The wounds inflicted on Bangladesh’s secular ethos

The assault on Bangladesh's secular moorings commenced in the early days of freedom in 1972, with consequences that were to assume increasingly menacing proportions as the years wore on.

Soon after the liberation of the country, it fell to Abul Mansur Ahmed, a writer and once a minister in Pakistan's central government led by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, to inform the nation that the emergence of an independent Bangladesh was a culmination of the Lahore Resolution of 1940. It was his considered view that Bangladesh was a fulfillment of the position adopted by the All-India Muslim League at its Lahore session in March 1940 relating to the creation of independent states for the Muslims of the subcontinent. In his opinion, wrong of course, Bangladesh was the sovereign Muslim state on the eastern side of India as envisaged in the Lahore Resolution.

Abul Mansur Ahmed quite ignored the reality behind the War of Liberation of 1971, which was that the armed struggle for freedom waged by the Mujibnagar government on the basis of the inspirational leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was aimed at the creation of a secular Bengali state. The Lahore Resolution was specific in its emphasis on the creation of Muslim states. On the other hand, the Six Points of the Awami League, as enunciated between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, envisioned a non-communal, democratic nationhood for the Bengalis of Pakistan. The war of 1971 successfully led to the rise of Bangladesh, which fact again was a clear rejection of the so-called two-nation theory propounded by the Muslim League in the 1940s.

If Abul Mansur Ahmed's observation was the earliest of misinterpretations of the Bangladesh ethos, Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani's systematic assaults on the secular character of the independent Bengali state were even more damaging. Known as the Red Moulana for his apparently socialistic views of politics and for his populism in pre-1971 Pakistan, Bhashani's place in Bangladesh's progressive politics is assured. The vibrant role he played in the anti-Ayub struggle in the 1960s and the position he adopted toward the Yahya Khan regime remain pivotal points of reference in any assessment of his career. And yet in the early years of Bangladesh's freedom, Bhashani went for a somersault. Haq Katha, the newspaper he presided over, spewed venom on a regular basis against the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. There is little question that Haq Katha sought to draw public attention to the corruption which was beginning to taint some politicians of the ruling Awami League. That was all right, but what was also true was that in their visceral condemnation of the Mujib government the newspaper and Bhashani simply went overboard.

Moulana Bhashani went for a total reversal of his political ideology when he began, in 1972, disseminating the idea of what he termed Muslim Bangla. Suddenly, in his view, Bangladesh was Muslim Bangla. It did not occur to the Moulana that he had been a participant in the War of Liberation, that it was he who in 1957 had bidden the state of Pakistan 'assalam-u-alaikum' and in December 1970, four days before the general election and somewhat imprudently, had declared the 'independence of East Pakistan'. His Muslim Bangla slogan cheered the enemies of Bangladesh only too well. Within the country, the old collaborators of the Pakistan army lay low, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Beyond the frontiers of the new country were arrayed all those elements, supported by Pakistan's Bhutto government and encouraged by such regimes as those which ruled Saudi Arabia and Libya, endlessly engaged in the job of undermining the Mujib government in Dhaka. Bhashani's Muslim Bangla perorations were lapped up eagerly by people and governments unable to tolerate the rise of a secular Bengali state in 1971. The focus came to be, for these elements, on the 'sixty five million Muslims' of Bangladesh, the remaining ten million, most of them Hindus, conveniently left out of the equation.

The next blow to the secularism epitomized by the state of Bangladesh came through the blood and gore of 15 August 1975. Moments after the Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was felled in a military coup, his assassins swiftly pushed the national slogan of Joi Bangla aside and reverted to the old 'zindabad' slogan.

Zindabad was a throwback to the erstwhile 'Pakistan Zindabad' propagated over the twenty four years prior to the collapse of Pakistan in Bangladesh in 1971. But Khondokar Moshtaq was happy to adopt 'Bangladesh Zindabad' as a substitute for Joi Bangla, a position that was to be unabashedly echoed by Ziaur Rahman, Hussein Muhammad Ershad and Khaleda Zia. The return of the zindabad factor also signaled a further extension of communal politics in the country, a reality nowhere more manifest than in the move by General Ziaur Rahman, the nation's first military dictator, to permit the return of such pro-Pakistan and therefore collaborationist parties as the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim League to politics in Bangladesh. Zia's communal inclinations had of course been demonstrated early on in his regime when through dictatorial fiat he twisted the knife through secularism, one of the four state principles enshrined in the Constitution. Thereafter, it was all a steep downhill ride for the country.

One of the bigger instances of the mauling of secular Bengali nationalism was the insidious, well laid-out infiltration into the national psyche of 'Bangladeshi nationalism' beginning in early 1976. Khondokar Abdul Hamid, a journalist known for his rightwing views and later part of the Zia dispensation, for the first time made known the intentions of the Zia military regime regarding the question of nationalism. At a discussion organized by Bangla Academy in February 1976, six months after Bangabandhu's assassination and three months after the murder of four national leaders in prison, Hamid propounded the spurious theory of 'Bangladeshi nationalism', which in its essence was a subtle return to the discredited two-nation theory employed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his acolytes in the vicious struggle for Pakistan in the 1940s. In time, 'Bangladeshi nationalism' was to lead, successfully, to a wide and widening chasm in the country, to say nothing of the misinterpretation and abuse of history it would supervise, a campaign that would eventually afflict the thoughts of those Bengalis born after the War of Liberation.

One of the darkest of steps taken toward a destruction of the nation's secular underpinnings was the Seeratunnabi conference organized by the Zia regime in early 1976 at Suhrawardy Udyan. Presided over by Air Vice Marshal M.G. Tawab, the expatriate Bengali air force officer brought over from West Germany to replace Air Vice Marshal A.K. Khondokar following the 1975 bloodbath, the conference was a convenient screen for a gathering of forces that had remained unhappy with the break-up of Pakistan in December 1971. Every speech, every issue discussed at the Seeratunnabi conference pointed to the clear and speedy and coming obliteration of Bangladesh's secular ethos. Not a sign was there, not a single hint that Bangladesh was a homeland for followers of all religious denominations, that it was a land which espoused liberal ideas. The impression, encouraged by the military regime, was one of the state cheerfully stripping itself of secular values and clothing itself in the flimsy attire of old-fashioned communalism. 'Bangladeshi nationalism' was on the march, the new emperor minus his clothes.

The last definitive nail on the coffin of secular Bengali nationalism came from the nation's second military ruler. Again through dictatorial fiat he decreed Islam as the religion of the state, deliberately and conveniently ignoring the historical reality of the land being a homeland of people of all religious and even non-religious persuasions. Plain and unashamed politics guided General Ershad in his misuse and abuse of Islam. In a larger sense, it only thickened the flow of coarse communal blood into Bangladesh's bloodstream.

From Abul Mansur Ahmed's cheerful celebration of a proper implementation of the Lahore Resolution through the emergence of Bangladesh to Hussein Muhammad Ershad's diktat of Islam being Bangladesh's paramount religion, it has been a long, steep and slippery road downhill.

We the people are still paying the price.