South Asia (Page 4)

A senior of Bangladesh’s independence war said,” This was a loss not of a home but of our history, of our, of our, of our, of our history.” He was speaking to me of the&nbsp, death on February 5&nbsp, of the Dhaka house of Sheikh Mujib thy Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president. &nbsp, &nbsp,

The target, 32 Dhanmondi, is as well known in Bangladesh as 1600 Pennsylvania in the US. It is where, in March 1971, Mujib was apprehended by Muslim soldiers as they began their violent assault in East Pakistan that culminated in a murder, the second Pakistan-India warfare, and the beginning of a new country.

And it is where Bangladeshi men massacred Prime Minister Mujib and several of his family members on August 15, 1975, in the first military revolution the nation has ever conducted. That it now stands in remains is an indication of how much people rage had accumulated during the 15 years of the increasingly authoritarian rule under Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, which ended drastically on August 5, 2024, after months of student-led demonstrations. &nbsp,

Hasina had turned 32 Dhanmondi into a memorial for her father. Now exiled in India, where she fled after her fall from power, Hasina is plotting a political comeback. She planned to deliver a speech on February 5 to condemn Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’s interim government and declare her intentions to avenge her ouster, as planned for a gathering of her Awami League party.

The youth leaders warned that if she spoke they would destroy her father’s house. She continued to speak, and the leaders kept their word: The house was destroyed. For people like the liberation war veteran, who sacrificed so much and had seen his own father killed in that conflict, this was a case of a mob indulging in senseless, self-defeating violence against a symbol of their country’s founding.

But for the students who participated, it was another act of freedom in defiance not just of a “fascist” Awami League, but of a particular version of history that enabled Hasina to present herself and her family as the only legitimate custodians of Bangladesh’s independence. &nbsp,

The uprising began last June after a court order revived a quota system reserving a proportion of government jobs for 1971 war veterans and their descendants. This was essentially a spoils system for supporters of the Awami League, the party Mujib founded and Hasina has led since 1981, but it was draped in the memory of the liberation to make objectionable claims about its opponents.

This didn’t matter to a new generation eager for employment opportunities in an unfair economy. When Hasina&nbsp, implied&nbsp, that the protesters were&nbsp, razakars, a Persian word meaning “volunteer” but widely used for Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army during the 1971 genocide, the resulting fury swelled the protesters ‘ ranks to an uncontrollable level. &nbsp,

Symbolism played a vital role in the events around the uprising. The most powerful was Abu Sayed’s body, a 23-year-old man who was fatally shot on July 16 while he was facing a barrage of bullets while he was standing in the middle of a road.

His death was a decisive turning point in the movement, prompting the respected photojournalist Shahidul Alam to declare, &nbsp,” the end is nigh” .&nbsp, Others replicated Sayed’s act of defiance, and a graphic of a young man with outstretched arms, a staff in one hand, has essentially become the youth movement’s logo. &nbsp,

This figure is intended to mock the trigger-happy police, which also forces Bangladesh to enter a new era. Yet for this new era to form, an older one must be settled. &nbsp, &nbsp,

Friend of Bengal&nbsp,

Fifty years later, the 1971 liberation war still serves as a court of appeal in which the main political players try to disenfranchise one another by litigating two unresolved issues: Who was the true custodian of Bangladesh’s independence? What kind of country was the birth of? A third, more essential question emerges from these two: Who stood for and who against the spirit of the liberation? &nbsp,

Outsiders can be forgiven for believing that Mujib’s status as the country’s founding father is as unquestioned as Jinnah’s in Pakistan or Gandhi’s and Nehru’s in India. At home, he is known as Bangabandhu, or Friend of Bengal.

In the first democratic election in Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party ( PPP ) won against the Pakistan army in 1970, when the Pakistan army agreed to transfer power to civilians.

But he was denied his mandate to form a government by a West Pakistan establishment that couldn’t abide being ruled by Bengalis. In the middle of March 1971, troops from West Pakistan arrived in Dhaka ready for a crackdown amid a stalemate between East and West Pakistan. Their first order of business was to apprehend the Bengalis ‘ &nbsp, leader, which they did on the first day of the operation, 25 March. &nbsp,

A large portion of the Awami League’s lore was based on Mujib’s own account after the war ended. According to him, Mujib, hearing of a West Pakistani plot to kill him and blame it on Bengali extremists ( therefore compelling the army to crush the rebellion in the East ) sent most of his children into hiding while preparing for martyrdom.

The key was for Mujib to be killed inside the residence to make it clear that soldiers, not bandits, were the ones who were to blame. Thus would his blood “purify my people”. Mujib dictated a final message to his people, recorded and later broadcast via secret transmitter, to fight the West Pakistan army for independence, regardless of his own fate.

To stop the bloodshed, he wisely ordered the paramilitary and party members who were defending him. And, most poetically, he recalled how as the soldiers took him away, having decided to arrest rather than kill him, he insisted on retrieving his pipe and tobacco. &nbsp,

If this was a profile of courage for Mujib’s admirers, for his opponents it was proof of something else: that Mujib, removed from the battlefield, was alive and safe in Rawalpindi amid the slaughter in Bengal.

On my first visit to Dhaka many years ago, a retired government official asked me, rhetorically, why the army didn’t kill or disappear Mujib then, given that in the chaos of the moment the top brass could easily have feigned ignorance of what had happened to him. The West Pakistan leadership argued in my interlocutor’s theory that Mujib was still willing to keep Pakistan united and should be kept alive for a future negotiation. &nbsp,

Although it’s difficult to say whether this explanation is accurate, it does indicate a larger debate over the liberation narrative. For the Bangladesh Nationalist Party ( BNP ), led by Hasina’s perennial rival Khaleda Zia, who has twice been prime minister, it was fighters and not politicians who won the country’s independence.

And it was army major Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda’s husband and the BNP’s founder, who&nbsp, declared Bangladesh’s independence&nbsp, over the radio on 27 March 1971, two days after Mujib was arrested. It is no longer taken into account that he did it at the directive and in the name of Mujib. &nbsp,

The BNP has long struggled to develop a brand of its own despite having a large coalition of anti-Awami League constituencies. This may explain why the party gives as much importance to a legitimizing myth around 1971 as it does. &nbsp,

Both narratives have depth in a society that is incredibly divided. For the Awami League, the BNP’s fidelity to an independent Bangladesh is questionable, given its pro-Pakistani sympathies and, above all, its long partnership with the Jamaat-i-Islami that explicitly&nbsp, opposed Bangladesh’s creation, on the grounds of Islamic unity.

Meanwhile, Jamaat supporters accuse Mujib and Hasina of giving India the right to renounce Bangladesh’s sovereignty. The Awami League holds Ziaur Rahman responsible for the assassination of Mujib and that of many of his family members, in the bloody 1975 coup that augured 15 years of military rule, the BNP blames Mujib’s extreme concentration of power in a one-party state for provoking the violent backlash of 15 August 1975.

And on it goes, a tooth for a tooth. &nbsp,

What kind of a nation?

The coup of 1975 also sparked debates about whether religion or geography had a bearing on the country’s fundamental character. Bengal was a major site of British divide-and-rule strategies and resistance to them. In a bid to suppress local resistance to colonial rule, the British partitioned Bengal in 1905 between a Hindu-majority West Bengal and a Muslim-majority East Bengal.

In his virtuoso account of the independence movement, &nbsp, Liberty or Death, the late Patrick French wrote,” Provoked an upsurge of nationalist protest, and the province had become the focus of both the constitutional and revolutionary faces of the freedom movement.”

While the protests forced the British to reunite Bengal in 1911, their effects didn’t stop there. A nationalist Bengali identity gained new strength and became the main threat to the British Empire. The repressive 1915 Defence of India Act was passed specifically in response to agitation in Bengal. &nbsp,

The Second Partition of Bengal is thus frequently referred to in Bangladesh as the 1947 partition. In June of that year, the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted for a united Bengal to join Pakistan. In the event of a provincial division, East Bengal legislators who were Muslim-majority, who still wanted a united province, voted that East Bengal would join Pakistan, where Bengalis would form the popular majority. Later, legislators from Hindu-majority West Bengal voted for the partitioning of Bengal and for West Bengal to become part of India. &nbsp,

Political power would, however, be concentrated in Karachi and, after the federal capital was moved, Islamabad. The predominately Urdu-speaking West Pakistan leadership opined blatantly, and it immediately saw the country’s ethnic and linguistic diversity as a threat. Tensions between the center and the provinces created either secessionist or ethnic nationalist movements in Balochistan, the Northwest Frontier Province, and Sindh—but most prominently in East Bengal.

The Second Partition came about as a result of Jinnah’s 1948 decision to make Urdu, the language of minority West Pakistanis, the sole national language, sparking a movement in 1952 for the promotion of Bangla as a national language. On the movement’s first day, 21 February, police killed four student demonstrators at Dhaka University ( for which a monument, Martyr Tower, was built in central Dhaka in 1963 ).

Although Bangla was ultimately recognized as a national language and enshrined in the 1956 constitution, these killings made reconciliation between the eastern and western wings of the country all but impossible. &nbsp,

The refusal to honor what a wide majority of Bengalis—indeed a majority of the country —voted for in the 1970 national election was the final indignity. Estimates of the number of Bengalis killed in the subsequent violence, which were carried out by West Pakistan, range widely from 30 000 to over 3 million, despite the efforts of many foreign observers and academics to arrive at a figure of around a million.

There is, as the respected journalist David Bergman has argued, &nbsp,” an academic consensus that this campaign of violence, particularly against the Hindu population, was a genocide” .&nbsp, It was only through India’s intervention in December 1971, and the third India-Pakistan war, that the massacre stopped and a new nation was born. &nbsp,

Thus, two independence struggles gave Bengali nationalism a rich history of resistance to colonial and West Pakistani rule. Liberation provided an opportunity to codify that nationalism. The 1972 constitution advocated nationalism and secularism as founding principles, in addition to democracy and socialism, while dissinguishing the new country from the one it had seceded from. It also banned Jamaat-i-Islami and any other religion-based party. &nbsp, &nbsp,

Following Mujib’s assassination, the Awami League’s emphasis on ethnic nationalism and secularism was openly contested when Ziaur Rahman stepped in and supported a different conception of Bangladeshi national identity, one that emphasised its religious and territorial makeup: a Bengali nation that was majority Bengali rather than a Bengali nation that was majority Muslim.

If Bangladesh was essentially Bengali, this argument went, then it would have reunited with West Bengal after 1971. The fact that it hadn’t was sufficient evidence that the two-nation theory, which demanded that South Asia’s Muslims establish a country, still existed. &nbsp,

Rahman’s constitutional amendments replaced” secularism” with “absolute trust and faith in the almighty Allah”, lifted the ban on religion-based parties, and called on the state to” to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity”. The Muslim salutation read,” In the Name of Allah, Beneficent, the Merciful,” as the preamble of the constitution’s preamble now begins with this phrase. Islamic studies became a compulsory subject for all Muslim schoolchildren.

A year after Rahman was killed in a mid-level coup, General Hussain Muhammad Ershad later inserted a constitutional provision declaring Islam the state religion. This Islamization drive ran in parallel to the one occurring in Pakistan under General Zia ul Haq’s military regime, albeit significantly more cautiously and gradually. &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

By no means has the Awami League’s ideological balance been harmonious with its adversaries ‘ religious politics. Political expediency and patronage have shaped policy choices at least as much as ideology, if not more. For instance, Hasina’s Awami League made a number of, frequently alarming concessions to Islamists, some of whom are still a powerful force despite her policies, including reintroducing secularism into the constitution in 2011 but keeping Islam as the state religion.

But 1971 remains a potent political weapon, one that Hasina flaunted against her rivals on returning to office in 2009, tapping a still deeply felt wound: the role of Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army in that war. &nbsp,

Accountability and its problems&nbsp,

War crimes were destined to be a major issue. The International Crimes ( Tribunal ) Act of 1973 made it possible to prosecute members of “any armed, defense of auxiliary forces, irrespective of nationality, who commit or have committed crimes against humanity on the territory of Bangladesh.” The purpose was to prosecute Pakistani prisoners of war, some 93, 000 of whom had been captured by Indian troops and transported to India. &nbsp,

After the country’s dissolution, Pakistan’s government, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s leadership, required that all prisoners of war be released in exchange for recognizing the new Bangladeshi state. Its ally China, acting on Islamabad’s behalf, wielded its first-ever UN Security Council veto to block Bangladesh’s admission to the UN.

Mujib and Indira Gandhi made a concession as Pakistan’s recognition increased: the Delhi Agreement of 1973 mandated the repatriation of all POWs in the three nations. As per the terms of the Simla Agreement between Islamabad and Delhi the year before, this repatriation deal triggered Islamabad’s recognition of Bangladesh. &nbsp,

However, it had to hold someone accountable for the genocide for the country to feel whole. But who? &nbsp, &nbsp, &nbsp,

If the Pakistan army was the main culprit, for many veterans of the civil war the Jamaat-e-Islami’s role was just as malevolent. Two of its armed wings, Al Shams and Al Badr ( the original&nbsp, razakars ), were&nbsp, widely accused&nbsp, of having committed atrocities like murder, rape, arson and looting alongside army soldiers. Little was done in its wake because Jamaat was prominent in politics during the democratic transition from 1990 to 2006.

By the 2009 election, however, which came after the army had suspended democracy in 2007, Sheikh Hasina promised accountability for 1971 at last. Her government reorganized the 1973 law to facilitate the prosecution of Jamaat’s leadership and established the International Crimes Tribunal ( ICT). The tribunal’s work began in earnest in 2010 to significant criticism at home and abroad for the absence of due process and the use of the death penalty. &nbsp,

As a legitimate demand for justice transformed into political theater, the trials quickly turned into the national story. The people convicted include the Jamaat party chief Motiur Rahman Nizami and several other senior party members and office bearers. Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a well-known BNP figure who was hanged in November 2015, was also present. &nbsp,

The ICT’s most consequential year was 2013. The Jamaat Vice President Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, a well-known preacher, was sentenced to death in February for provoking violent demonstrations that resulted in the deaths of more than 40 people, including several police officers. The same month, another Jamaat leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Numerous young people in Dhaka’s Shahbagh Square pleaded for the death penalty for Mollah in exchange for a different form of protest. Their anger grew again that September, when the Supreme Court commuted Sayeedi’s sentence to life imprisonment. One report described the Shahbagh protests as&nbsp,” the biggest mass demonstration the country has seen in 20 years” .&nbsp,

In response, the government changed a law allowing the state to challenge ICT verdicts and successfully appealed the decision to increase Mollah’s death sentence. Mollah was hanged that December. &nbsp,

When I attended an ICT hearing in Dhaka on the invitation of one of the prosecutors in the immediate aftermath of these events, I was a strong critic of the whole process—and I remain one. But interviewing students who took part in the Shahbagh Square protests, I was also aware of how the trials had politicized a new generation of Bangladeshis and familiarized them with the atrocities of 1971. The concerns over the death penalty and due process sounded unrelated to them.

An older activist who had participated in the liberation war informed me that he still believed the Jamaat collaborators deserved whatever the maximum sentence on the books meant, if that meant execution. To be sure, many other rights activists opposed the death penalty and the ICT itself, and they argued that the” Shahbaghis” had undermined the quest for justice and lit a dangerous fuse. &nbsp,

How dangerous quickly became clear. Shahbagh had inspired a counter-movement led by the Hefazat-e-Islam, hitherto a marginal Islamist coalition supported by the Jamaat and others, and fed by a large&nbsp, qaumi&nbsp, ( privately run ) madrasa sector.

An organization that had been focusing on limiting women’s rights to employment and other freedoms was given new life by the ICT. In April 2013, barely two months after Shahbagh began, Hefazat held massive rallies in Dhaka around 13 demands, the third of which was &nbsp,” stringent punishment against self-declared atheists and bloggers”.

Secular bloggers had been the prime organizers of the Shahbagh movement. Ahmed Rajib Haider, a member of an extremist group known as the Ansarullah Bangla Team, who advocated Al Qaeda’s ideology, was killed on February 15th, 2013.

At Hefazat rallies, clerics explicitly called for the bloggers ‘ hanging. Soon, a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers began to appear in the press and elsewhere, with no one claiming authorship at the time. On February 26, 2015, the blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death outside a book fair in Dhaka. Ansarullah again claimed responsibility. In a similar way, four other secular bloggers, publishers, and commentators were killed the same year. &nbsp,

In recent years, the politics of 1971 have been bloody. Hefazat remains an influential force ( as does Jamaat ), bolstered by concessions Hasina made to appease it, including yielding to the group’s demand in 2018 for qaumi madrasa diplomas to be recognized as the equivalent of a Master’s degree. And now, after several years of dormancy, the ICT has been revived—to prosecute Hasina in absentia for&nbsp, her&nbsp, crimes. &nbsp,

A New Era? &nbsp,

In November 2023, Hasina inaugurated a new site of murals and a large golden statue of her father to honor his role in Bangladesh’s freedom struggle. On the day her government collapsed, protesters demolished it. In the days that followed, Mujib’s sculptures and images were mostly destroyed.

In January, the interim government changed the national curriculum to reflect the BNP version of events, replacing Mujib with Rahman as the recognized founding father—a bid, officials said, to rectify historical inaccuracies. The ending of 32 Dhanmondi seems almost logical, if unsettling, in terms of climax. The youth movement’s more revolutionary elements are also calling for scrapping ( rather than amending ) Mujib’s 1972 constitution and&nbsp, permanently banning the Awami League. &nbsp,

However, within the youth leadership there are other more forward-thinking rumors. It’s worth recalling that student demonstrations over the quota system first occurred in April 2018 and that in July, young people again took the streets after two students were killed in a road accident. What started out as a plea for better road safety turned into a massive outcry against more severe government failures.

These events augured an emergent force in the polity: Organized youth who weren’t allied with a party ideology or a 1971 narrative, as their predecessors in Shahbagh Square had been, but who were focused on bread-and-butter issues. And they clearly rattled the government, which after initial attempts at appeasement&nbsp, cracked down harshly, &nbsp, in a precursor to the events of 2024. &nbsp,

In their engagement with the student leadership, one can clearly see a new generation of activists and political leaders less inclined to fight in the name of old myths. The politics of the nation may be influenced by an open discussion about the allegations that emerged over the year 1971 because they have sown the country’s politics to a certain degree.

But the more compelling struggle ahead may not be between different accounts of the country’s birth, but between those who want a new politics focused on justice, equity, and democratic governance and those who want to stake their claim on high office by summoning the ghosts of liberation past.

Repeating the cycle of vengeance and delegitimizing one’s opponents again may be tempting in a deeply traumatized nation, but it will likely have a bitter afterlife. The past frequently exists.

Shehryar Fazli&nbsp, is a program manager for the Inclusive Democracy in South Asia Opportunity at Open Society Foundations. He has spent more than 20 years covering South Asia in various capacities. He is also author of the novel, &nbsp, Invitation&nbsp, ( 2011 ), which was runner-up in the Edinburgh Book Festival’s 2011 First Book Award. This essay is republished with permission.

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