Bangladesh War: The embers of liberation 

Forty-seven years is not a long time in the making of a nation-state. The birth pangs of Bangladesh as a new nation seem to be going on even now. Come December and the nation is plunged into memory, celebration and much sadness. It will be no different this time. This is so, even though it is called the Victory Month in Bangladesh.

The 16th of December – the day the Pakistani army surrendered to its Indian counterpart – is the big day. Tributes will be paid to the national martyrs’ memorial at Savar near Dhaka. But two days before that – on the 14th – the country remembered one of the blackest days in the new nation’s history. On that day, the people gathered at Rayer Bazar and near the Jagannath Hall of Dhaka University, where hundreds of the country’s best intellectuals were slaughtered by the Pakistani army on 14th December, 1971, in an attempt to snuff out the minds and hearts of the liberation warriors. As in other years, the sombre occasion provided an opportunity to remember the painful past of the country, its birth-pangs.

But then, the intellectuals were only a part of nearly three million people brutally killed in perhaps the biggest genocide in world history since the Second World War. The way the big powers such as the United States and China stood by Pakistan, even after the scale of the genocide came to be known to the outside world, is one of the abiding shames of modern diplomacy and statecraft.

But, there is a shameful side to the legacy of the Liberation War inside Bangladesh. The country’s society and politics even today bear bitter marks of the division in the polity over the nation’s blood-drenched birth. That is why every December 16 lays bare the polarisation between the so-called pro-liberation and anti-liberation forces.

The seeds of this division were there in the Liberation War itself. The forces such as the Al-Shams and Al-Badr and the pro-Pakistan elements in the Bangladesh army had never been enamoured of either Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or of a new nation called Bangladesh. The 16th of December, 1971 marked their defeat, but not their destruction.

These forces avenged their defeat in battle on 15th August, 1975 by killing “Bangabandhu” and most of his family members at his home in Dhaka. Thus, began the second part of the story of the liberation’s legacy. The new regimes could not take the country back into Pakistan, but they tried everything to undermine or downright dismantle the liberation’s history and achievements.

To the writers of the new narrative, the father figure of the new nation was not Sheikh Mujib, but Ziaur Rahman, who usurped power after Mujib’s assassination and became the chief martial law administrator and then President until he was also killed in an army coup in 1981. In came another usurper from the army – HM Ershad – who headed the military rule from 1982 till 1991, when combined forces of Opposition parties forced him to resign. The elections of that year brought Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, to power and ushered in electoral democracy in Bangladesh.

But, between them, Ziaur Rahman and Ershad demolished much of the social and political structure that Sheikh Mujib and the Liberation War envisaged. Instead of the “secular” character of the country that its 1972 constitution promised, the military regimes turned it into an “Islamic” republic. The Liberation War itself was portrayed in a distorted way. And, the openly anti-liberation leaders such as Gholam Azam and his Islamist radicals were allowed to return to Bangladesh and rehabilitated in politics and society. Islamisation of the society began in earnest with women having to bear the brunt of it more than others.

Khaleda Zia’s coming to power was seen by these elements as a golden opportunity to further deepen their roots in Bangladesh. Their main enemy was not the legacy of Sheikh Mujib but his party, the Awami League, the principal pro-liberation party, and its current leader and Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina. Several attempts were made on her life.

Bangladesh became a new hub of Islamic fundamentalism and of terror attacks inside India. Matters got worse with rise of Islamist terrorism throughout the world towards the end of the 1990s. A Bangladeshi cleric was among the signatories to the declaration of jihad by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda against the US, India and Israel.

Slogans and graffiti in Dhaka – by Islamist forces – proclaimed, “Bangla hobey Afghanistan, amra hobo Taliban” (Bangladesh will become Afghanistan, we will become the Taliban). In the aftermath of 9/11 in the US and terror attacks elsewhere, the world could no longer afford to ignore what was happening in Bangladesh. Khaleda Zia returned to power in 2001 in the company of her Islamist allies and the terror groups seemed to have a free run of the country.

It was only with Sheikh Hasina’s return to power for the second time in 2008 that the terror groups and Islamist parties began to feel the heat of the government’s offensive against them. To strengthen her hands in the anti-fundamentalist battle, several pro-liberation social groups such as Shariar Kabir’s Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmool Committee (Committee to uproot the killers and agents of 1971) were out in the streets to reclaim the liberation’s legacy.

Among other things, these groups demanded trial and punishment for those who led the killing squads against liberation warriors, intellectuals and the common people in 1971. The unrelenting pressure by these groups forced to set up War Crimes Tribunal in 2010. Perhaps, Sheikh Hasina was not prepared to go very far on this, but events overtook her.

So, when a notorious war criminal, Qader Mollah, was given a life sentence instead of a death penalty by the court, the old pro-liberation social groups and new ones, mostly comprising students, began what came to be known as the Shahbag Movement. Shahbag is the public square in Dhaka where the students squatted day after day to demand that Mollah be hanged. The man was hanged, as were several other equally notorious gangsters of 1971. The Shahbag Movement has since faded out, but it helped to rekindle the memory of the liberation war with all its sadness, horrors and eventual triumph.

The War Crimes Tribunal cast its shadow on Bangladesh’s politics. The Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Khaleda Zia and its allies cried foul, calling the tribunal flawed and politically biased. Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League alleged that the BNP’s anti-liberation and pro-Pakistan position was exposed yet again not only by the latter’s opposition to the tribunal but also by the fact that many of the condemned men were either BNP leaders or had close links with the party.

So, the Liberation War of Bangladesh is not just memory or history, it has been alive and kicking in Bangladesh’s politics ever since 1971. This time, it comes with an added significance.

The next elections come barely two weeks after the Victory Day – on December 30. There can be no doubt that Sheikh Hasina and her party will make a special effort to revive the tragedy and the triumph of 1971 and also to paint the BNP and its allies as the arch-enemies of the Liberation War. And it will be an unprecedented poll with the former Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition alliance Khaleda Zia in prison serving a seven-year sentence on corruption charges and barred from fighting the polls. Even her son and heir, Tareq Rahman, also convicted in corruption cases, can only issue instructions from his London hideout.

But, like elections anywhere, the victors and the vanquished are part of a show that will pass. For Bangladesh, what is important is that it is slowly growing out of its isolation and unimportance in the global scene. It is the eighth most populous country in the world and home to the one of the largest Muslim populations for any country.

Bangladesh’s record in primary healthcare and women’s empowerment have caught the world’s attention. Its economic success has been something of a marvel for what was until recently one of the poorest countries in the world.

In 1974, the World Bank estimated only Rwanda to have a lower per capita income than Bangladesh. Last year, the same Bank suggested that Bangladesh is getting out of the category of the least developed economies.

Sheikh Hasina has projected that by 2021 Bangladesh will become a middle-income country.

All this is great achievement for a country that made news headlines only because of massive human tragedies in its primitive garment factories, natural disasters or never-ending street battles and blockades by rival political groups.

But the bitter political rivalries also portend possibilities of another slide into doom and gloom. As they celebrate the Victory Month and also remember the ghoulish part of the liberation saga, Bangladeshis may do well to recall the old adage, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."