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NAZMA SHAHEEN
‘We have achieved liberation, not emancipation’
by Robab Rosan
Widely credited as one of the youngest female freedom fighters in the country’s war of liberation, Nazma Shaheen was only a student of class eight at the Azimpur Girls’ High School in Dhaka when she decided to go to war.
‘I dreamt of being a hero like Pritilata,’ she says. Her decision was aided by growing up at the university quarters in front of Iqbal Hall (now Sergeant Zahurul Haque Hall) of Dhaka University, the epicentre of student politics of that time and the activities of her sister, Lutfa Haseen Rosy, who was then affiliated with the Chhatra League.
Her father, Abu Zaid Sikder, who was then a deputy college inspector of Dhaka University, was, however, not amused.
‘I was taking physical and arms training on the campus of Dhaka University in the morning, along with my elder sister, when some activists from the Chhatra League came to us,’ recalls Nazma. ‘They had gotten materials from the Dhaka match factory to make bombs and they gave the things to us for safe keep. We kept the materials in our house without informing our parents.’
The morning after the crackdown on March 25, the sisters tried to dig a hole in their garden to hide the gunpowder. ‘Our father caught us and pulled us away,’ she remembers.
Nazma and her sister were not, however, discouraged.
Nazma left Dhaka along with her parents when the curfew was withdrawn on March 27, and after a tedious journey, they reached their homestead in Daudkandi, Comilla. They returned back to Dhaka sometime in June.
Just after returning to Dhaka they got information that the Bangladesh Liberation Front was looking for fighters. After some days, another student leader of that time, Rafiqul Islam (now her husband), and a member of central committee of the then East Pakistan Chhatra League, came and asked them to join the liberation war.
‘One fine morning, my elder sister and I left the house, telling our parents that we were going to school. We packed some dresses in our school bags and my elder sister secretly wrote a letter addressing our father. She wrote that we were running away from home to participate in the war,’ she says.
The two sisters, along with Rafiqul Islam reached the BLF base camp of the Khasru group, led by Kamrul Alam Khan [popularly known as Khasru bhai], at Demra and took training on using arms and ammunition. ‘Khasru bhai used to leave my sister and me, separated and alone, at Shamshan Ghat in the dark hours of the night, to make us brave. He told us that we should not just train, but also have the courage to fight.’
In August or September, they went to Tripura, India when the second batch of the BLF was recruited for formal training by the Indian army. There, when 11 women, including Nazma and her sister, came together, the high commanders of the Eastern sector of the BLF arranged a special drill for them to train and prepare for the war at the Lambuchhara camp in Agartala.
During the operation to free Demra on December 6, she was stationed in a bunker and was helping the fighters in the front by supplying arms and ammunitions.
Now a professor at the Institute of Nutrition and Food Science, Dhaka University, Nazma still recalls those days with a tinge of fear, melancholy, and happiness.
‘I frequently tell my husband that our war for the country’s independence and the relation between us is bonded in a single thread,’ she says.
‘When Rafiq and I were crossing the CNB road in Kashba, Comilla to enter the Indian soil, military convoys were passing through the road and we quickly jumped into a pond. Both of us were drowning. Suddenly, I realised the man who has holding my hand did not know how to swim. I then started to swim and saved him.’
‘We were adamant to liberate our motherland,’ she continues. ‘We have got a piece of land. We have achieved liberation, but not emancipation. I think we did not fight for merely a piece of land, we had dreams of decorating the land with social justice, freedom from poverty, education and secularism.’
Nazma thinks that they could not annihilate their enemies. The enemies are still plotting against the spirit of the war of independence. ‘It is our failure. The progressive forces have been divided into many groups but the reactionary groups are still united. They are today vocal against equal rights for women.’
When asked about the current controversy over the government’s women development policy she says, ‘My mother used to tell us, “I have kept my daughters in the same womb where I kept my sons.” I still believe in it.’
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Gendered independence