"Fundamentalism and radicalism are spreading like cancer in Bangladesh. All the right thinking people should unite to fight this menace," said Samik Bhattacharya, West Bengal BJP chief.
He also said that - "Since the 1980s, fundamentalist forces have been spreading their base in Bangladesh".
(A photograph taken during the conflict of a woman who had been assaulted featured in an exhibition in London. A snap of that era.
Titled 'Shamed Woman', but also called 'Brave Woman', the image was taken by a Bangladeshi photographer, Naib Uddin Ahmed.
The image is considered to be as "classical a pose as any Madonna and Child".
The woman has her hands clenched, her face completely covered by her hair.)
The Bangladesh liberation war is often asserted to be one of the most grievous examples of wartime rape.
During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, members of the Pakistani military and 'Razakar paramilitary' force raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape.
Some of these women died in captivity or committed suicide, while others moved from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India.
In 2009, almost 40 years after the events of 1971, a report published by the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee of Bangladesh accused 1,597 people of war crimes, including rape.
Since 2010, the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) has indicted, tried, and sentenced several people to life imprisonment or death for their actions during the conflict. The stories of the rape victims have been told in movies and literature, and depicted in art.
The term Birangana was first introduced in 1971 by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to refer to victims of rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War, in an attempt to prevent them from being outcast by the society.
Since 1972, victims of rape during the war have been recognised as Birangona, or "war heroines", by the government of Bangladesh.
The atrocities in East Pakistan were the first instances of war rape to attract international media attention, and Sally J. Scholz has written that this was the first genocide to capture the interest of the mass media.
The women's human rights organisation Bangladesh Mahila Parishat took part in the war by publicising the atrocities being carried out by the Pakistani army.
Owing to the scale of the atrocities, US embassy staff had sent telegrams indicating that a genocide was occurring.
One, which became known as the Blood telegram, was sent by Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka, and was signed by him as well as US officials from USAID and USIS who at the time were serving in Dhaka.
In it, the signatories denounced American "complicity in Genocide", in an interview in 1972,
Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, justified the use of military intervention, saying, "Shall we sit and watch their women get raped?"
In 1994, the book Ami Birangana Bolchi (The Voices of War Heroines) by Nilima Ibrahim was released. It is a collection of eyewitness testimony from seven rape victims, which Ibrahim documented while working in rehabilitation centres.
The narratives of the survivors in this work are heavily critical of post-war Bangladeshi society's failure to support the victims of rape.
Published in 2012, the book Rising from the Ashes: Women's Narratives of 1971
-- includes oral testimonies of women affected by the Liberation War. As well as an account from Taramon Bibi, who fought and was awarded the Bir Protik (Symbol of Valour) for her actions, there are nine interviews with women who were raped.
The book's publication in English at the time of the fortieth anniversary of the war was noted in The New York Times as an "important oral history".
The 2014 film Children of War portrays sexual violence during the war. The film by Mrityunjay Devvrat, starring Farooq Sheikh, Victor Banerjee, Raima Sen, among others, is meant to "send shivers down the viewers' spine.
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