Ground Realities
August 15, the High Court verdict and our darkness . . .
THE High Court move to strike down the ill-advised decision by the BNP-led alliance government in 2002 to cancel August 15 as National Mourning Day will cheer all Bengalis. And it will because of quite a few reasons. In the first place, it is a step toward reminding the nation as well as the world outside of the collective shame we went through when Bangabandhu, along with his family, was murdered in a coup that would leave us deeply scarred as a nation. In the second, it is a clear sign that for all the darkness we have traversed in the years since the assassination, we yet have it in us to reassert the values that have consistently underscored Bengali culture and heritage. Finally, it is a pointer to the presence even now in this country of elements reluctant to accord the esteem which naturally is Bangabandhu's. Worse, these elements happen to be the remnants of a class which, for years on end, have thrived in Bangladesh through a distortion of established political realities.
Where the matter is one of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government's view of August 15, no one is in any doubt about its attitude. That is fine, for attitudes are often the base upon which principles are shaped. But in the case of the BNP, indeed in the case of all those men and women who have merrily glided through life in a celebration of August 15, attitudes have seriously marred the making of principles. In the five years in which General Ziaur Rahman perpetrated his dictatorship in Bangladesh, the biggest casualty of politics was Bangabandhu and everyone else associated with him, both before and during the War of Liberation.
All too often, of course, you will come by people ready to heap praise on the nation's first military administration, on Zia, because it did nothing to challenge Bangabandhu's place in our lives as the father of the nation. That praise is pointless, for it ignores the bigger and more sordid reality, which is that the Zia regime systematically airbrushed Bangabandhu out of history and in all the time it held on to political authority, it made sure that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was never mentioned in any context anywhere in the country.
And that was the irony. Movie houses showing films made between 1972 and mid-1975, and in which Bangabandhu's image was depicted in certain scenes, crudely tried to screen out the image in a blatant attempt to pretend he had never existed. And Bangabandhu's non-presence on the historical canvas was, of course, accompanied by other, more crude developments. At none of the celebrations of Independence Day and Victory Day in the Zia years was there any mention of the term "Pakistani" in relation to the occupation forces that perpetrated the genocide in 1971. Neither was there, in those celebrations, any hint of the overpowering presence of the political leadership that had waged the War of Liberation. Vacuity was all. Unreality dug holes in the truth.
Indeed, in the Zia years, the effort to shut out history effectively led to the growth of political fungi, in the shape of forces intent on putting the truth in a straitjacket. At an Ekushey discussion at the Bangla Academy in February 1976, the same where Khondokar Abdul Hamid floated, as part of the Zia scheme, the spurious idea of "Bangladeshi nationalism," Professor Kabir Chowdhury was the only speaker among so many to mention Bangabandhu. And then too he called him Sheikh Mujib, obviously owing to the insidiously developing culture of denying the assassinated leader his primacy in national politics. Chowdhury's remembrance of Bangabandhu, given the fearful symmetry in politics at the time, was a courageous act. But not everyone was a courageous man or woman in that dark era.
Move on. Or move back. In the period following the assassinations of August 15, quite a few well-known citizens disappointed the nation by their inexplicable behaviour. Moulana Bhashani, having only months earlier (in March 1975) extolled Bangabandhu during the latter's visit to Santosh, lost little time in cheering the coup that was but an initiation into the bloody chaos soon to follow. A group of politicians, all contemporaries of Bangabandhu, and some his allies in earlier times, quickly made it known that Mujib's death was occasion for celebration. To them, August 15 was najat dibosh, or deliverance day. Quite a few of these elements would in time link up with Moshtaque in his Democratic League.
It is rather curious that today no one who once so cheerfully joined the party mentions that phase of his life in his curriculum vitae, even as he aspires to be part of government. One even served as an adviser in the present caretaker administration. Members of the Mujib government, or a vast majority of them, chose to serve or were compelled to serve the Khondokar Mushtaque regime. Only Kamal Hossain, foreign minister in the Mujib dispensation, stayed away, having been out of the country at the time of the coup.
At our missions abroad, quite a few diplomats moved with alacrity to dispose of Bangabandhu's portraits on the walls. London was a particularly painful experience. A mob of exuberant Bengalis rushed into the chancery building and did all they could think of to humiliate a dead, fallen Mujib.
There is no end to such tales of rampant ignominy. When the Jatiyo Party today welcomes the High Court verdict on National Mourning Day, you rub your eyes in disbelief as you mull over that response. And you do that because it was in the Ershad era that Bangabandhu's assassins floated a so-called political party they called the Freedom Party.
One of those assassins even had the temerity, thanks to the government's patronisation, to turn into a presidential candidate in 1988 and go on television seeking votes. Today, he is a prisoner under sentence of death. General Ershad prayed at Bangabandhu's grave, but did not lift a finger to have the notorious indemnity ordinance repealed. And the record of the BNP governments under Khaleda Zia? Silence ought to serve as an answer to the question.
It is these terrifying points of darkness we recall as we celebrate the High Court verdict. In politics, it is always the law and always history that have the final say. History has never been unfair with men and their deeds. The law has never squirmed before murderers on the rampage in the nocturnal hours. Life is not fair, the gods are not just, and death is only a breath away. But it is the old dreams, the lost values, and an urge for a new renaissance that keep men and women of noble note going. The High Court has just informed us that a new renaissance may already be at hand.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments