Today is the vijay-diwas for Bangladesh. Today is the day when Bangladesh earned their freedom from the brutal Pakistan Army. But the war wouldn’t have started if not for one journalist.
On June 13, 1971 one Pakistani reporter published an article in the UK’s Sunday Times and that changed the course of history for Pakistan, recreated the fate of Bangladesh and changed the outlook of West towards Pakistan.
It was the article after reading which, the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her “on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India’s armed intervention,” he recalled, reported Mark Dummett in BBc.
Anthony Mascarenhas, an honest Pakistani reporter exposed the brutality of Pakistan’s suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising in that article.
Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.
Thus started the most powerful and influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.
Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK’s Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army’s brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.
