by Mahtab Haider

A great many of the struggles and upheavals of modern history have been ‘centred around the effort to gain freedom from political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men,’ wrote Erich Fromm in his 1942 classic Fear of Freedom. ‘The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend. While a class was fighting for its liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted in all who are oppressed,’ wrote Fromm. Bangladesh’s struggle for independence — i.e. the movements that culminated in the 1971 war fought by the peoples of Bangladesh encompassing ethnicity, religion, gender and class — is, in many ways a symbol of just such a struggle. If the nation state is an imagined community, then the community that Bangladesh’s independence struggle had imagined would emerge from the war was a just and noble one, where every individual would stand equal in the eyes of the state, and be entitled to (an entitlement, not a privilege, mind) equal opportunities and rights in political and civil life. There can be no greater testimony to these claims than the text and the spirit of the constitution that the country adopted in 1971, with exactly these values forming the core of the country’s being. But this too is true. ‘In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended,’ wrote Fromm. There is perhaps not another sentence that so aptly depicts the fate that has befallen every marginalised section of society, among whom predominantly but not exclusively are women, in the era of independent Bangladesh... [ + ]