Daily Times

“History of man”, says Freud, “is the history of repression by the civilization”. To avoid the death-wish (Thanatos), it reins in the unbridled Eros. For id, however, every authority is reprehensible. It refuses to recognize the realm of necessity, hence rebels against the authority of super-ego and ego – the master and its watchdog. Every authority that stymies economic and instinctual freedom is negation of liberation, and therefore needs to be overthrown.

“Remembrance”, says Marcuse, “is a mode of dissociation from the given facts”. It fractures the power of established facts by recalling the horrors and hopes long eclipsed. Men with an intact memory could revisit the past when a civil war (along with its horrors) struck a state; a ‘midnight child’ was born of a ‘sacred’ womb and baptized as land of pious and pure. Incidentally, its former masters too belonged to the ‘land of angels’.

Wars were once fought on a battleground but ever since the enemy has become omnipresent, the one built in the system, the old concept has eclipsed in the fog of history. However, the venue in the aforementioned case was East Pakistan, and the battle had all the historic dimensions of a class war fought between an armed-to-the-teeth expropriators and an unarmed or scarcely armed expropriated majority which had nothing to lose but its chains. Athena, the goddess of war, smiled on the latter. The outcome of the war favored the rebels. The powerful super-ego and ego, its servile companion and co-hunter, the guardian and the guard, both had to bite the dust.

The deception of liberation prevailed for a while but soon this authentic dimension of liberation turned out to be a mirage. The ‘revolt’ devoured its own children. The power went back to the same class of oppressors, apart from the fluent Bengali they spoke now. The primal father made his return with the same fanfare.

From the workers point-of-view, the war was lost even before it actually began. The premise of national self-determination, a hand-maiden tool for the native bourgeoisie, was its innate flaw. The eastern wing was effectively colonized by the western wing. The struggle wasn’t limited to the colonial relationships alone. Its other dimension, the struggle between two different mode of productions, the capitalist and feudal, was equally significant; the latter was the dominant mode of the western wing.

The other downside of this struggle was its lack of mass support in the colonial wing. Despite the coercion and relentless atrocities committed on the eastern wing, the people of the western wing remained largely alienated from this struggle. The proletariat of the western wing was too indoctrinated to play its decisive role, proving Gramsci succinct that proletariat without consciousness is nothing more than a puppet hanging on a string.

The unfinished, protracted dark-night of generals and feudals lingered far too long to stymie the weak native bourgeois to play its historic role. Pakistan was denied the whole era of liberal enlightenment, which is necessary for a nation to become accustomed to the norms of liberty, equality and fraternity. These bourgeois ideals are an essential part of democracy regardless of its Orwellian character. To perpetuate its servitude, the free market needs to provide certain freedoms – freedom of speech among them – which secretly maintains its coordination with the hegemonic interests. Masses deprived of these ideals can scarcely be blamed for their false consciousness.

For both Bengalis and the world, the crimes committed by the western wing were tantamount to genocide: hundreds and thousands were killed with many targeted to satisfy the unsublimated libidinal desires of the masters. “Personal superego replaced by the official superego disciplines the nature, dominates the instincts with fury… The superego, impotent in its own house, becomes the hangman in society … revenge is sought from others who are always plenty, this routine of suppression is repeated until the total destruction” (Horkheimer). One also wonders about its ramifications for the Two-nation Theory, which was made to appear as the reason for the partition.

The Comilla Cantonment massacre and many such heinous crimes described in the Hamoodur Rehman Comission Report speak volumes of the cowardice guised in chivalry, and yet hardly anyone was put on trial. On the contrary, the culprits were received on the drumbeats by the civilian government, an equal partner in this hideous tragedy. The religious mercenaries with their hands drenched in their brothers’ blood found little hesitation to lay all the blame of this debacle on one individual, Yahya Khan, and his prurient character. Despite this attempted distortion of reality, these divine figures could not hide their mutilated faces. “Chastity”, Nietzsche states, “is a virtue with some but with many almost a vice… Many who tried to cast out their devil went themselves into swine”.

For the Pakistani state, losing its colony resulted in an undeclared technical insolvency. The deceptive phrase of socialism revived the tumbling structure of feudalism. Unlike Bismarck, Bhutto’s Caesarism proved to be a regressive one. It imported the religious diversion and Bonapartist plague. He had forgotten that staring at an abyss brought the stare of the abyss back. Those licking their wounds had never given up their ambition of power. The religious right to whom he embraced against the specter of socialism led him to the unlit pathways. The military might have stabbed him in the dark of the night, but the populist leader hoisted his own petard.

Bangladesh had its own share of sorrows. Political freedom must be translated into economic freedom, or else it remains a mere pipe dream. If people cannot determine the form and condition of their freedom, what they receive in the name of liberation is a hoax, an exchange of masters. The prophetic words of Rosa would definitely be echoing in their ears: “So long as capitalist states exist, i.e. so long as the imperialistic world policies determine the inner and outer life of a nation, there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or peace”.

Despite this defeat, the rebels successfully denounced the vicious ideology; they invalidated the concept of utopia by turning it into an achievable reality. “Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives” (Adorno). The people of Bengal have the great resolve to stand-up against the odds, and to express great refusal. They must have learnt their lesson that freedom can either be the fate of all or that of none.

It is time for the Pakistanis to seek an official apology from their ‘former’ brothers, and shun repeating the same in another province, where people disappear in the darkness of the night, only to be found later as mutilated cadavers. In 2008, Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, had set one such example by apologizing to the Stolen Generations of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Why cannot the Pakistani elite follow his footsteps? It will not change history, the nature of the crime or the atrocities committed by the state of Pakistan, but it may help to alleviate some burden of guilt the nation is carrying on its conscience. Is this thinking too unthinkable?

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com