KARACHI: The book, “Blood over Different Shades of Green East Pakistan 1971: History Revisited” authored by Ikram Sehgal and Bettina Robotka will be launched on Saturday in Karachi.
While historians in Pakistan have generally avoided the painful and controversial subject of the dismemberment of the country in 1971 and its aftermath; Sehgal and Robotka attempt to revisit the historical, published and non-published accounts of the 1971 war and seek to bring to light causes that led to it.
According to renowned British historian R G Collingwood, a historian must ‘reconstruct’ history by using ‘historical imagination’ to re-enact the thought process of historical persons based on information and evidence from authentic sources.
Sehgal and Robotka have attempted to do exactly this; they have explored the events that led to the civil war of 1971 and also studied in great detail the impact it had on the country.
Ikram Sehgal, in addition to being a veteran of the 1971 war is the chairman of Pathfinder Group of Pakistan. He is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and a director of the East-West Institute (EWI), a US-based think tank.
He has served on the board of directors of Bank Alfalah and as chairman of K-Electric. He has also served as director of the Business Advisory Board (BAB) of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Geneva and co-chairman of the Pakistan Committee of the Swiss-Asian Chamber of Commerce (SACC), Geneva. In addition to this, he is also a regular contributor of articles in newspapers and appears regularly on current affairs programmes in his capacity as a defence and security analyst.
Bettina Robotka holds a PhD on the Indian nationalist movement in UP in the 19th Century from the Institute of Asian and African Studies (IAAS), Humboldt University. She is an expert on South Asian history and has been teaching Indian and Pakistani history at IAAS for thirty years now.
From 2005 to 2010 and 2012 to 2013, she worked at the Higher Education Commission (HEC) foreign faculty programme as a full professor and taught various courses in history and social sciences at the Institute of Business Administration and the Institute of Business Management in Karachi.
She has also written extensively on the history of nationalist struggle in the subcontinent, the political system of Pakistan, democracy in South Asia and the role of Islam in politics. She reviews articles for several HEC recognized journals in Pakistan and evaluates PhD thesis for the University of Punjab, International Islamic University of Islamabad, and Area Study Centre for Europe, University of Karachi.
