Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

The liberation of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971 was the fulfilment of a national dream. It was a dream which, in the course of the preceding nine months, had mutated into a long nightmare as the Pakistan occupation army went about killing and pillaging all over this land. The nightmare was what we fought to overturn, to roll back as it were; and as the weeks turned into months, the valiant young men and women of the Mukti Bahini waged war in the bushes, along urban streets, in the villages and on the rivers to turn this country into a proper land of liberty and secular democracy. It was a war which brought out the best in all of us, for we all fought in defence of the collective national self-esteem. We went beyond the partisan, beyond party, to embrace the idea that the struggle for freedom was a political and military exercise that aimed at the attainment of a national goal. Our intellectual classes, indeed civil society as we knew it back then went into the war without reservation. Officers deserted the government of the occupying power; men at radio did the supremely brave thing of setting up the Shwadhin Bangla Betar and teachers, journalists, peasants, workers, soldiers, policemen, politicians — an entire nation — queued up to contribute their merit and their talent into a successful prosecution of the war.
   It is that mammoth enterprise of liberty we celebrate this morning, thirty three years after the murderous army of occupation from Pakistan bit the dust here in this country of rich tradition and enviable heritage. But as we celebrate the joy of freedom, we remember in all humility, in all the prayer we can muster, the three million Bengalis who were killed by the soldiers of Tikka Khan and AAK Niazi. We recall the enormity of sacrifices made by the tens of thousands of Bengali women molested and raped by Pakistan’s soldiers and we pay, as we will always pay, our most profound tributes to them. In all this remembrance of the moment when victory came our way, we cannot but tell ourselves that we have not forgotten or forgiven the men who so damaged our land and scarred our lives in that year when we shed tears and blood before finding it possible to laugh in the ecstasy of freedom. The foreign soldiers who killed our people, their local collaborators who played treacherous with this country are people we will forever associate with infamy and notoriety. And as we remember the old tales of suffering, it remains our supreme responsibility to pass the message of pain and happiness to our children and grandchildren, in the expectation that they will not forget the ethos to sustain which Bangladesh struggled so strenuously before it took its place in the community of free nations. Let the message to the future come in clear, unequivocal terms. The War of Liberation was waged in order for us to be able to establish a secular, democratic Bengali state where, naturally, the values we associate with life would be upheld, indeed reinforced over and over again. Any deviation from the principles upon which we went to war in 1971 would be a trivialising of the sacrifices of our martyrs. We cannot do that. We will not do that. We will not direct hammer blows at our self-esteem.
   This morning, it is time to reflect on the old goals, on the ancient objectives. It is time to ponder anew the question of democracy and good governance, of rule of law and of security of life and property for citizens. In this people’s republic, we will not forget that 1971 was all about people’s empowerment. Let us move on, to realise the goal.

...And our story abroad

The observance of Victory Day affords all of us in this country an opportunity of thinking of some of the ways we can project our history before the outside world. There is hardly any denial that we have long suffered from an image problem beyond our frontiers, especially in the West. That means that unless we get our house back in order — in politics, economics and the like — we will have little cause to be happy about ourselves. But perhaps one of the most important ways in which we can propagate our identity, our historical background, is through producing good, authoritative works on the political struggle leading to the attainment of liberty in 1971. And those works necessarily must be in such widely accepted foreign languages as English and French. Unfortunately, over these three decades and more, it has been seen that not much effort has been put into the job of producing good historical works in foreign languages or translating the many works which have proceeded from the minds of some of our renowned scholars.
   In these times, it is important that nations present a positive, thriving view of themselves to the outside world. There are countries which maintain distinct, well-manned cultural wings at their diplomatic missions abroad. Perhaps we can take a cue from them and go about setting up our own centres of cultural and historical excellence through our own diplomatic missions abroad, at least in global cities where it really matters. Apart from a dissemination of history and heritage, it will be worthwhile for government, any government in this country, to undertake regular programmes of sending well-known scholars of the country abroad, the goal obviously being an enrichment of the national ethos in foreign lands.
   We cannot but remember that it was a whole, worried world which took huge interest in our struggle for freedom back in 1971. It is then only natural that we let the world know how we have been faring in areas that have quite been overlooked as we have struggled for economic survival. Our literature, theatre, cinema, folklore, et cetera, need audiences abroad. It is as simple as that.

Martyrdom is neither a political argument, nor a partisan monopoly. The mean politics centring on the killing of intellectuals in the terminal days of 1971 by the killer wings of the Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami — Al-Badr and Al-Shams — is getting sickening by the day. The political parties should leave the martyrs alone, and not shed crocodile tears and spin their own fictions around the ghastliest pogrom of a century after the Nazi gas chambers.
   The sad and grisly sights of the killing fields and the ditches in Rayerbazar on the riverfront, and the memories of the dead and decapitated corpses of some of Bengal’s finest daughters and sons have not faded. In fact, they have been captured on celluloid and documented by the NBC television network of the United States on December 16, 1971, and by the 1995 hour-long or perhaps much longer David Bergman’s investigative documentary of Channel 4 of London, entitled The War Crimes File. Although the State has built a memorial on the site, it’s a pity that the successive governments, including the hallowed post-independence government that had tolled the bloody knell of its own parting after the enactment of the Draconian 4th Amendment to the Constitution in January, 1975 in a record time of five minutes, and sought to establish a one-man-one-party Baksal regime at its own deadly peril and tragedy in mid-august of 1975, did little or nothing to bring the perpetrators of the ‘murders most foul’ to justice.
   Although some are loath to recall the Buddhijibi Nidhan Tathyanusandhan Committee (Intellectual Killing Fact-Finding Committee), formed on December 18, ‘71 at the National Press Club, and the probe conducted by it through physical raids of the abandoned camps of the Al-Badr and Al-Shams black-shirts and depositions of the victims’ families and other witnesses, the report submitted by the committee on January 8, ’72 to then Acting President, the Late Syed Nazrul Islam, and the then Home Secretary, Abdul Khaleque, a returnee superior service police official from government-in-exile Hq at 8, Theatre Road in Kolkata, was the first and perhaps the last (and the lost or forgotten) indigenous probe-document on the killings. (Myself and Barrister Amirul Islam, along with late senior journalists Ali Ashraf and Ehtesham Haider Chowdhury, had handed over the report and recommended an Ordinance creating a joint force of the Indian Army, the Bangladesh Defence Force and the police to spread the net so that none of the suspects short-listed by the committee would escape the country, and hence the law.) They escaped both, and some of them have since been living happily ever after in London.
   The David Bergman docu-film of 1995, that reached a very wide audience and viewer-ship across the world, including Bangladesh (though not in any of the television channels in Dhaka, not even to speak of the much-lamented Ekushey of Simon Dring fame), opened up an opportunity of war crimes trial, or even a trial in London for some of the persons identified in the documentary as Al-Badr or Al-Shams killers. Bergman tried hard, as far as I have learnt from the bits and pieces of information in the media and word of mouth, with concerned solidarity-persons, to set the legal process rolling. But there is nothing on record or in evidence that the 1996-2001 government of Sheikh Hasina or even the so-called Ghatak-Dalal Nirmul Committee even moved an inch to make use of the docu-film’s narratives, picturisation and other evidences. “What manner of thing is your crocodile?”—to adapt a Shakespearian line to tears, with apologies to the great English bard.)
   The point we are trying to make is: from history to martyrdom everything is being trivialised in Bangladesh. Worse still, some of the actors in that historical period or the progeny of some of the martyrs in the huge concentration camp of Bangladesh are lending themselves to partisan exercises in distortion. While the commerce of political power will continue to fuel this competition for the misappropriation of history, we would rather not quote the aphorism on patriotism being “the last resort” of those about whom Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said something very, very and literally uncomplimentary indeed.
   Today on Victory Day, having put behind December 14, the ritual day for remembering the intellectual martyrs, we remember the known and the unknown men, women and children who perished in occupied Bangladesh in hundreds and thousands at the hands of the Pakistan army, and those innumerable brave fighters killed in combat.
   In memoriam, we recite the epitaph on all the graves of all the martyrs in the verses of Robert Louis Stevenson:
   Blows the wind today/ and the sun and the rain are flying,/ Blows the wind on moors today and now,/ where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,/ My heart remembers how!
   — Enayetullah Khan
   Simultaneously published in New Age and Holiday

I find myself short of spontaneity in expressing my true emotions whenever I am drawn into conversations about the Liberation War — Muktijuddho. The topic is one of the very few things I am cautious in approaching, almost overly conscious in commenting on (those who are familiar with me will tell you that I am usually not one to mince my words). And over the years it has taken a somewhat pathological turn, this deliberate, calculating attitude of mine. With some I fear I will come off too enthusiastic, with others too insolent, and with yet others perhaps too all-knowing — what I end up coming off as with most or all of them, in fact, is apologetic.
   But I really shouldn’t be apologetic about Muktijuddho. After all, I am the son of not one but two freedom fighters, the grandson of two more. I have grown up living and breathing Muktijuddho — in absorbing the conversations, the ideals, the camaraderie and the lifestyle of my parents, grandparents and their friends. And resultant of whatever I have soaked up of those conversations and ideals is the fact that Muktijuddho is the source of both my most coveted identity (of being a Bangladeshi) as well as my proudest (of being a Muktijoddha-shontan). So why should I of all people be apologetic?
   Yet I am.
   Because the Muktijuddho — or rather the idea of Muktijuddho — that my friends, my colleagues, even random acquaintances have ingrained in their imaginations when they engage me in conversation is not the one I have grown up to be proud of. Because the Muktijuddho that we are taught as history, nowadays changing every five years in not just the names and events but in its very essence, is not the Muktijuddho that my parents fought.
   Well, you’ll be thinking I’m not telling you anything new when I write that the greatest chapter in our nation-state’s history has been usurped, hijacked, kidnapped by the two dominant political factions in the strictly bipolar world that is today’s Bangladesh (let’s be honest, they have no differing ideologies, so let’s not call them political ideologies). But do we ever stop to think that we, the respective followers of the two poles (by choice or lack thereof) actually play into the ploy by quietly abiding by the boundaries that they have drawn for us vis-à-vis Muktijuddho? You and I are programmed to think that kurta-pajama-tupi-dari equates Razakar, and Rabindra Sangeet sung adorning one-inch-radius red teep equates chetona. Each of us, standing on the two sides of the spectrum, sneer at the other.
   The fact is the idea of Muktijuddho was not hijacked or kidnapped from us. We, in the overzealous necessity we find in proving, stamping our partisanship, have handed it over on a golden platter. What results is that most of the post-independence generations not only have a skewed, untrue perception of Muktijuddho, but also have quite an aversion to the concept of Muktijuddho and the divisions it creates.
   And thus my apologetic approach to my proudest identity.
   The two-way street
   The apologies are not just about my close associations with, and fascination of, Muktijuddho. They go both ways, in fact.
   Three Victory Days ago, my colleague Tanim and I were asked by the newspaper we were then associated with, Shaptahik 2000, to write a cover story on Muktijuddho ebong ajker projonmo — Muktijuddho and today’s generation. We each wrote a highly personal, emotion-charged piece. The two articles were different in many ways, but also similar in others, reflecting mostly the fact that both of us had much the same associations with Muktijuddho. The most analogous strain between the two was, however, the sense of vacuum we felt in not being able to relate our feelings to others, to express our pride about Muktijuddho.
   It was, indeed, a time of embarrassment as far as being a Muktijoddha-shontan was concerned — we were at the peak of the notoriety of Dipu Chowdhury, son of valiant freedom fighter Maya. But I was embarrassed of other less obvious things as well — of meeting a frail, old man called Subedar Wahab at the Bichitra office. This man sporting the quintessential ‘Razakar’ look of kurta-pajama-tupi-dari was apparently one of the bravest Muktijoddhas you could find. I was ashamed branding as Razakar so many who looked exactly like Subedar Wahab without even stopping to think twice. I had been carried away by the wind of the times, by the belittling pettiness of so-called chetona.
   It made me ask: What is really Muktijuddher chetona? Subedar Wahab would always sit slightly afar from us at the Bichitra office, conscious of the class divide in his every move. Milon, Bir Sreshtha Mohiuddin Jahangir’s nephew, would often come to my mother for help, for charity, living the hard reality of an economic divide. But hadn’t Subedar Wahab dreamt of a more just social structure as he led ambush upon ambush during the war? Hadn’t Captain Jahangir promised his charges of an equitable economic structure hours before he gave his life just two days before liberation?
   But, when I was writing in the year 2000, Subedar Wahab’s or Captain Jahangir’s dreams and aspirations were not considered chetona. The iconoclastic impositions of one political faction over another were. So Tanim and my apologies then were for being Muktijuddho-philes, but not chetona-philes.
   Today, as we were planning yet another Victory Day special (Tanim has curiously followed me to New Age, both of us via Holiday!), the two of us found the tables turned. In our attempt to get across our ever-enthusiastic ideas about the vast variety of subjects that could be written about, we found ourselves trying to tread carefully. Because now we run the risk of being perceived as too much chetona — of actually trying to propagate the very things that we don’t, can’t relate to.
   As we tried to push through stories about the heroics of Muktijoddhas, some of them controversial in later years, we found studied, subdued disapproval in the tones of some of our colleagues who we look up to. I understand their point — they fear that broaching the subject of Muktijuddho and focusing on some of the players might be considered playing into the hands of partisanship.
   But isn’t that precisely the game plan employed by the partisans? That one side would assert its ownership on Muktijuddho by spreading half-truths and untruths about it, and the other would reject Muktijuddho altogether — to pretend it never happened. Whose purpose would we be serving by not taking up that middle ground? Just because some quarters would brand me one way or the other, should I pretend that March 7 never happened or that there was no broadcast from Kalurghat on the 26th? Should I not write about Khaled Musharraf the Sector Two commander because of whatever predicament he faced later?
   The apologies do go both ways. And people like Tanim and I are constantly made to make them, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. And as the apologies overtake our pride, slowly but surely, the true spirit of Muktijuddho gradually becomes lost.
   Postscript
   As Tanim wrote one of his pieces for the Victory Day supplement, he told me to take a good look at it, as he thought it might prove a bit of a boring read. Even before he could finish his thought, Kristy and Mashida, two other colleagues of ours, looked at us incredulously. “Boring?” they screamed, “How on earth can you find this boring? This is spellbinding.” Tanim and I simply smiled.
   For us, the fortunate lot who have had the privilege of growing up to stories from the war front, from Melaghar, from Bisramganj, from Sona Masjid, some of these stories have been heard so many times that they sound ordinary. We tend to be blasé about Muktijuddho, playing it down, not realising that to the vast majority of the post-independence generations, these stories have remained untold.
   These stories of valour as well as genuine cowardice, of joy as well as despair — if they continue to remain untold, to our generations Muktijuddho will remain an amalgamation of half-truths, untruths and outright rejections of its occurrence — an aversion. But are our parents, their friends, their generation taking note?
   ‘The writer is deputy editor, New Age. This article was previously published on this page
   on December 16, 2003
   Special circumstances have led to a dropping of today’s letters column. — Editor