Remembering the dead, redeeming the pledge

Syed Badrul Ahsan

It is time to remember once more. It is especially so because we live in times where the propensity to forget often gets the better of the proclivity to remember. In these thirty eight years that have gone by, we have recalled the sacrifices of the brave men and women who went to their deaths only days before the liberation of the land. And these were individuals who, like the rest of us, knew freedom was on its way, that indeed it was only steps away, that the wild men come from the mountains far away had lost the nerve to fight againstpi the determined onslaught of a people unwilling to give away its land or its values.

Martyred Intellectuals Day is thus about some of our best and brightest who were picked up and then picked off by the local collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army, in the sinister expectation that an emergent Bengali state would find itself badly bruised at birth, that it would not be a state proper but would be reduced to being a statelet. You recall the arrogance of the Punjabi army captain, who brazenly informed Anthony Mascarenhas in April 1971, that the Pakistan state meant to keep the rebellious Bengalis in subjugation for no fewer than thirty years. You remember too Roedad Khan's self-satisfaction on the morning of 26 March 1971 as he approached a fruit-laden table for breakfast with Tikka Khan and all the other men whose soldiers were busy shooting down Bengalis all across Dhaka. Yaar, imaan taaza ho gya (friend, faith has gained freshness). That is what he said; and that is what all Pakistanis and their Bengali collaborators believed in the nine months between March and December 1971. Yahya Khan vowed to punish Sheikh Mujibur Rahman for his 'act of treason'; and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto crowed that Allah had saved Pakistan! The Bengali academic Syed Sajjad Hussain went abroad, to tell disbelieving people that the army had committed no genocide in 'East Pakistan'.

In December 1971, we believed that the end of Pakistan was nigh. So did its defenders, with blackness in their souls. You think of the Muslim League, of elements like Sabur Khan. Only a couple of days before liberation, even as the al-Badr and al-Shams murder squads of the Jamaat-e-Islami went around abducting Bengali men and women to murder, Sabur Khan told his fellow collaborators that Bangladesh would be an illegitimate child of India. General Niazi vowed that Pakistan would last, that the Indian army and Mukti Bahini would take Dhaka over his corpse. And all the while, Pakistan's soldiers were retreating everywhere, making a desperate rush for Dhaka. Many of them died, in line with the calling of poetic justice. Many more trundled down to Dhaka and other 'safe' places, to witness the surrender of the world's 'best fighting force', their own.

But marauding armies do not give up in decency, in the dignified stillness that comes to soldiers who have lost a war for a cause they have believed in. In 1971, Pakistan's army and Pakistan's razakars had no cause to live for or die for. Which explains their stubbornness when it came to killing Bengalis and raping their women. Soldiers who have murdered, whose rapacious nature has destroyed the moral fibre in them, will not yield until they have sunk their teeth, for one last time, in the flesh of their victims. And that precisely was what was done to Bengali physicians, academics, journalists and others in the terrible darkness enveloping the country between 13 and 15 December. Young men trained to murder for Pakistan went about hunting down their own teachers. Professor Gyasuddin was picked up. Dr. Aleem Chowdhury was taken away. Ladu Bhai was abducted. Selina Hossain was led away. If you recall history, if you know how it was in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union to be kidnapped and murdered by the state, to be purged, you would get a sense of what the Pakistanis and their collaborators did throughout 1971 and especially on the eve of freedom. If you remember the Nazis, if you think back on what the Japanese did in Nanjing in 1937, you would have a clearer idea of what Pakistan did to Bangladesh's brightest sons and daughters even as battlefield defeat stared it in the face. If you cannot prevent history from opening a new chapter on a nation's struggle for liberty, so the Pakistani reasoning went, you can wield the machete and maim somewhat that history. And that was when they went looking for Bangladesh's intellectuals, found them, through the cover of a curfew, and swiftly went into the gory business of torturing them to death. There is Rayerbazar, its killing grounds, to speak to you of those horrible times.

This morning, it is time to redeem the old pledge, to rededicate ourselves to the cause of a secular and therefore democratic Bangladesh we waged war for in a long-ago season of hope and courage. It is time for renewal.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor Current Affairs, The Daily Star.