by Syed Badrul Ahsan

The rise of Bengali nationalism throughout the decade of the 1960s, precipitated as it had been by the language movement of 1952 and again by the clear attempts to strip away at the majority status of Bengalis in the Pakistan state structure, was clearly based on the principle of secularism. It was felt, as much in those early days as in later times, that the ethos upon which Bengali politics shaped itself was all founded on the heritage from which the culture of the land and its people had taken root. One can argue, of course, that the conscious move on the part of the people of East Bengal to align themselves with the patently communal movement for Pakistan quite belied their secular background. The argument would be right, up to a point. What matters is the way history for Pakistan’s Bengalis shaped up in the days immediately after the creation of Pakistan in August 1947. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan revered as the Quaid-e-Azam, for the first time in his long political career encountered vociferous opposition to his policies when he peremptorily suggested that only Urdu would be the language of the state he had built. The fact that he was Pakistan’s undisputed leader did not matter at all when a band of young men quickly and even as Jinnah spoke at Curzon Hall of Dhaka University in March 1948 raised their voices in protest. It was the earliest indication of a resurgence of secular Bengali nationalism, even if the reality was that East Bengal had turned into, and would remain, part of Pakistan for the foreseeable future.
   The essential spirit upon which Bengali politics was to develop would become increasingly more manifest in the years after Jinnah’s death. His successor Khwaja Nazimuddin and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan tried giving the Bengalis more of what the country’s founding father had tried doing. The result was badly counterproductive. Indeed, it remains to the credit of the people of East Bengal that the first post-1947 banner of resistance to the rule of the Muslim League was raised in a Bengali ambience when Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani moved to give shape to the Awami Muslim League in June 1949. There was, despite the qualification of the term ‘Muslim’ in the name of the organisation, little mistaking the fact that it was unfettered democracy of the Westminster sort the new party aimed at. And that surely was pluralism as it came wrapped in all the brilliance of secularism. The 1952 upheaval over the place of Bengali in the Pakistani scheme of things only added a little more of substance to the struggle for a democratic polity. In subsequent years, it would be made clear to the West Pakistan-based political classes that while they continued to harp on what was becoming a worn-out theme of Muslim nationalism for Pakistan, the Bengalis in the country’s eastern province were moving in the opposite direction. The triumph of the United Front over the Nurul Amin-led Muslim League government in the East Bengal provincial elections of 1954 was fundamentally a victory of secular forces over a communalistic cabal. Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq, while visiting Calcutta as the new chief minister of East Bengal, basically gave out the right message about East Bengali feelings when he reminisced about the old days in pre-partition India. It was behaviour that would soon lead to trouble for Huq and the United Front ministry, but the point had been made —- that East Bengal, a mere seven years into Pakistan, was not willing to be lumped with the provinces forming West Pakistan into a communal body politic. This theme of secular democratic politics was carried a dramatic step further when Moulana Bhashani made his ‘assalam-o-alaikum’ address to West Pakistan at the Kagmari conference of 1957.
   The concept of secular Bengali politics, with the ground thus prepared in the 1950s, was a theme that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was to build on. An important catalyst to the rise of Bengali nationalism was the conscious move by the Bengali cultural elite to go for an observance of Rabindranath Tagore’s centenary of birth in 1961. The association of such influential men as Justice S.M. Murshed with the celebrations sent out a very potent message of the Bengali being a culturally and politically distinct entity within Pakistan. It was a message that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, even at that relatively early stage of what would ultimately be a momentous political career, heard loud and clear. There are reasons to believe that it was in 1961 that his disillusionment with Pakistan set in. The commandeering of the state by the army in 1958 had only reinforced Bengali feeling that democracy, rather than being the wave of the future, was in sad retreat in Pakistan. Men like Suhrawardy had grown unhappy with the decline of the state. For Suhrawardy, who believed that the country could have a future if it embraced secular politics, the arrival of the Ayub Khan military regime was a disaster. He was not prepared, physically or psychologically, to put up resistance to the dictatorship. His death in December 1963 released men like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from any obligation to adhere to the Pakistan ideology in the form it existed in at the time.
   By far the clearest and most powerful expression of secular Bengali sentiment came through the Six Point programme for regional autonomy that Mujib presented at the Lahore conference of Pakistan’s opposition parties in February 1966. There was hardly any question that the reforms which the Six Points aimed at were underpinned by a very strong base of secularism and were therefore a strategic way of presenting the argument for Pakistan, especially its eastern wing, to move away from the two-nation theory that had midwifed its birth in 1947. In the years between 1966 and the fall of the Ayub regime in early 1969, the resurgence of Bengali secular nationalism was complete. It would only be a matter of time before the political class which had initiated the movement would roll to preponderance on an all-Pakistan stage. That triumph came through the Awami League’s coming by an absolute majority of seats in the national assembly elections of December 1970. With East Pakistan already being referred to as Bangladesh, with the religious and communal political groups like the Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami having been thoroughly marginalised by the electorate, the moment appeared right for Bangladesh to consider moving out of Pakistan altogether. Had the military junta led by General Yahya Khan not made a mess of things, it is reasonable to suppose that Bengalis would have eventually, through a democratic, confederal process gone for the creation of their own independent and necessarily secular state. The genocidal action of the Pakistan army only accelerated the path to separation. What happened through the War of Liberation in 1971 was a massive rejection of the communal state of Pakistan and the establishment of a proper, fully defined democratic and sovereign state for Bengalis. Naming the country the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and vesting all powers in the people was the final embodiment of a secular spirit that had been developed and improved upon in all the twenty four years that Bengalis had spent within the Pakistan framework.
   Close to three and a half decades into freedom, Bangladesh faces perhaps the biggest challenge to its existence and survival as a secular democracy. The carefully laid-out strategy that has gone into a rehabilitation of the communal forces defeated in 1971, first through a failure of the first Awami League government to hold such forces to account for their complicity with Pakistan in the genocide of three million Bengalis and then the insensitivity with which all collaborators were pardoned by Mujib, followed naturally by the return of the communalists to the political centre per courtesy of the military regimes of General Ziaur Rahman and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad now has Bangladesh up against a wall. The rise of Islamic extremists, all of whom have been peddling ideas that go against the very grain of Bengali political belief, is a bad and heavy assault on the civilised principles upon which Bangladesh’s sovereignty rests. The Jamaat-e-Islami, which clearly relishes the troubles secular democracy is faced with today, cannot but look forward to a time when the country reverts to a form of theocratic rule. The murderous elements of the Jama’atul Mujahideen clearly expect something more radical, which is a state that will be ready and willing to take the long, difficult path back to religious medievalism. The suicide killings and the threats constantly being held out against any and all manifestations of secular power are essentially a repeat, after a thirty four-year interregnum, of the desperation that went into the job of trying to save Pakistan in this country back in 1971. The men who cheerfully helped the Pakistani occupation army in shaping such murder squads as al-Badr and al-Shams are today safely and securely ensconced in political power, thanks to men and women whose understanding of Bengali history has been as parochial as it has been outrageous.
   As the nation recaptures the spirit of 1971 on Victory Day this year, it is the goal of secularism that takes fresh new meaning for Bengalis once more. The raison d’etre for Bangladesh has been its secular foundations, which is why it is important that the old principles be reasserted by the national leadership and, more specifically, by those forces which shaped the secular democratic basis of the nation in the years leading to the War of Liberation. The biggest lesson for the country, in these fraught times, is that it can fulfil its destiny through a determined adherence to its original ethos of a modern democratic order. The Islamic militants with the bombs out there are therefore a warning to all Bengalis that should secular politics falter, there will not be much of a state of Bangladesh left to speak of. The bottomline should be obvious: the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and communal bigotry do not go together. In the present murderous struggle for survival into which the religious medievalists have pushed the state, it is the secular republic that must emerge, even if bloodied and wounded, triumphant.