The home ministry’s recent directive to the law-enforcement agencies that cautions them on deaths of detainees in their custody, though it may well end up being empty rhetoric, deserves praise. Praise because it is this government’s first open admission that the phenomenon of extrajudicial killings is not only continuing unabated but also that a senior adviser in the military-controlled interim government, former general MA Matin, finds the trend significant enough to discuss it with top officials from the law-enforcement agencies, and then issue a directive to this effect.
   There is, of course, sufficient cause for the government to be concerned. The impunity that the law enforcers have traditionally enjoyed during the political regimes of the past have now increased manifold in an era where ‘joint forces’ are carrying out similar operations. Extrajudicial killings, i.e. killings of detainees who do not face trial, is now a decades old phenomenon in Bangladesh that enjoys widespread popularity and endorsement in Dhaka’s elite circles who believe with conviction that ‘criminals’ – those that do not belong in elite circles – deserve a swift and fatal retribution rather than undergo trial in the judicial system that is blamed for being ineffective.
   The Rapid Action Battalion has been the principal judge-jury-executioner institution responsible for a bulk of the deaths that have taken place in custody. Since its creation in 2004, RAB has been responsible for more than 400 deaths of detainees in their custody, reported almost daily by newspapers which report them variously as deaths couched in more gentrified terms as ‘crossfire’, ‘encounters’ and ‘shootout’. The reason that there is a growing pressure on Fakhruddin Ahmed’s government – which incidentally promised accountability and decency in governance after its assumption of power – is that between January 11, 2007, and its completion of a year in power in 2008, there have been at least 176 such deaths in custody, some of them so terrifyingly gruesome that even a written account is too graphic for consumption.
   Adivasi leader Choles Ritchil’s name inevitably ranks high in a long list of gruesome deaths in custody that has stained this government’s first year in rule. Ritchil was picked up on March 20 last year and tortured to death in the army’s Kakraid camp in Tangail’s Madhupur, according to the Dhaka-based human rights group Odhikar.
   An excerpt from Odhkar’s fact-finding report on Ritchil’s death reads as follows: ‘Then, they went to the room where Choles Richil was kept and beat him again. One of the army personnel told others to bring pliers, red chilli powder and a blade. Choles was crying and saying that he could not bear it any more. The army personnel beat him until about 6 pm. About at 6:20 pm the army told Tuhin and Piran to leave the camp and also told them to see Choles Richil for the last time. They were told they would collect the body of Choles later. Tuhin and Piren went to the room where Choles Richil was kept. They found him lying face down on the floor, his body covered in bruises. Tuhin called: ‘uncle, uncle’. Choles Richil did not reply but looked at them.
   When Ritchil’s body was returned to his family members and taken to a local hospital where he finally died, he had nails missing and multiple bruises and cuts all over his body – facts confirmed by multiple witnesses including community leaders and the clergy of the local church.
   The tragedy of a government comprised of the good and the great of Dhaka is that torture of detainees has become a hallmark of its law enforcement policy. ‘On February 20 last year, a ward commissioner of the Charfashion union parishad Khabirul Islam Dulal was arrested by 11 members of the Navy,’ according to Odhikar. The rights group reports that Dulal, arrested on suspicion of possessing illegal weapons, was first taken to his own house and allegedly tortured in his front yard, his chest bruised by boots, in front of his two children aged three and five. He was allegedly force-fed chilli powder and salt. When he begged for water, his hands were tied and he was thrown into a nearby pond before being fished out, stripped naked and beaten mercilessly. When he was taken to a nearby thana health complex, the doctors declared him dead.
   While these cases have been well documented by Odhikar – which has shown courage in investigating custodial deaths when most other rights groups have curried favour with the government by looking the other way – the climate of fear in which these rights activists and the media is operating is making the task of exposing these crimes doubly difficult. At least two senior human rights activists at Odhikar have so far faced intimidation and assault at the hands of the law enforcers. Odhikar’s acting director Nasiruddin Elan was taken to the naval headquarters on May 3, 2007, where senior members of Naval Intelligence allegedly threatened him with death. Hasan Ali, Odhikar’s human rights defender in Kushtia, was not so lucky. He was picked up by the local police from his house on December 4, 2007 and beaten severely with batons by high-ranking police officials, before being released without any account or explanation on what his crime had been.
   It was against this backdrop that Irene Khan, the chief of the international human rights watchdog Amnesty International, who visited Dhaka in early January, flagged the impunity that law enforcers are enjoying even after they mete out such treatment to detainees. ‘Abusive military and police personnel must no longer be shielded from accountability, including prosecution,’ said the Amnesty brief at the end of Irene’s visit. She rightly pointed out that this practice has persisted throughout successive regimes of the past and continues to do so with the same culture of impunity under this regime.
   In demanding that the culture of torture in detention and extrajudicial killings be brought to an end, it is not the military-controlled interim government’s humanity that needs to be appealed to. The actions of any government as a whole or individual state actor is compelled to be bound by the principles laid down in the country’s constitution, in which Articles 31, 32, and 33 outlaw such treatment of prisoners and detainees, stating clearly that ‘no action detrimental to the life, liberty, body, reputation or property of any person shall be taken except in accordance with law.’ And the law demands that a detainee be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours of his detention and that only the courts of law have the jurisdiction to mete out punishment.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com

IT IS still a daunting task for historians of Pakistani nationalism to explain why the Muslim League declined so quickly, in less than seven years after partition, in East Pakistan polity. Not only the party that legitimately claimed the credit of winning a homeland for the Muslims in East Bengal disappeared from the political stage, the nation itself fell apart in less than two and a half decades. To many Pakistani nationalist historians the imagining of Muslim nationalism was unproblematic and uni-dimensional, especially in East Bengal, the region inhabited by a Muslim majority, economically exploited and socially oppressed by the upper caste Hindus whose political platform was the Indian National Congress led by Gandhi.
   A separatist politics, encouraged by the British, adopted and pursued by the Muslim elite of Bengal and Northern India, matured in the process of voicing constitutional guarantee for the Muslim minority. The political cohesiveness and solidarity among different social classes of Muslims were formed by Jinnah’s strategic manoeuvres within the quasi-liberal space of colonial politics. The response by Gandhi, Nehru and Patel to Jinnah’s political moves landed them in the cul-de-sac of no return without accepting the two-nation theory leading to the creation of two nation-states. Exactly that happened. India and the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal had to be partitioned. This story is well-known to the students of South Asian history.
   The other outcome of the two-nation theory, i.e. the emergence of Bangladesh, has a storyline also. The difficulty with that story is its failure to locate the inaugural moment of the change in the way the community was imagined. In the genre of nationalist history the movement for the recognition of Bengali as the state language is considered to be the birth moment of the second coming of nationalism among the people of East Bengal. The incident of police firing on the students and masses on February 21, 1952, celebrated as Language Martyrs’ Day since then, is the most important landmark in the historiography of Bengali nationalism.
   The assassination of Gandhi, by itself historical in a different historiography of the failure of the Indian nation to come to its own, is also a milestone in the Bengali nationalist historiography. The incident by evoking widespread mourning among members of both the nations succeeds in laying the foundation stone of a bridge between the two bitterly contesting nationalisms in South Asia. Gandhi’s death not only complicated Muslim nationalists’ assessment of him but also exposed the internal conflict of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal.
   On January 30, 1948, while he was walking slowly from Birla house in Delhi, to attend a prayer, Gandhi, 78 years 3 months 28 days old on that day, was killed by an assassin in New Delhi. Gandhi spent 144 days in Birla House before being shot by Nathuram Godse, Bombay’s Marathi editor of the Hindu Rastra and a Hindu radical with links to Rastriya Sevaka Sangha, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan (Rs 55 crore, approx. 40m pounds).
   Gandhi’s death was a tragic event of a huge magnitude which shocked the world to attention. Sheean wrote in his eyewitness account, ‘Just an old man in a loin cloth in distant India; yet when he died humanity wept.’ That evening after Gandhi was murdered the entire population of India was heartbroken by this dastardly act. Nehru in his radio speech on January 30 told the world that, ‘The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it...We will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him.’
   Any evaluation of Gandhi is not so easy, if not impossible. Gandhi’s long political life, his struggle against racism and imperialism, his thoughts on Indian social reconstruction, his rejection of modern technology, his efforts at nation-building in modern India by reemploying traditional Hindu religion, his stand for the Muslims after partition, last but not the least, his political compromises with imperialism, do not allow analysts of his non-violent politics to arrive at any final decision about his political ideology. Radical politics often mentioned him as a reactionary and many on the Left believed it. On the other hand, his political followers accepted him as ‘Mahatma,’ the title which was given on January 21, 1915 by Nautamlal Bhagavanji Mehta at the Kamribai School in Jetpur, Gujrat. To many Harijans and poor peasants Gandhi was God’s incarnation on earth. He was the Hindu god, Rama, in the Kali Yuga – an age full of sins. Indeed, the difficulty of comprehending Gandhi becomes apparent by a statement of his closest political disciple Jawaharlal Nehru, the most outstanding of the founding fathers of modern India, who once wrote that he did not give much importance to Gandhi’s writings on Swaraj but found it difficult to explain Gandhi’s acceptability among millions of Indian peasants. Indian historians are continuously trying to find out how that happened. The subaltern historian Shahid Amin unravelled to a large extent the complexity of understanding Gandhi in his article ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ in the third volume of Subaltern Studies. Those who are familiar with the nationalist struggle against the British are also aware of Gandhi’s deep influence and importance in Indian politics. Although it is true that he could not prevent the outcome of communal politics for which he is often blamed by historians like Ayesha Jalal who holds him responsible for not sharing power with the Muslims and thus hastening the partition of India. When the British left, India was divided into two sovereign nation-states – one with a Hindu majority and the other with the Muslim.
   It cannot be said that Gandhi’s political ideology was always very acceptable to the Indian Muslims, but the latter, especially the activists and the leaders among them, did not have the same opinion about Gandhi. The divergence of opinion regarding Gandhi among Muslim politicians became much sharper after his assassination.
   Pakistan came into being on August 14, 1947. Bengal was divided and East Bengal, morphed into East Pakistan and the Muslim League took control of the newly created nation-state. While they were carrying out the task of nation-building, the Muslim League activists were bubbling with zeal. But all of them were not unanimous about their project and it came out clearly on that fateful day of January 30, 1948.
   The way Muslim leaders registered their reactions contained the seeds of decline of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the undisputed leader of the Muslims, in his condolence message at Gandhi’s death, published on January 31 in the Dawn published from Karachi, said, ‘Whatever our political differences, he was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and respect.’ On the basis of this statement, Abul Mansur Ahmad, the then editor of weekly Ittehad published from Calcutta, in his memoir quoted Jinnah as having said on Gandhi’s death, ‘India has lost a great Hindu.’ Acknowledging that ‘There can be no controversy in the face of death,’ Jinnah did not concede an inch, even after Gandhi’s death, from asserting that Gandhi was the leader of the Hindus, the political position Jinnah held all his life. Jinnah failed to reconcile politically even with an assassinated Gandhi. Though the immediate reason for Gandhi’s death was his effort to save Pakistan from financial ruin by exerting moral pressure, through a fast unto death, on the Indian government to deliver to Pakistan the withheld amount of Rs 55 crore on account of the division of assets shortly after partition.
   Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, in his statement said, ‘He was a great figure of our times and was trying unceasingly to bring back sanity to the people and to establish communal harmony... His recent efforts for communal harmony will be remembered with gratitude.’ Khwaja Nazimuddin, the premier of East Bengal, said, ‘The greatest tragedy is that when Mahatma Gandhi was most needed he has been taken away from us.’ Both of them realised the importance of Gandhi’s mission after independence and unhesitatingly acknowledged his greatness with the risk of differing with their leader. On the other hand, the last Muslim prime minister of undivided Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardi, then living in Kolkata carrying out Gandhi’s mission of establishing communal harmony, made an emotionally charged statement, ‘Weep India weep, if you have tears, shed them now.’
   To be continued
   Ahmed Kamal teaches history at Dhaka University