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The birth or death anniversary (the latter fell a few days ago) of poet Rabindranath Tagore always becomes an occasion for Bengalis to go on a cerebral journey through the corridors of time. The time, of course, relates to such factors as when he lived, composed poetry and his short stories, travelogues, created dance dramas, penned songs and then sang them with all earnestness, for us who are so proud to be known as Bengalis. His inventive approach to every department of Bengali language and literature, from modernising Bengali grammar to simplifying complex words, made the language contemporary and thereby more comprehensible for the ordinary readers. He broke away from the age-old style of writing prose and poetry and introduced a crisp and somewhat trendy fashion to express his thoughts, albeit to the ire of the traditionalists. It can be said with a great deal of certainty that the treasure trove of Bengali literature would have remained half empty if Tagore had not created those timeless poems and songs, now read and sung by Bengalis all over the world. While he delved deep into the wealth of local tunes to enrich his special genre of songs, he also inculcated a totally different appeal in some of his songs through blending modern West as well as East European tunes that were popular in his times.
   Rabindranath Tagore was deeply touched by the pristine beauty of the then East Bengal, now Bangladesh, with its winding and full-flowing rivers, lofty native trees on the banks, miles of golden paddy fields, wide assortment of birds and the haunting tunes of folk songs. He came to this part of Bengal often to stay for months and during such times he composed some of his immortal poems and songs. Some spot the influence of traditional Baul songs in many of his compositions, and it is no secret that the songs of Lalon, the mystic composer and singer of Kushtia, had profound influence on the bard. It is here that he found the required inspiration to write seven volumes of poetry, including Shonar Tori and Khanika, all between 1894 and 1900.
   Bengalis were overwhelmed when they heard of Tagore’s coming by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. They were overjoyed when two years later he was awarded the knighthood, but they were also moved when Tagore renounced it in 1919 as a protest against the wanton killing of about 400 unarmed civilians in Amritsar by the British troops. Tagore was truly the first modern writer and poet of Bengal and it is a historical certainty that he will continue to overwhelm the Bengali psyche for generations of people in this country as well as in countries and societies where Bengalis are a defining factor of life.

People stealing cars

A recent report published in a Bangla newspaper informs us of the apprehension of a group of car thieves from a village in Gazipur. Along with the nabbing of the thieves, three stolen cars were also recovered though the ringleader evaded capture. Now, this piece of news may not provoke much of interest in most readers as the car owning population consists of a very low percentage of people. Nevertheless we are compelled to bring this matter to the notice of the authorities because, as buying cars is becoming an affordable option for most middle class people through the convenient hire purchase system, it is expected that within the next ten years many more urban families will have their own means of transport. The present set of conditions where a lot of people living in the urban areas with vehicles of their own show quite clearly that what was once a dream has now become a reality. Or that is the way one can look at the situation. And as increasingly bigger numbers of cars come on to the streets, the threat of vehicles being subjected to theft also rises. That is because with so many vehicles around the job of stealing becomes easier.
   A few years ago, a similar car stealing ring was nabbed from Uttara and though that made headline news, the stealing of cars in the satellite town has not abated. In addition, it is also believed by many quarters that quite a few dealers of second hand cars are in fact linked to this trade. In this regard, we might do well to go back a few years when a report published in a newspaper focused on a few organized car-stealing groups being operated from Uttara under the ostensible social identity of second hand car dealers. However, these groups and their leaders have not been captured and Uttara is still a place from where cars and car parts are stolen, often in broad daylight.
   As for the recovered cars from Gazipur, we see that all carry the registration number starting with the number 11, a clear sign that shows the vehicles are relatively modern. This is more worrying because if car thieves have managed to break through modern sophisticated lock systems then vehicles both old and new are at risk at the moment.
   As we thank the DB police for catching the thieves, we would like to ask the police authorities to compile a list of second hand car dealers. This is important because if people dealing in old cars have their identities and other details preserved in the records, many cars can be saved. In addition, the authorities can establish and maintain permanent contacts in Dholaikhal, the place where stolen cars are scrapped within hours and then sold in the open market.
   Let there be a wholesale, concerted operation mounted against those who steal cars and other vehicles. We cannot but note that Dhaka is a city where for a driver to park his car and move off for a cup of tea nearby is risky business.

With all the talk swirling around us of martial law and jungle law and the like, it is perhaps a moment to travel back in time and reflect on how our lives have been affected, or permanently scarred perhaps, through various periods of military rule in this free state of Bangladesh. We will leave out the Pakistan story, for one of the compulsions that led us into the movement for regional autonomy in the 1960s and subsequently the War of Liberation in 1971 was this enormous desire on our part to get out of the clutches of government by illegitimacy or rule by armed might. There is the big truth, for many of us, that we went through the formative years of our lives in the shadow of military rule. People like myself began and ended school in the times of Field Marshal Ayub Khan and General Yahya Khan. It was perhaps for this reason that when in the 1960s men like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan began in earnest to call for a return to civilian elected democracy, the youth in us detected something of hope for society as a whole. Of course we were too young to understand all the nuances of a democratic order, but we felt the right stirrings in the heart. By the time the War of Liberation commenced in Bangladesh, we knew for a fact that for all our earlier expectations of democracy taking roots in Pakistan, the very real truth was that a country based on communal politics and run by the military was not morally equipped to be home to a democratic order.
   The principle, in 1971, was thus simple: the emerging state of Bangladesh would serve as an overall ambience of democracy based on the necessary fundamentals of a secular order. The four principles of the state as enshrined in the constitution promulgated in 1972 typified precisely the reasons why Bengalis had struggled for pluralism over the years. But those principles took the first battering, an extremely bloody one, through the coup d’ etat of 15 August 1975. Now, there are those Awami League-baiters who will tell you at every conceivable opportunity that it was a coup mounted by the Awami Leaguers themselves under commerce minister Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed. It was no such thing. It was simply a conspiracy hatched by a group of majors and colonels, a conspiracy encouraged by Moshtaque and his cohorts, aimed at undermining the foundations of the state given shape to through the declaration of independence on 26 March 1971 and established de jure on 16 December 1971. The earliest announcements made on state-controlled radio on the morning of 15 August 1975 made it clear that the coup by the majors and colonels had been aimed at pushing the country back to a past from which it had emerged clear only four years earlier. Bangladesh Betar, the Bengali, nationally accepted term for the radio, was replaced by the English ‘Radio Bangladesh’. Then, in a moment of shrill excitement, the assassin-soldiers proclaimed Bangladesh to be an Islamic republic. That declaration was subsequently not emphasized, but the attitude on the part of the coup leaders continued to be one where the country was once more regarded as a land for the majority Muslim religious denomination. In Pakistan, where a state of glee and unbridled happiness came over people who had never seen anything wrong with the macabre way in which their soldiers had behaved in 1971, Prime Minister Bhutto was quick to accord recognition to the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Bangladesh. As a ‘brotherly’ gesture, he also decided to send a quantity of rice to the people of Bangladesh. Over the next few days, China and Saudi Arabia, countries which had resolutely opposed Bangladesh’s struggle for freedom, duly recognized Bangladesh. In the country as a whole, the slogan of Joi Bangla that had served as a rallying cry for the nation in the years leading up to liberation and after was swiftly replaced by the Moshtaque regime with ‘Bangladesh Zindabad’. Secularism, per courtesy of the coup that had left the founding father of the nation and his family dead, was on the ropes.
   The argument might be raised that the coup of 15 August 1975 did not lead to a proclamation of martial law. It certainly did not. But there was every indication that it was a military regime, albeit one controlled by junior officers who had broken the military’s chain of command and were now engaged in pulling the strings behind the Moshtaque cabal. On a social level, the coup was symbolic of things fearsome, certainly worse than what the Pakistani coups of 1958 and 1969 had epitomized. Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan had both muscled their way to power through avoiding any action that could lead to bloodshed. In Bangladesh, the first military coup made it obvious that those who had commandeered the state were restrained by no such considerations. The number of people killed at dawn on 15 August was simply mind-boggling. It was not merely a question of subverting the constitution of the republic but indulging in well laid out, planned assassinations as well. Just how ruthless the coup leaders and their beneficiaries in the regime were was nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in the murder of the four leaders --- Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, M. Mansoor Ali and AHM Quamruzzaman --- in the ‘secure’ confines of Dhaka central jail on 3 November 1975. What the murders of 15 August and 3 November made clear was the existence of a thorough, almost foolproof blueprint to push the secular Bengali state into the woods and replace it with one reminiscent of the edifice that had been prevalent in Pakistan since 1947. The coup d’ etat of 15 August 1975 was also the very first indication of how much of brutalization the rule of law was to go through in the times ahead. An indemnity ordinance imposed on the country by the Moshtaque regime (it was later to be incorporated in the nation’s constitution by the military regime of General Ziaur Rahman) made it an impossibility for the assassins of President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his family and his political associates to be tried in any court of law. A system of politics based on a legal sanction of murder and mayhem was thus firmly in place.
   When men like Moudud Ahmed and Justice T.H. Khan enlighten us these days on the sinister nature of martial law, we know what they mean. Indeed, we appreciate the fact that they have finally chosen to give voice to feelings which millions across this country have known and felt all these years. Thirty years after August 1975, it is only proper and morally correct that we recall all the humiliation, all the slide in self-esteem we as a nation have gone through because of the periods of martial law, military rule and quasi-military rule imposed on us at various points in time. It was the military administration of General Zia which clearly introduced the divisive idea of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’, a coinage that has militated against the traditional and historically acknowledged concept of Bengali nationalism on which all our pre-1971 struggles for self-expression were based. A certain sort of sophistry is brought to bear on such a narrow definition of nationalism when its defenders point to the need for an inclusion of Bangladesh’s sub-cultures, its indigenous people, within the larger canvas of nationalism. But is that really the purpose of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’? If it were, there would not be the emphasis on the Muslim characteristic of the state that has over the last thirty years been so much a part of the politics pursued by the followers of General Zia and General Ershad. The suspicion that secular Bengalis have regularly entertained about ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’ is that it is a subtle way of taking this country back to a semblance of the communal two-nation theory which rent India asunder in 1947. That is one of the legacies of military rule we live with, the kind of politics which Moudud Ahmed today correctly condemns as jungle law (though his compulsions for doing so are more personal than anything else). And how else has military rule left us feeling small and inconsequential? You only have to recall the alacrity and ruthlessness with which General Zia and his regime prised secularism and socialism out of the constitution and replaced it all with an invocation to Allah. The consequences have been horrendous. People who went to every length to prevent the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 suddenly found it possible to be politicians again, this time in a Bangladesh which in many ways reminded them of how life had been in Pakistan. Abroad, in the diplomatic arena, the Bengali nation went red in the face when the killers of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the four leaders of the Mujibnagar government were chosen to speak for the country as its diplomats.
   When you move on, to the times when General Ershad seized the state and kept it in his grip for nine years, you can only recall the further slide he caused in the structure of what was rapidly turning into the form of an enervated Bengali state. His obsession with holding on to illegitimate power led in time to his imposition of Islam on the nation as the religion of the state. It was his regime which sought to break up the higher judiciary through dividing the High Court into seven divisions and thus undermining the independence of a branch of government that remained the last institution people could turn to in their search for justice. The process of installing military men in institutions that were the exclusive preserve of the civilian administrative structure was inaugurated by General Ershad. Soldiers became mayors of cities, entered the cabinet as ministers and occupied some of the more influential of diplomatic missions abroad as ambassadors and high commissioners. One of the worst aspects of military rule in this country has been the mathematical precision with which the nation’s military rulers have corrupted politics. Some of the men who could have gone down in national history as illustrious political figures were brought low when they agreed to be part of the political organizations cobbled into shape by the soldiers.
   It is an unfortunate nation that becomes a hostage to unconstitutional or extra-constitutional rule. Men who commandeer the state through armed strength leave whole generations grappling to preserve their self-esteem. Men who ride to power through martial law and the men who serve these men of unbridled ambition are not people we can be proud of, at least not in this country.
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk