In 2008, hunting for a record of my birth at Dhaka’s Holy Family Hospital in 1965 took me to a nondescript room in the institution that now has the words Red Crescent added to it. None of the large, dusty registers that an obliging staffer dug out from its depths were birth records—mine or anyone else’s. But they were heart-rending, given that the hospital used to be staffed by Catholics back in the day, including the American obstetrician-nun who delivered me.

For, these books logged hundreds of abortions, dating back to 1971. The targeted rape of thousands of East Pakistani women—Muslim and Hindu—by West Pakistani troops and local Razakar and al Badr collaborators before and during the war is well documented. But the extent to which humiliation and dishonour added to the brutality of their trauma was proved by the fact that a Catholic hospital had set aside its religious taboos to conduct abortions.

Many of these chilling records were destroyed in the years after independence, especially since the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, as part of attempts to erase the facts that led to the split of a nation created by Islam. How the Holy Family/ Red Crescent records survived till 2008 is a mystery. Oversight perhaps. But they may finally disappear in this current round of vandalism to destroy the Mujibur Rahman legacy and its history with Pakistan.

The return to power in 1996 and then again in 2006 of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh founder Sheikh Mujib’s elder daughter, had saved records of those horrific days from total official elimination at least for a while. Without records, the families of the thousands of Bengali East Pakistanis who were murdered during Operation Searchlight unleashed by the Pakistan Army and those who were........

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