How Bangladesh remains an ‘accidental country’ – Firstpost
Bangladesh has an uncanny ability to defy stereotypes, for good or bad. In the August upsurge that dethroned Sheikh Hasina, the very foundational legacy of Bangladesh was questioned and symbolically discarded in the form of the demolition of statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and setting on fire his historic house turned into a museum at Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
How future generations of Bangladesh will perceive their history only time can tell. Not many years ago, in 2013, Bangladesh appeared to reiterate its foundational legacy through a civil society movement to press for the death penalty for war criminals of ’71 under the amended International Crimes (Tribunal) Act, 1973.
The civil society activists, mainly bloggers, had congregated at Shahbag, a major neighbourhood of Dhaka, demanding capital punishment for Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Qader Mollah, who had been awarded life imprisonment by the tribunal. The death sentence was finally pronounced over Mollah after a further amendment in the statute later that year. A string of death sentences to the likes of Kamaruzzan, Ali Ahsan Mojaheed, Salauddin Qader Chowdhury, etc., followed even as Delawar Hossain Sayeedi’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
However, Shahbag protests with their distinct secular overtone also triggered counter-mobilisation of Islamists under the umbrella organisation viz Hefazat-e-Islam under the leadership of Mufti Ahmed Shah Shafi. Hefazat-e-Islam intends to turn Bangladesh into a thorough Islamic state. The opportunity was capitalised upon by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party to create turmoil, particularly in view of the impending elections in 2014.
Bangladesh seems to be continuously caught in a seesaw between secular nationalism and Islamism. This has partly to do with political changes in Dhaka. Late Ahmed Sofa (pronounced chhofa), an enlightened Bangladeshi thinker and author, reminiscences how he was shocked to find Abul Fazal (1903-83), the noted Bangladeshi secular intellectual, who proudly called himself an atheist, participating in sirat mehfil, an Islamic congregation.
One fine morning during his morning walk, Sofa found Abul Fazal was returning with a prayer cap on his head, accompanied by Air Vice Marshal Muhammed Ghulam Tawab, whose “excesses in matters of religion had often embarrassed even President Zia-ur-Rahman”. Abul Fazal had been inducted into the President’s advisory council of education policy, which accounted for his sudden and surprising reversal in attitude towards religion. This Sofa found disturbing, which became the starting point for his essay included in his eponymous book Bangali Musalmaner Mon (in Bengali), meaning ‘on the mind of Bengali Muslims’. Sofa argues that there is something in the mind of Bengali Muslims, which does not allow him to rest at a point of faith but constantly swings him either to the right or left. He was so motivated that he finished the essay, covering 37 pages of the book, during the course of a single night.
It is entirely speculative whether Bangladesh would have come into existence as a sovereign nation in 1971 if the then President of Pakistan, viz General AM Yayha Khan, had timely accepted the results of Pakistan’s general elections held on December 7, 1970, which had handed out a clear victory to the Awami League. In a national assembly comprising 300 general seats, the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had won 160, far ahead of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which picked 81 seats.
With the benefit of seats reserved for women, the Awami League ended up with a tally of 167 seats in a house of 313 members. The most important agenda before the national assembly was framing the Constitution of Pakistan, since its two previous constitutions (1956, 1962) had been abrogated.
Logically, Mujib should have been the prime minister of Pakistan. Yayha indeed described Mujib as the future Prime Minister of Pakistan while interacting with media persons at Dacca Airport on January 14, 1971, before returning to Karachi. However, Yayha chose to avoid the convening of the national assembly, raising a bogey of discord between the two wings of Pakistan. On February 13, 1971, Yayha finally convened the assembly to meet at the Provincial Assembly Building, Dacca (now Dhaka), with effect from March 3. An immensely ambitious Bhutto colluded with Yayha to boycott this inaugural session even as other legislators had started arriving from West Pakistan. Two days before the session was scheduled to begin, Yayha unilaterally postponed it, plunging Pakistan into a constitutional crisis.
In the resultant confrontation between the President and the Awami League, which launched a non-cooperation campaign, Yayha compounded his misjudgment by opting for a military solution. That was his fatal mistake. He ended up having what he tried his best to avoid, the dismemberment of Pakistan. Little moral prospect was left for a united Pakistan after the verdict of the first free and fair election based on adult suffrage in the history of that country had been thus subverted. Yayha’s actions provoked the people of East Bengal into rebellion against the authority of Islamabad-Rawalpindi. Exactly on the second anniversary of Yayha’s ascent, Bangladesh had declared independence on March 26, 1971.
The crux of the Awami League’s election campaign was its six-point program, which promised regional autonomy, but independence was nowhere suggested. Even the Government of Pakistan, in its White Paper on The Crisis in East Pakistan published on August 5, 1971, admits that six points of the Awami League, as publicly announced, made no claim to alter or to abridge the sovereign character of Pakistan. The White Paper further states that in his election speeches, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had amply clarified that he stood only for provincial autonomy and not for the disintegration of the country or any dilution of its Islamic character. On 21 September, 1970, in a public address in Narayanganj, he said, “The six-point programme would be realised, and at the same time neither the integrity of Pakistan nor Islam would be jeopardised” (vide P.4).
The White Paper quotes several leaders of the Awami League, like Tajuiddin Ahmed, A H M Qamaruzzaman, and Khondokar Mushtaq Ahmed, to conclude that the party had no premeditated plans to break up Pakistan. It, however, blames the Awami League for three things. First, its leaders allegedly incited Bengalis against their own “political Mir Jafars and parasites” and “exploiters and dacoits” from West Pakistan. Second, they broke up meetings of rival political parties and indulged in hooliganism during the long election campaign. And third, they attacked the offices of newspapers (P.5-8). Though the White Paper makes allegations of “Joy Bangla” slogans raised by a few workers of the Awami Party, no leader of the party is named in this connection.
It is evident that there was no demand for Bangladesh even a few months prior to the outbreak of the war of liberation on March 25, 1971. The Awami League’s runaway victory, however, meant that it would have the decisive role in framing the third Constitution of Pakistan based on the six-point programme. Under this scheme, Pakistan would have been a federation of five units, where no single unit would be able to impose its will on the other four. Yayha, however, was determined to forestall this development, fearing it would weaken the western wing of Pakistan (the Urdu belt) vis-a-vis its eastern wing (the Bengali belt) when in reality a few smaller parties like the National Awami Party (Wali Group), etc, were making overtures to Mujib. Strangely, Yayha himself did not provide any alternative scheme.
Yayha, by trying to avert Mujib’s ascent to the Prime Minister’s office, played his hands wrongly, resulting in a fiasco for Pakistan’s unity. Bangladesh was declared in the afternoon on March 26, 1971, by proxy. Anthony Mascarenhas informs one Mohammed Abdul Hannan, General Secretary, Chittagong district Awami League, announced it from Kalurghat transmitting station on the behalf of Mujib (Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood, P.135). However, after Ziaur Rahman became the president in April 1977, he began claiming that he was the first to declare the independence of Bangladesh on radio on March 27, 1971.
An “accidental country” might be an atrocious description of Bangladesh. It is true that the country is a product of circumstances, rapidly changing its profile from East Pakistan to East Bengal and then to “Bangla Desh” before settling into Bangladesh. There was indeed a disaffection towards Rawalpindi in the minds of Bengalis. It came to the fore in an undisguised manner as Yayha’s chicanery became evident and he chose to deal militarily with a political standoff, which was eminently his creation in the first place.
As early as March 2, 1971—a day after Yahya postponed the national assembly indefinitely—A S M Abdur Rab, a young socialist leader, burnt the Pakistani flag and hoisted the new national banner at a huge rally attended by Mujib. (At 80 now, Rab, President of Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), is amongst the few Bangladeshis today who have frankly condemned the restitution of Jamaat-e-Islami, which collaborated with the Pakistan army’s carnage in 1971, as a patriotic party). It was actually the leftist JSD faction inside the Awami League that claims the credit for nudging an indecisive Mujib towards hailing sovereign Bangladesh.
At first it looked like the liberation of Bangladesh was a triumph of secular Bengali nationalism over the Islamic identity of erstwhile East Pakistan. Bangladesh’s Constitution (1972) in its Preamble accepted nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism as its four pillars. Bangladesh’s Constitution, drafted by Kamal Hossain, Bar-at-Law, who is still a civil society activist at 87, is the first in South Asia to incorporate mention of secularism.
Article 12 specified that the principle of secularism would be realised by the elimination of communalism in all its forms; the granting by the state of political status in favour of any religion; the abuse of religion for political purposes; and any discrimination against, or persecution of, persons practising particular religions. Article 38, by implication, prohibited the operation of a number of political parties that had campaigned to establish an Islamic state in Bangladesh or colluded with the Pakistani marauders during the liberation war.
However, mental transformation is more difficult to achieve than political transitions. Soon after the unification of Italy, Italian nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio is known to have stated, “We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians.” Whereas Bangladesh was created in 1971, it left Bangladeshis in a profound identity crisis. There was hatred for the West Pakistanis, and people of East Bengal wanted them out. However, the creation of Bangladesh did not automatically lead to the cancellation of the two-nation theory. It left a large section of people in the newly born nation in an ambivalent frame of mind.
Mujib was absent from the scene through the best part of the liberation war. He was arrested in Dacca on March 26, 1971, before being flown to Rawalpindi via Karachi. He was lodged in Central Jail at Mianwali (Punjab), where he was court-martialed and risked being executed. But in the meanwhile, Yayha lost power soon after Pakistan’s defeat in the Indo-Pak 1971 War and was replaced by Bhutto as the president. Bhutto decided to release Mujib in a surreptitious manner, putting him and his former constitutional advisor and co-prisoner, Barrister Kamal Hossain, on a secret PIA flight to London. Mujib thus reappeared before the world in Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair, London, on January 8, 1972, after Bangladesh had been created.
Thus while Mujib might rightly be hailed as the father of Bangladesh, he was an absentee father nonetheless. He could not fully absorb the impact of events and sentiments that had agitated East Bengal during his absence. He could not be present at the first meeting of the cabinet, which, as Anthony Mascarenhas informs us, took the shape of a tea party, presided over by Mujib’s uncle, with Vice President Syed Nazrul Islam and Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed and Vice President sitting on his either side (Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood, P.8).
Mujib chose to become the prime minister himself, rather than the president as it was initially announced, because under the Westminster style of government, the former wielded actual authority. In that position Mujib failed to keep himself above partisanship. He also indiscreetly patronised people who had been overtly or covertly with Pakistan during the War of Liberation. The appointment of Mehboobul Alam, the Dacca correspondent of Dawn (Karachi), who also used to write highly coloured scripts for the “Plain Truth” programme on Radio Pakistan, promoting disinformation on Bangladesh’s liberation war, got hired as Mujib’s press secretary. The appointment raised such controversy that Mujib had to get rid of him. There were many turncoats who found honourable places in the new establishment.
Mujib’s sky-high popularity had touched rock bottom when he was assassinated on August 15, 1975. Khondakar Mostaq Ahmed, who became the president for a brief period of 80 days, inaugurated noticeably pro-Pakistan policy. He established diplomatic relations with Pakistan, which Mujib had refused to do till Pakistan settled the outstanding issue of dividing national assets. Mostaq, as Masceranhas informs, was surrounded with government officials like Shafiul Azam, Tabarak Hussain, Salhauddin, and A B S Safdar. Mostaq appointed Tabarak Hussain, a diplomat ostracised by his fellow Foreign Service officers for his decidedly pro-Pakistan attitude during the liberation war, as the Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh. Hussain, through his wife, had a family connection with Yayha Khan (Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood, P.86).
It is surprising how quickly, writes Marcus Franda (1981), Bengali nationalism dissipated once Bangladesh was created. Franda, whose essay, ‘Ziaur Rahman and Bangladeshi Nationalism’, was published barely two months before Ziaur Rahman was assassinated (Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, March 1981, P.375).
It might be remembered that successive governments in Dhaka had promoted one version of Islam or the other, bolstering Islamic identity. Even Sheikh Hasina, with $118 million aid from Saudi Arabia, planned to set up 560 model mosques. What “model” of Islam Saudi Arabia could promote is best left to imagination. By April 2023, a total of 200 mosques had already been inaugurated, as told by the then Bangladeshi High Commissioner to Pakistan, S M Mahbub Alam. Ahmed Sofa was correct; the Bengali Muslim mind could not rest at a point of faith, but it must swing either to the left or right.
The writer is author of the book ‘The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India’ (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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