Yvette Rosser

"Though there are some striking similarities, the situation regarding the politics of the historiography in Bangladesh is quite different than in Pakistan. In Bangladesh the textbooks were subjected to similar pressures as in Pakistan, with two military dictators during twenty-one years, both attempting to guide the historical narrative and hence, they believed, the political and psychological direction of the people. (4)"

"The manner in which the textbooks were gradually rewritten in Bangladesh is very different than the method of the BJP in India, where changes in the orientation of historiography have been implemented with media fanfare an broad consultation—a very public debate. In the very different political atmosphere of BNP/Islamist government controlled Bangladesh, changes were clandestinely implemented, with little public review."

"When I make presentations about India at teachers conferences or in classrooms, the two most often asked questions are: "Why do women wear a dot on their foreheads?" and "Why, when there is so much poverty in India, dont they eat all those cows?" These questions broach issues of relevance and correlating non-Western practices to similar experiences in the students lives, within a context they can comprehend."

"More ominously, for Bangladeshis whose relatives were murdered, is the exclusion in the new BNP sponsored textbooks of the role played by the Jamaat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist organizations that supported razakars, Islamic terrorist squads implicated in the murders of intellectuals in Dhaka on December 14, 1971. The controversial sentences that blamed the Jamaat-i-Islami in the Awami League era text books were immediately expunged when the Jamaat-i-Islami came to power in a coalition government with the BNP. (20)"

"One of the more remarkable aspects of textbooks in Pakistan is their ability to completely eliminate cause and effect regarding the creation of Bangladesh. There is usually only a passing mention of the general elections called by Yahya Khan who is uniformly seen as a bad leader, a heavy drinking womanizer. There is nothing about the cancellation of the National Assembly, little about the military crackdown in Dhaka, less about the misfortunes of the Pakistani Army. The traumatic birth of Bangladesh is blamed on Indian cunning and incipient Bengali irridentalism.... “Eras and events deemed either irrelevant, hostile or inconvenient to the fulfillment of the Pakistan Movement are omitted”."

"Pakistani textbooks have a particular problem when defining geographical space. The terms "South Asia" and "Subcontinent" have partially helped to solve this problem of the geo-historical identity of the area formally known as British India. However, it is quite difficult for Pakistani textbook writers to ignore the land now known as India when they discuss Islamic heroes and Muslim monuments in the Subcontinent. This reticence to recognize anything of importance in India, which is almost always referred to as "Bharat" in both English and Urdu versions of the textbooks, creates a difficult dilemma for historians writing about the Mughal Dynasties. It is interesting to note that M.A. Jinnah strongly protested the Congress’ appropriation of the appellation “India”, but Mountbattan dismissed his arguments."