Daily Times

The history of a country decides its present socio-political dynamics and sets up its future trajectory. Often, to get away from the dictatorship of the past, countries rewrite and recreate their history by restructuring their socio-political structures but there is always a caveat: the means to recreate history may lead to chaos and the establishment of archaic socio-political structures. Those countries, with few exceptions, that have used violence as a means of socio-political change, carry forward that legacy. Bangladesh is an example. It had opportunities to create a new history but it failed to do so. The country is still living with its own version of 1971. It is not ready to accept any other narrative, which may give it a chance to learn from its past and address the root causes of structural violence in Bangladesh.

Though the official version of 1971 has been deliberately kept protected from challenges, in recent years many scholars have come out with their version of events. Many unknown facts about the liberation war of Bangladesh have been discovered, which can provide answers to many questions related to its skewed socio-political structure. In 2011, a movie named Meherjaan was released but, after a few days, it was taken out of theatres because of protests against its storyline, which was based on love between a Baloch soldier and a Bengali woman. Of course, a handful of supporters of freedom of expression came out against the censorship of the film. Talking about 1971, Nayanika Mukherjee writes that her research shows various Baloch and Pathan soldiers often helped East Pakistani civilians by aiding their escape. Opponents said the movie was anti-nationalist, anti-women and an attempt to malign those biranganas who, after the liberation war, were turned into barongana, which refers to ‘penetration’ and ‘penetrated’. Yasmin Saikia, in her work Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, has written about the plight of those women and the treatment they met after the birth of a sovereign Bangladesh.

About the violence of 1971, it is a reality that Pakistani soldiers carried out ethnocide, but the Awami League (AL) cadres also played a role. On the basis of an interview, Professor Ishtiaq Ahmed, in his book The Pakistan Military in Politics: Origins, Evolution, Consequences, writes that after it became clear that the National Assembly was not meeting on March 3, 1971, Bengali militants began to attack Biharis (Urdu speakers living in East Pakistan) in Chittagong. The Pakistan army remained passive till March 25. Citing from the Hamodur Rehman Commission, he further writes that the commission wondered why the military did not try to quell the agitation at that early stage and, instead, was ordered to return to the barracks.

Once Bangladesh was liberated the situation did not improve but rather, over the years, it became worse. The stakeholders in liberated Bangladesh used violent means to consolidate their political power. Dina Mahnaz Siddiqi writes that in order to amass power, less than three years after drafting of the 1972 constitution, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1972-1975) pushed through the fourth amendment, which instituted authoritarian one-party rule in place of parliamentary democracy. Mujib sidelined the armed forces and created his own paramilitary forces, the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini (JRB), which became associated with arbitrary terrorist tactics, and as an instrument to quash resistance to the regime. After the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in 1975, Major Ziaur Rehman, through a coup, became head of state. During the long period of army rule, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which was banned by Sheikh Mujib, was allowed to take part in politics through the enactment of the Political Party Regulation (PPR) act in 1978. The JI gradually strengthened its presence and become a player after the restoration of democracy in Bangladesh. It emerged as the fourth largest political party in the 2001 elections and had two cabinet positions as coalition partner in the government between 2001 and 2006.

However, the ghost of 1971 hovered over the recent 2014 general elections. The tribunal constituted to try perpetrators of violence in 1971 began delivering its phase-wise verdicts from 2013. Initially, when the tribunal did not pass the death sentence on the ‘butcher of Mirpur’ Abdul Quader Mollah, a people’s movement popularly known as the Shahbag movement erupted. The verdicts and the movement were opportunities to restart a fresh debate over 1971, give space to alternative narratives and accept mistakes. Nothing like that happened. On the contrary Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina used the tense environment for her political benefit. Amidst mass violence and boycott by the opposition political parties, she presided over flawed democratic elections to return to power.

Answers to the present and future lie in the past; many learn and move ahead but a few try to remain behind. Bangladesh needs to rethink what it will do with its history.

The writer is a PhD student in South Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He specialises in Indian internal security and foreign policy as well as regional water conflicts