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Selective Amnesia
Bangladesh
is in the grip of an identity crisis as de-Mujibisation finds more and
more takers and attempts are made to cosy up to Pakistan. An observation
by India Today's Sumit Mitra who was in Dhaka recently.
Thirty
one years ago, Shamsunnahar Hall, the girls' hostel of
Dhaka University, had witnessed one of the worst barbarities in
its history, with west Pakistani troops, unleashed from the
garrison in the late evening of March 25, 1971, herding hundreds
of the hostel's inmates into military trucks. They were raped in
open fields in the cantonment. Thirty million Bangladeshis were
killed in the nine-month-long orgy of violence, and a million
women raped.
Near the hostel, Naveeda, an 18-year-old undergraduate history
student, and a member of Chhatra League, the student wing of the Awami
League that brought the country independence, was chirping last week:
"Liberation? What liberation? We should forget about liberation and
move ahead. We'll reach nowhere if we still think it's enough to ride
on the success of liberation". Standing close to her was Rehan, a
post-graduate student of the Chhatra Dal, student arm of BNP, the Awami's
main rival which is now in power, who philosophised on democracy. "Under
democracy, this country has failed to make a headway. It can flourish
only if it puts the baggage of democracy behind." Welcome to the
People's Republic of Bagladesh, circa 2002!
After securing its second independence in 24 years---from the
British in 1947 and from Pakistan in 1971---the republic of 13
million Bengali-speaking people is facing an identity crisis, and
is gripped by a selective political amnesia. The first thing it
forgot was the bashing it had got from Pakistan, covering up the
old scars under a patina of forgiveness.
After the August 15, 1975 assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, architect
of the liberation war, it also tried to forget his role in the freedom
struggle. There was a sudden political u-turn when in 1996 Sheikh Hasina,
Mujib's daughter and chief of the Awami League, was elected prime minister.
But the change was
transitory.
Following the general elections in October last, Khaleda Zia,
Hasina's predecessor as prime minister and chief of BNP, is back
in the saddle. With Khaleda, the relentless official drive to rewrite
the nation's history of independence is back, obliterating in the process
the role of Mujib in the liberation struggle. The first sign of this "de-Mujibisation"
hits the tourist when he presents his dollar bills at the currency exchange
counter, to be given back a wad of Taka notes of the same denomination
but of different designs. In one set, the older ones, there is the picture
of Mujib but it has disappeared from the newer ones, making way for some
highly ornamental calligraphy. On being re-elected, the BNP government
quickly dumped the law concerning conservation of portraits of the "father
of the nation". The 4.9 km long Bangabandhu Jamuna Setu, Asia's largest
river bridge between Tangail and Sirajgunj, named after Mujob known as
Bangabandhu, was suddenly renamed Jamuna Setu. The vice-chancellors of
all the 11 government universities appointed in the earlier regime were
changed overnight. The army chief, appointed during Hasina's prime ministership,
was quietly removed from office and packed off to Australia as ambassador.
A classic example of the nation's divided perception of the liberation,
and of its main agent, Mujib, is its confused response to his assassination.
After the 1971 coup, Khondoker Mushtaq, who became the president, promulgated
martial law and an indemnity ordinance exempting the killers from trial.
This became a constitutional amendment when President Ziaur Rahman, Khaleda's
slain husband, ratified in the National Assembly in 1979 all actions under
martial law. The Mujib murder case was therefore put on ice for 21 years,
until in 1996, when Hasina got the indemnity ordinance removed from the
constitution. As the trial began, only four of the 19 accused could be
arrested, all from foreign lands.
In December 2000, a two-member division bench of the high court gave a
split verdict, following which the case was referred to another court
which, on April 30, 2001, passed death sentence on the four, and on eight
other absconders. However, an appeal by the convicts is now pending before
the Supreme Court. It is being delayed because the division now requires
three new judges to hear the petition as five of its current strength
of seven are ineligible to hear the appeal. Former chief justice Mahmudul
Amin Chowdhury had asked the Khaleda administration for appointment of
new judges on an ad hoc basis for the disposal of the "Bangabandhu
murder case", but Gana Bhavan, the prime minister's office, has been
silent, and is rumoured to be waiting for a "friendlier" bench.
Is de-Mujibisation, and the attempt to cosy up to Pakistan (evident from
the recent red-carpet reception in Dhaka to Pakistan President Pervez
Musharraf), the result of the memories of 1971 having receded too far
back on the country's mind? "De-Mujibisation is nothing but political
turf battle," says Zahirul Huq, director-general of external publicity.
And, as far as Bangladesh's new romance with Pakistan is concerned, Foreign
Minister M. Murshed Khan recalls the 1974 India-Pakistan-Bangladesh tripartite
treaty in which Mujib himself pledged to "forget" the past.
And now the BNP, whose founder, Zia, was anti-Mujib but not anti-liberation,
has accepted, as a partner in the ruling coalition, the Jamaat-e-Islam,
whose militia, the Al Badr, had collaborated with the Pakistan Army in
the 1971 pogrom. Haq explains that it is business as usual in Bangladesh
politics as Hasina's Awami League too had accepted the Jamaat as a political
ally against the BNP prior to the victorious 1996
election. In a rain-soaked afternoon at Dhaka's Dhanmandi, at the home
of Mujib where he was killed in a Pakistan-inspired coup, which is now
a museum run by a private trust, the blood-spattered history of the young
republic speaks with evidence that refuses to be wished away. The bullet
holes in the walls are counted and marked.
The glasses, slippers and the dress he wore when the attackers
came are encased and preserved. The visitor is guided more or less along
the path that his assailants had taken, until he reaches the point where
Mujib had fallen down, at the landing of back stairs, where stands a life-size
drawing of the man. As this correspondence looked at the drawing, and
froze, Siraj, the young guide and Awami League supporter, said, "those
who want to erase this man from history were not happy that we'd left
Pakistan". There are many others who are not really worried about
Pakistan but would not like their rulers to bask too long in the glory
of the liberation war. "Forget about liberation and move ahead,"
as young Naveeda had declared at the university.
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