Editorial
Baufal and endangered media
There are sinister things happening in Baufal upazila of Patuakhali district. And these have been happening to the journalists’ community there. The clear news report is that a local member of Parliament, Shahidul Islam Talukdar of the ruling BNP, recently beat up a young journalist of the locality because he was upset by a news report on the part of the latter. Incidentally, the journalist happens to be a teacher in a local college, to which place he has been unable to go for fear of the goons that have been responsible for his bad treatment at the hands of the MP. In other words, Monjur Morshed, a correspondent of the Barisal based Ajker Parobartan and lecturer at Engineer Faruk Talukdar Mohila College, has been in hiding since the incident. The picture that we thus have of conditions in Baufal reflects a particularly eerie stage of darkness for the nation’s journalism.
The irony today is that even as a lot of people generally go around speaking of the freedom that newsmen enjoy across the country, there are clear instances of incidents that portray the grim realities the media are up against. Let us stick to the Baufal incident. When it is a local lawmaker who simply takes the law in his hands and goes around beating up or threatening newsmen (Morshed, we understand, is not the first victim of his wrath), one does not get a very encouraging picture of journalism in the land. People loyal to the MP or disturbed at the investigative reports by newsmen in Baufal have been moving around in intimidating fashion and warning journalists to stay away from printing anything against them or their leaders. The feeling, for a long time, has been that there are people who while masquerading as lawmakers have actually been playing the role of godfathers. It then follows that anyone who calls up the courage to expose these godfathers or patrons of criminality can only find himself in hot water. Besides, there is the fact that in the interior of the country, where crimes are essentially the preserve of local politicians and their goon squads, journalists are regularly a vulnerable group of people. It is easy for politicians and for government officials, such as the police, to go after them and often hound them out of town and out of jobs. Our revulsion at such sinister incidents taking place comes through our observation of how a lot of people have indeed been celebrating the humiliation of journalists in Baufal through organising a feast for themselves. Not even the collective protest of Baufal newsmen over the treatment meted out to Monjur Morshed has mattered. They were chased away by ruling party goons. As for the police, they did what they have long been doing —- taking the side of the one who has committed wrong.
Everything, one might as well argue, falls into a pattern. The Baufal incident is only an extension to what has been done all over the country. A police officer physically assaulted a young university reporter in Chittagong the other day. Told of the identity of the young man, the officer committed the audacity of making it known that he would have beaten him up even more if he had been aware of that identity. A few weeks ago, a ruling party lawmaker literally lunged at a young reporter within the precincts of the parliament building. Parliament Ilias Ali, for long at daggers drawn with Finance Minister Saifur Rahman, has now made peace with him. Note, though, that he has now described the story of his differences with the minister as media manipulation. Ministers have been rather shrill lately in accusing newsmen of tarnishing Bangladesh’s image by their negative reports. Is it then any wonder that newsmen all over the country are today targets or potential targets of the mighty and their hangers-on?
Politics is painful
The drama that has just been played out over the ruling party nomination for the Faridpur-1 Jatiyo Sangsad constituency can be studied from a number of angles. But we will not go into all that. That can be done some other day. For now, though, the mind is truly focused on the careers of political people who have sometimes taken a sudden new turning in life. Think of Kazi Sirajul Islam, the Awami Leaguer who decided some months ago that jumping ship would yield him good dividends. There were all the rumours floating around of his business dealings grinding to a halt because of his opposition politics. But everything could be smooth, so report the wags, if he was willing to join the BNP bandwagon. It was a difficult situation for him.
At one point, Kazi Siraj reassured the chief of the Awami League that he was not planning, at all, to leave the party. And yet he was telling men in the BNP that he was ready to be with them provided they promised to be with him. Within days, he was in the ruling party, telling his new friends how bad his old friends had been all along. Of course, he could not be a lawmaker any more, because of the floor crossing bit ingrained in Article 70 of the constitution. But, no matter. Siraj had been assured of coming by the BNP nomination at the by-election that would ensue. He duly was given the ticket, but what he and his benefactors had not banked upon was the spirited resolve of Shah Mohammad Abu Zafar and his followers to do everything to prevent Kazi Siraj from going back to the JS. And hence the latest step, on the part of the prime minister, to take the nomination away from Siraj and give it to Zafar. Where does that leave Kazi Siraj? The cynic will probably think in terms of things high and dry. On a more philosophical level, one could say that something of poetic justice has been served.
Politics is always full of pain. It becomes sheer agony for a politician who knows he is neither here nor there.
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Revisiting August 15
Even the first Martial Law of post-August 15, 1975 was a corollary to the one-party monstrosity that had repressed and eliminated even the last vestiges of pluralism and the individual identities of the political party institutions, including that of the Awami League, the vanguard of the 1971 struggle
August 15, 1975 continues to divide the political matrix in Bangladesh in sharp and irreconcilable contrariness, the much larger shade of indifferent grey in popular or public response to the gory event notwithstanding. The principal actors, nine of them, in the killer execution of the one-party Supremo Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the members of his family, including women and children, on the fateful morning have been handed down ‘death by hanging’ verdicts by a Special Tribunal instituted by the 1996-2001 Awami League government for what is billed as the ‘Bangabandhu’ or ‘Sheikh Mujib murder case’.
Three of them are on death row in Dhaka’s prison on an extended charmed life from the repeated hands-off by the Supreme Court Judges taking the cover of ‘embarrassment’, a judicial prerogative to decline inking the procedural confirmation of the verdict. One of them died of natural causes, the rest having gone anonymous in this wide open, though increasingly shrinking, world under the net of the Interpol and the writ of the extradition treaties. The avenger trial started with the deletion of the indemnity clause giving the August 15 actors immunity from the law in the Constitution, and ended with the death sentences after months of procrastination and witness parade on the dock, but ultimately failing to clear the hurdle of confirmation even during the AL rule of the previous tenure.
That’s where the case is now lying in situ, with the partisan AL reminders going into threnodies on August 15 in what is now a ritual month of mourning for them. It is a month of apologia and tributes at once, of personal losses for the survivors in the family and what remained of the Awami League fraternity after the leap into the dark recess of the one-party system since the January, 1975 Draconian Fourth Amendment that fell by the wayside and was remorselessly prefaced by both legal and extra-legal gagging of dissenting voices, creating blood-curdling killing fields across the length and breadth of the country, and the incorporation of the political parties and the institutions of the government into a monolith of singular temporal power.
The constitutional deconstruction thus began with the one-party BKSAL, aided and abetted by the then superpower, the ex-Soviet Union and the axis-partner of India at that time, and continued till date with Ershad’s proclamation of Islam as the state religion, in what was designed to become a pristine secular and civil society. Even the first Martial Law of post-August 15, 1975 was a corollary to the one-party monstrosity that had repressed and eliminated even the last vestiges of pluralism and the individual identities of the political party institutions, including that of the Awami League, the vanguard of the 1971 struggle. Pray, how could pluralism be restored otherwise than by a proclamation, and the BKSAL, since felled in the strike of August 15, 1975, be consigned to the bin of constitutional garbage?
Secondly, had sufficient conditions of public and institutional alienation not ripened at the time, how could an otherwise isolated killer band with no organised support and sanction from the armed forces, either in part or in whole, for power-seizure get away with the least or no resistance from the BKSAL brigades of the Awami League, the ex-Soviet communists and the then Muscovite National Awami Party of Professor Muzaffar — the Troika so-called. Even the storm-troopers of the Rakkhi Bahini, a supernumerary and para-statal partisan killer force of the fallen one-party regime, would not move into action against a loose and otherwise toothless band of disgruntled freedom-fighters involved in the August 15, ’75 blitzkrieg. The feeble resistance or the first counter-coup against the bloody overthrow of the one-party Supremo, in which Khaled Mosharraf was roped in by some officers on the plea of restoring the chain of command, failed miserably amid the street mayhem of November 6, and the subsequent people-soldier uprising of November 7. The objective conditions were such that the people and the country were not at all prepared to go back to ante-August 15 days, howsoever brutal and drastic the change might have been.
Thirdly, the post-August 15 proceedings till the emergence of General Zia on the crest of the November 7 uprising was an intra-Awami League affair, with the Parliament and the Cabinet staying put under the political command of AL stalwart Khandaker Moshtaque Ahmed, but for the exception of erstwhile Prime Minister Mansur Ali, Vice-President Syed Nazrul Islam and Cabinet member Quamruzzaman. The architect of the government-in-exile, Tajuddin Ahmed, had already been sidelined and axed by Sheikh Mujib himself, though he represented the hierarchical succession order in the party command, and fell victim to the dark killing in jail custody along with the three aforementioned leaders. The Parliament was still in force, and AL top dogs like Abdul Malek Ukil and Mohiuddin Ahmed, among some others, were sent out as emissaries to the West and the ex-Soviet Union — in that order — by Moshtaque to mend fences.
It was at best an Awami League factional and hence civilian coup led by Khandaker Moshtaque in his contention for power. He bet his odds on the chasm of inimical contradictions between the one-party establishment and the whole people. They were then coming to a simmering head and waiting to explode. But it was not a military coup, as understood by the book, in which a section or the whole of the military, with partial or total sanction, seek pre-eminence and seize political power. The failed coup of November 3 by a section of the officers’ corps fitted the first description and the subsequent bloodless take-over by the then Chief of Staff, HM Ershad, in 1982 the second kind till enough was enough for the latter’s civilianised military rule running out of steam in the terminal month of 1990. The rest of the several bloody proceedings in Dhaka, Bogra and Chittagong cantonments, arising out of the ideological putsch by Colonel Taher acting murderously in a fit of infantile disorder, and the Chittagong Circuit House killing of President Ziaur Rahman, were the bizarre and blood-drenched post-scripts in mutinies.
While thoughts of the above kind are highly subjective and there is nothing called the whole truth in the recorded accounts of instant history or those cobbled together long after the fact or coloured by a belief system like a credo, it may be worthwhile to look back in time and put August 15 in perspective. The gory and the murderous aspect of the far-reaching event notwithstanding, the politics on either side of power contention within the Awami League and the highly inimical contradiction between the one-party system and the whole people obtaining at the time cannot be separated from the cause and effect logic or illogic of the killer strike.
This was perhaps the most sensitive of all reasons as to why the AL government chose to hold a murder trial rather than a murderous overthrow of an unloved one-party regime that fell hard as a rock under the uncertain force of a single deadly strike. While the subsequent exercises in the series will also be somewhat anecdotal in the light of my long one-hour meeting with the Titan on July 29, ’75, after he himself had ordered my release from the prison on July 18, ’75, I am pained to say that the cultist mystique of August 15, ’75 neither holds the public in awe, nor in tears, nor in supplication like what was sought to be hidden by the Catholic church on the Holy Grail behind Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
— Enayetullah Khan
from Toronto
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Simultaneously published in
New Age & Holiday
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