by Mahtab Haider

Doctor, freedom fighter, originator of social movements, the man behind the Ganasasthya Kendra — Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury talks to New Age about the war, and after, and now. Excerpts:
   
   How do you read the rise of Islamist militancy in Bangladesh?
   It’s only logical that those we left behind are now holding us back like dead-weights. In the three decades since 1971 we have privatised every sector, even education and healthcare, and we have abandoned our commitment to social welfare. Although universal primary education is an official target for the government, this has not been advertised aggressively. People in the villages still believe that madrassahs are better because if you send your child to one everything is free. In a sense this is true. Mainstream education has become too expensive because there is private tuition involved. But what are your job prospects if you study in a madrassah? If today’s Quomi madrassahs really are the breeding grounds of JMB militants, it is the result of this exclusion. And not only have they been excluded, they have been used. Both major political parties, not just BNP, have used these elements to their benefit. How many Arab Muslim countries will you find where politicians say ‘Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim’ before they make a speech?
   
   ‘Muktijuddher Chetona’ is a phrase that our politicians frequently press into service to legitimise their actions. What exactly was ‘Muktijuddher Chetona’ for you in 1971?
   I can tell you what we didn’t fight for. We didn’t fight to establish Bangladesh as an Islamic state. We fought against Pakistani oppression, against their colonial attitude. We believed religion was a personal issue that should be practised at home. I give Sheikh Mujibur Rahman credit for espousing secularism. But he should not have started readings from the Qur’an, Gita or Bible on BTV. Religion has to be left out of schools for Bangladesh to become the country we envisioned in 1971. My generation didn’t get Islamic lessons at school, but didn’t we learn religion?
   In 1971 we had two objectives. Earn our liberation, not ‘get it’, from Pakistan — I believe India’s intervention shortened the war to our detriment. And we dreamt of a country where people’s five basic needs would be guaranteed. It would be a socialist, egalitarian and secular society. Everything else they call Chetona is just bhaotabaji.
   
   Have we achieved any of those goals?
   None. Not a single one. Sons and daughters of muktijoddhas illegally occupy flats in the Dhaka University campus, even though they teach at BUET and have another flat allotted to them. This is the new Muktijuddher Chetona.
   
   Where in the education sector do you think the interventions are needed?
   The fundamental need of the hour is for the state to play a greater role in primary and secondary education. Every madrassah, every school, every university must be in control of the state.
   Madrassah education needs radical reforms — if Kemal Ataturk could do it one hundreds years ago, what is stopping us now? We can’t have half-educated moulvis teaching only religion to thousands of young men. These boys need to learn science; they need to learn philosophy and history. Let the Quomi madrassahs become Quomi schools where the children will get a minimum of four hours of general knowledge teaching and three hours of religion every day. This system will help their own religious beliefs grow stronger through debate. They should have management committees comprised of people who come from other backgrounds — so that there is more openness and progressive-thinking in their curriculum.
   In the same way English-medium schools need radical reforms. They are just as bad as the Quomi madrassah, promoting a different brand of radicalism and creating armies of young people who are disconnected from Bangladesh’s reality. Every English-medium school must have three compulsory hours of teaching in Bangla.
   
   What about the non-formal education sector? Aren’t they part of the solution?
   What are these non-formal NGO schools doing? If a person does not get about five years of schooling, he becomes illiterate within a few years of leaving school. What is the point of having such literacy? Britain does not have non-formal education, none of the western countries do. Why do they fund non-formal schools in Bangladesh?
   The problem is that NGO schools are replacing government primary schools in many parts of the country but they are not fulfilling the undertaking this requires. Every non-formal education school in the country should be made a primary school — imagine, if we had 100,000 schools to compete with Quomi madrassahs, would we have this militancy problem then? These young men are militants because they have been failed by the state, by the NGOs and by civil society. What a shame that we could create no other aspiration for our children other than becoming suicide bombers. These NGO schools have been part of the problem. Because they built their schools, the state stopped building schools in those areas. Organisations like BRAC, Grameen and ASA should set up primary and secondary schools in the villages instead of non-formal ones. Instead they do micro credit — because the main beneficiaries of micro credit are those NGOs themselves. They need to lead the revolution. They need to employ female teachers, break the taboos, and take primary education everywhere.
   
   Do you agree that present-day Bangladesh is faced with a serious intellectual crisis?
   If a university professor’s aspiration is to live in Baridhara, you can imagine the kind of intellectual crisis we are faced with. His aspiration should be that he will write a good book or do groundbreaking research. I would say, our intellectual crisis is greater than our crisis in politics. Bangladesh’s biggest corruption is that its teachers and academics don’t do any research. We need radical surgery. Teacher’s salaries need to improve, there is no doubt about this, but teachers need to realise that they will never earn as much as a businessman. We need to improve their salaries by getting rid of excess teachers. We should sack every university teacher who does not do at least 20 hours of classroom teaching in a week. Teaching just business and computer science will not be able to take this country forward — these boys and girls need to know philosophy, sociology, economics. I don’t believe there is a single household in Bangladesh whose son or daughter goes to university but they spent less than Tk 500 on private tuition every month during his or her school-years. So if they can pay private tutors Tk 500 per month, why do they have a problem with paying the university more than twenty takas? Also, an independent body should be empowered to investigate these universities and take action to prevent violence and session jams.
   
   And what about our political crisis?
   The main crisis is that we are limited to choosing between two political parties. This is another form of totalitarianism. No matter what you think of someone, how much you distrust them, if they send you a letter inviting you to dialogues, in our culture, you have to accept that letter. Kader Siddiqui recently said, ‘Mujib Bhai spoke to the Pakistanis until 24th March knowing that they were the enemy.’ Why does Hasina reject the government’s offer for dialogue on something so important? And why do the other parties in the coalition just say hukka hua to that? If they don’t have their own opinion on something as important as this, they might as well just close their parties down and join Awami League. Why do they need a separate identity?
   Two groups have hijacked control of politics — it is not in the real politician’s hands any more. These two groups are businessmen, and retired civil and army bureaucrats. As a result, the parties are mostly out of touch with the people and the political vision is very centralised. We have to bring back into politics those people who will take it as a profession and not a means to an end. For example, even people like me would hesitate to call up an ex-secretary after 10:00pm, but the poorest voter in a politician’s constituency should be able to walk into his room even after ten o’ clock. The politician will never ignore him or treat him badly because he understands the value of that vote. This is the basic difference.
   But it is also our misfortune that people like Dr Yunus did not enter politics. He has given everything he can to micro-credit, now he needs to make a greater contribution. Dr Kamal Hossain and Badruddoza Chowdhury’s efforts to create third forces have not worked. One went to Tungipara right after launching his party to do mazaar ziarat, not realising that if it’s a Tungipara party we needed, there is Awami League — why would we need a new one? And Badruddoza had never shown courage in his political career to be able to earn the confidence of the people. We need Dr Yunus now.
   
   You were in London when the war started. How did you get back?
   That’s right, myself and Dr Mobin came back from London to fight soon after the war started. In London, we went to Hyde Park and publicly burned our Pakistani passports, becoming stateless in the process. We then took a Syrian Airlines flight from London to Delhi via Damascus. But at Damascus, there was a long, maybe four-to-five-hour delay, and for some reason we kept sitting in the plane even though other passengers went out. After a while we asked the air-hostess what the problem was. ‘The problem is you,’ she said. ‘If you leave the aircraft you will be arrested by the Syrian police, but the aircraft is international territory so they are not being able to arrest you from the plane,’ she explained. You see the Syrian government was friendly to the Pakistani government, and would have gladly obliged. Eventually of course, they couldn’t keep the plane waiting any longer and had to let us go. It was our first taste of victory in our journey to the war.
   The other really abiding memory I have from the war is a mission I was sent to Dhaka for. A classmate from my schooldays owned two ships which ran fuel from Dhaka to Khulna for the Pak army. I was tasked to find the schedules for these ships so that the Muktibahini could destroy them. I came to Dhaka by night, and our contact was not where he was supposed to have been because a curfew had been declared, so I did what I had been forbidden to do. I, along with some other Muktijoddhas went to our home in Bakshibazar. As we approached the gate, we saw two Pak soldiers drawing closer on a rickshaw. We scrambled over the gate and started knocking on the door frantically. I understood for the first time, the fear that had taken Dhaka hostage. All the lights in my house went off, and in spite of my pleas, no one would open the gate. It was my mother who recognised my voice and ordered that the gate be opened. Everyone thought I was still in England. That night my mother told me something I will never forget. She said, those who had died in the war were martyrs, those, like me, who were fighting, dreamt of a new nation. But what about those, like her, who spent night after night in insecurity, wondering what hell would break loose on them the next day, whether her daughters would be safe? My friend who owned the ships, gave me the exact schedule and told me where we should attack and destroy his ships. What was his, or my mother’s place in the war? Weren’t they muktijoddhas as well?
   
   What will the Bangladesh of the future be like?
   I am very hopeful. Because our people are very bright. Our garments workers have put Bangladesh on the world map. I can’t stress enough that we need to decentralise our entire administrative set up. We need to decentralise politics, education, healthcare, all of it. We have to realise that we are a nation of 140 million people.