“This may be the most important book launch at the Karachi Literature Festival this year,” announced panel moderator Ghazi Salahuddin, referring to deceased Major-General Rao Farman Ali’s work, How Pakistan Got Divided (OUP, 2017). This was because it covers a subject that is not talked about much in Pakistan, namely the partition that occurred in 1971, written by a person who had been a participant in the process.

The author’s son Shafiq Ur Rahman briefly stated that the dismemberment of Pakistan could have been prevented had wisdom prevailed over passion and the quest for power, to the detriment of the national interest, been curtailed.

Aquila Ismail, activist and author of Of Martyrs and Marigolds (CreateSpace, 2012) a novel based on her personal experience of the creation of Bangladesh, spoke out against historians’ cold uncompassionate analogies of tragedies. Historians care only about dates, she argued. They do not look at what happens to humanity in terms of war. She said that she was not only a witness to the fall of Dhakka but also a survivor and felt that it has not been covered adequately in Farman Ali’s book. The perception in East Pakistan at the time was the General Rao was calling the shots. There was and still is a perception that on December 14, 1971, just a few days before the surrender,  the General was complicit in the brutal murder of intellectuals, in which four of Ismail’s friends lost their fathers. She said that these perceptions have not been dealt with in this book.

Ismail continued that in his book General Rao said that there was no genocide. “If 26,000 people were killed instead 50,000, that doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy,” she argued.

Political analyst and diplomat  Zafar Hilaly argued that Pakistan was a non-historical state, born out of colonialism. The survival of such states, he said, depends on the wisdom of their leaders. Unwise leaders can lead such states to eventually perish, the way Yugoslavia and the USSR did, and the way Syria, Yemen, Libia, Sudan, Somalia and Iraq are in the process of doing. “Today, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Israel etcetera, are among several dozen non-historical states that would suffer the same fate as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union,” he explained.

Pakistan, Hilaly said, reminded him of what was said about the founders of modern Italy: having created Italy, they forgot to create Italians.

Hilaly revealed that in early 1972, the PPP’s chief strategist J A Rahim, who was minister for production at the time, had personally confessed to Hilaly and his father that Rahim and Bhutto had worked hard to bring about the fall of East Pakistan. They had decided that East Pakistan was a halter around their necks and that they could not have gotten anywhere “lugging that stone around”. Hilaly recalled looking at his father after hearing this shocking confession. “My father averted his gaze, and for me that gesture of his said it all.”