scholar; Mohaiemen, Naeemet al. (eds), Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat Writers’ Collective, 2010)Google Scholar.

45 John Gill erroneously shows this area to have been ‘captured by India/Mukti Bahini [pro-Bangladesh Freedom Fighters] prior to 3 December’. Gill, An Atlas of the 1971 India-Pakistan War, p. 16.

46 The National Day commemorated the establishment of the Mizo National Front on 22 October 1961. Together with Independence Day (1 March) it represented the ceremonial high point of the Mizoram political calendar.

47 The portrait, taken at the bungalow of the deputy commissioner of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, shows the president of Mizoram (Laldenga) sitting in the middle. To the left is the secretary to the president (Zoramthanga) and to the right the establishment secretary and area commissioner of Rûn (V. L. T. Muana). Standing from left to right are the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (Zahmingthanga), the commissioner (Lalhleia), and the police commissioner (Lawmthanga).

48 From left to right: Colonel Lallawta, Lieutenant Colonel Sangliana, Captain Tawnluia, and A. D. (S.) Thangzela.

49 It was not a peaceful bubble by any means, however. For internal squabbling among Mizos in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, see Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 147–154.

50 They also received help from the Chinese consulate in Dhaka. In the Bangladesh Liberation War, the United States supported the Pakistan side, and India and the Soviet Union the Bangladesh side. Hluna, ‘MNF Relations with Foreign Powers’; Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 149–150.

51 From left to right: Police Commissioner Lawmthanga Colney, Superintendent of Police Lalnghenga, and Inspector of Police Lalmawia.

52 Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, p. 149.

53 Nibedon, Mizoram, p. 164.

54 Cf. Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, p. 346.

55 From left to right: Superintendent of Police Lalnghenga, Captain Lalhleia, Thanthuama, and Lalsangliana (all members of the State Security Agency). With them are commandos of Pakistan's Special Services Group and the son of an East Pakistan police officer.

56 Uban, Phantoms of Chittagong, p. 101; cf. Gill, An Atlas of the 1971 India-Pakistan War, p. 32.

57 Bareh reports Indian airplanes over the Chittagong Hill Tracts and (rumours of) Indian soldiers in these hills as early as April 1971, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 151–152. The first Indian aircraft sweeps over East Pakistan took place on 30 March 1971, four days after the beginning of the war. Mohan and Chopra, Eagles over Bangladesh, p. 78.

58 The Indian armed forces entering the Chittagong Hill Tracts from the east were under Major General S. S. Uban. They were not part of the regular Indian Army but formed ‘an irregular Tibetan unit [that] the RAW [Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency] operated’. It was based in Lunglei in Mizoram ‘battling Mizo insurgents and so was leveraged for the war’. Mohan and Chopra, Eagles over Bangladesh, pp. 256–257, 283; Uban, Phantoms of Chittagong.

59 Lalsangliana Sailo, quoted in Nibedon, Mizoram, p. 166.

60 Alternate spellings: Rakhine (Myanmar).

61 This river, officially named Rainkhyang (alternate spellings: Renikhyong or Rainkhiang), also has a Mizo name, Tatkawng.

62 See Nibedon, Mizoram, pp. 166–170; Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 155–157; Uban, Phantoms of Chittagong, pp. 109, 113.

63 Other images of the Bangladesh Liberation War that can be understood as reflecting adventure and romance rather than terror and devastation are discussed in Mookherjee, Nayanika, ‘Mobilising Images: Encounters of “Forced” Migrants and the Bangladesh War of 1971’, Mobilities, 6:3 (2011), pp. 399–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 This happened on 22 December 1971. Nibedon, Mizoram, p. 170.

65 Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 63–64, 150. Contacts between these two insurgent groups dated back to 1967. ‘In the second half of 1967, a branch of the Burmese Communist Party, the head of the Arakan Communist Party, Kra Hla Aung, and three others had come to Mizoram. They held talks with the Vice-President [of the Mizoram government, by the name of Lalnunmawia], who was then in the Lurh division [of Mizoram]. Their main agenda was to get Mizo support in fighting the Burmese government and the need for uniting in the struggle.’ Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah, p. 620.

66 Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, p. 63.

67 Nibedon, Mizoram, pp. 173–174.

68 The military face of the insurrection became known as the Shanti Bahini (Peace Forces) and its political face as the Parbotto Chottogram Jono Shonghoti Shomiti (United People's Party of the Chittagong Hill Tracts).

69 Even though the Chittagong Hill Tracts War came to an end with a peace treaty in 1997, intense militarization, antagonism, and lower-level conflict continue to this day. Mohsin, Amena, The Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh: On the Difficult Road to Peace (Boulder/London: Lynne Rienner, 2003)Google Scholar; Chakma, Bhumitra, ‘The Post-Colonial State and Minorities: Ethnocide in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 48:3 (2010), pp. 281–300CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Pandey, Pranab Kumar and Jamil, Ishtiaq, ‘Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: An Unimplemented Accord and Continued Violence’, Asian Survey, 49:6 (2009), pp. 1052–1070CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mohaiemen, Naeem (ed.), Between Ashes and Hope: Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat Writers’ Collective, 2010)Google Scholar. See also regular updates provided by the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission: www.chtcommission.org, [accessed 22 August 2015]; and http://www.chtnews.com, [accessed 22 August 2015].

70 Bareh, Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5, pp. 190–194.

71 Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire, p. 264; Verghese and Thanzawna, A History of the Mizos, Vol. 2, p. 110.

72 Saikia's voice has been the strongest to urge for a new historiography that should blur the boundaries and thus could act as a first step towards reconciliation. Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh.

73 Thus this case joins other contributions to second-generation narratives of the war (notably those by Mookherjee and Saikia, mentioned earlier) that have challenged the good/bad categorization and demonstrated the importance of being attentive to persons, situations, and cases that straddled this divide during the war.

74 For introductions, see Mohsin, Amena, The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1997)Google Scholar; Adnan, Shapan, Migration, Land Alienation and Ethnic Conflict: Causes of Poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh (Dhaka: Research and Advisory Services, 2004)Google Scholar; and Jhala, Angma D., ‘Daughters of the Hills: Legacies of Colonialism, Nationalism and Religious Communalism in the Chakma Raj Family, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal, c. 1900–1972’, South Asian History and Culture, 4:1 (2013), pp. 107–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further perspectives are provided by Siddartha Chakma, Proshongo: Parbotyo Chottogram (Calcutta: Nath Brothers, 1392 B.E. [1985–86]); Shelley, Mizanur Rahman (ed.), The Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: The Untold Story (Dhaka: Centre for Development Research, 1992)Google Scholar; and Roy, Raja Tridiv, The Departed Melody (Memoirs) (Islamabad: PPA Publications, 2003)Google Scholar.

75 Ahsan, Syed Aziz-al and Chakma, Bhumitra, ‘Problems of National Integration in Bangladesh: The Chittagong Hill Tracts’, Asian Survey, 29:10 (1989), pp. 959–970CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pandey and Jamil, ‘Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh’; Uddin, Nasir, ‘Living on the Margin: The Positioning of the “Khumi” within the Sociopolitical and Ethnic History of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’, Asian Ethnicity, 9:1 (2008), pp. 33–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakma, ‘The Postcolonial State and Minorities’; Mohaiemen (ed.), Between Ashes and Hope.

76 For example, apart from everyday violence and coercion, in its first few years the Pakistan state turned murderously violent against rebelling policemen (1948) and demonstrating students (1952) in Dhaka.

77 The Ansars were the largest of a number of volunteer militias in East Pakistan; others were the Muslim (League) National Guards, the Pakistan National Guards, the Mujahids, and the Razakars. Eastern Pakistan Ansars Ordinance 1948 (12 February 1948); Ansar Act (1948); First Annual Report on the Ansars (Dacca, 1949), in Home (Police) Department, Branch Police, B. Proceedings P10A-76/49(11-49), National Archives of Bangladesh, Dhaka. See also van Schendel, Willem, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2005), pp. 96–97Google Scholar, 277.

78 Niazi, Betrayal, pp. 75–79.

79 Alternative spelling: ‘Jatiya Rakshi Bahini’. ‘Jatiyo Rokkhi Bahini Act, 1972’ (President Order no. 21). Karim, S. A., Sheikh Mujib: Triumph and Tragedy (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2005), pp. 272–274Google Scholar.

80 Riaz, Ali, ‘Bangladesh in 2004: The Politics of Vengeance and the Erosion of Democracy’, Asian Survey, 45:1 (2005), pp. 112–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Momtaz, Suraya, ‘Human Rights Violations in Bangladesh: A Study of the Violations by the Law Enforcing Agencies’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 13:4 (2013), pp. 101–117Google Scholar.

81 Such links involved many partners. A good example is Indian Major General S.S. Uban who, first, headed the operations against insurgents in Mizoram; then, second, trained the Mujib Bahini (one of the units of Bangladesh Freedom Fighters struggling against the Pakistan armed forces in East Pakistan in 1971); third, invaded the Chittagong Hill Tracts in December 1971, battling Mizo fighters there; and, fourth, acted as advisor to the Bangladesh government in the creation and training of the Rokkhi Bahini in 1972. Karim, Sheikh Mujib, pp. 215, 271–272.

82 Conversely, Mizo involvement in the Bangladesh Liberation War has been of little concern to Mizoram historians. There are a number of published accounts in English, and the most detailed memoir is in the Mizo language. In addition to Nibedon (Mizoram) and Bareh (Encyclopaedia of North-East India: Volume 5), English publications include: Vumson, Zo History: With an Introduction to Zo Culture, Economy, Religion and their Status as an Ethnic Minority in India, Burma, and Bangladesh (Aizawl: the author, 1993); and Verghese and Thanzawna, A History of the Mizos, Vol. 2. The most prominent source in Mizo is Zamawia, Zofate Zinkawngah.

Figure 0

Map 1a. The location of Mizoram in India.

Source: The author.
Figure 1

Map 1b. Bangladesh and Mizoram.

Source: The author.
Figure 2

Figure 1. A group of Mizo guerrilla fighters lined up in front of their cave hideout in rural Mizoram in 1967.

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.37
Figure 3

Figure 2. Mizo exiles’ wedding party in Mahmuam (East Pakistan), the capital headquarters of the Mizoram government-in-exile, in 1969.40

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.
Figure 4

Figure 3. A group of Mizo volunteers constructing a church in Chhantlang (East Pakistan) in 1970.41

Source: Mizo National Front collection (hereafter MNF collection).
Figure 5

Figure 4. Armed with a guitar and songbooks, young Mizos get ready to go carolling around Mahmuam (East Pakistan), Christmas 1970.

Source: K. Lalthansangi collection.
Figure 6

Figure 5. Mizoram Independence Day (1 March) commemorated the beginning of the Mizo revolt in 1966. Here we see the president of Mizoram, Laldenga, inspecting the national guard of honour in Mahmuam (East Pakistan) on 1 March 1969.

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 7

Figure 6. Newly elected members of parliament giving the oath of allegiance to V. L. T. Muana, the election commissioner, in the Mizoram government's headquarters in New Chhantlang (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 9 April 1971.

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 8

Figure 7. Mizo National Day celebration in the town hall of Rangamati (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 21 October 1971.

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 9

Figure 8. The leaders of the Mizoram government pose for a state portrait in Rangamati, 22 October 1971.47

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 10

Figure 9. Four officers of the Mizo National Army during a light-hearted moment at Rangamati College, 23 July 1971.48

Source: R. Zamawia collection.
Figure 11

Figure 10. Mizo police officers pose in a photo studio in the city of Chittagong, 30 August 1971.51

Source: MNF collection.
Figure 12

Figure 11. A Pakistan Army man surrounded by Mizo fighters clad in various uniforms in Barkal (Chittagong Hill Tracts, East Pakistan), 29 September 1971.

Source: R. Zamawia collection.
Figure 13

Figure 12. Mizo rebels (State Security Agency) and Pakistani commandoes (Special Services Group) with their arms and a transmitter, East Pakistan, 1971.54

Source: R. Zamawia collection.
Figure 14

Figure 13. Mizo advisers and Pakistan Army men in Sylhet, 1971.55

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 15

Figure 14. Mizo men bathing in the Rainkhyang (Tatkawng) river in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh) during their flight to Burma, circa 18 December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 16

Figure 15. President Laldenga and his entourage marching towards Burma in the southern Chittagong Hill Tracts (Bangladesh), circa 18 December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 17

Figure 16. President Laldenga addressing his cadres in Salopi village (Bangladesh) during the flight to Burma, late December 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 18

Figure 17. Mizos roasting a pig in Salopi village (Bangladesh), Christmas 1971.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 19

Figure 18. Captains Lalthlana and Lalsangliana Sailo on their way to Arakan (Burma), January 1972.

Source: Lalsangliana Sailo collection.
Figure 20

Figure 19. Arms instructor H. Zoramliana poses with two flags (of the Mizo National Front and Independent Mizoram) in the Mizo military training school, Sunsawng (Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh) in 1979.

Source: H. Zoramliana collection.