Re: Myth about winning 1965 War
Couldn’t agree more. History is hardly an academic discipline in Pakistan. There is serious dearth of primary source material, availability of state documents to write professional, research and evidence based ‘history’.
Agenda ridden memoirs are considered alternate history because they rebelliously differ from the orthodox view and it pleases certain fractions of the society. Anything that sounds ‘different’ is considered ‘right’. Those memoirs are totally immune to any academic scrutiny, any cross checking of sources, neither it goes through academic peer review to be considered a professional, credible and reliable history. But they sell!
Everyone loves to have a little whine about how shoddy the history writing tradition is in Pakistan, but how many national and local archives, libraries and history research institutions and departments you have in the country in order to encourage writing of history? Most of War history reports, document and real primary sources and evidences are stacked somewhere in the archives of GHQ, so how can anyone claim to have cracked the code on Pakistan’s war history is beyond me. Ridiculous.
In Britain, after 10, 20 and 30 years of restrictions, state department papers by law are released to national archives, hence history is considered a serious academic discipline dealt by professional historians who dedicate years going through plethora of quality primary source material to write exhaustive research and evidence based history…not to quote and unquote things based on bloody Wikipedia and BBC reports!