The turbulent birth of Bangladesh was unique in being the only case of majority secessionism in the world to date, and one premised solely on linguistic identity and culture. Erstwhile East Pakistan constituted 51 per cent of the pre-1971 Pakistani population. This wrenching split squarely repudiated the hokum of the two-nation theory, which led to immense dislocation and massacres. It took millions of lives, two decades of chaos and tensions, and three major wars for this foundational myth to be tossed aside.
Yet, a legion sticks to it, invoking either the chequered legacy of the founder or finding solace in alternative, revisionist histories —or using it as a means to guilt-trip India.
The philosophical conundrum known as the Ship of Theseus asks whether, if all the parts and components of a body are replaced, it remains the same old body or becomes an entirely new one.
The aftermath of 1971 was a moment of reckoning for Pakistan, as well as for Bangladesh, as they faced the choice of defining themselves either through exclusionary terms, invoking mythical lore of past glory and vague abstractions, or through a broad, futuristic common vision.
Ernst Renan said that a nation is defined as much by what it forgets as by what it remembers. From that standpoint, willful amnesia and slumber are rather strong in the Jammatis and their fellow travellers, who range from religious zealots to the fancy radical chic nihilists in India. This tendency is so pronounced that an updated version of Stockholm Syndrome might well be termed Dhaka Syndrome.
The gruesome murders and mass rapes during Operation Searchlight, and the violence against Hindus, painstakingly documented by the brave journalist Anthony Mascarenhas in his 9,000-word essay in Sunday Times, compelled Indira Gandhi to intervene. The bloodletting and religious targeting blueprint and action plan bore a disturbing similarity to the Nazi genocide. And it is no secret who the overwhelming victims were and why, yet there has been no attempt to investigate this orgy of violence and frenzy of hatred without bias.
The Jammatis and Razakars can be seen as equivalents of Schutzstaffel (SS) in the subcontinent, equally determined to annihilate the impure and purge the nation’s body politic from the ‘other’.
While it’s often said that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, what about those whose misreading was a projection of their own complacent make-beliefs?
The Prolonged Myth
It might come as a surprise today that Bangladesh became the first country in South Asia to constitutionally enshrine secularism in 1972, just a year after its tormentuous birth and amid catastrophic floods and immense poverty. The term was subsequently removed from the constitution, reinserted, then removed again, until the country’s Supreme Court finally reinstated it in 2010.
Dhaka’s tryst with secularism carries another significant irony and a false start: its most prominent advocate had initially cut his teeth in political demonstrations, organisation, and mass mobilisation as a student activist with the Muslim League. The background of his political mentor and his early life raises questions about whether this commitment to secularism was a genuine change of heart, a pragmatic survival tactic, or mere expediency.
In an interesting incident narrated in Mascarenhas’s A Legacy of Blood, Saudi Arabia, under King Faisal, expressed a desire for the fledgling country to become an Islamic Republic. Justice Abu Chowdhury, the country’s first High Commissioner to the UK and later President, explained the Bangladeshi brand of secularism to King Faisal ‘with semantics that would have amazed King Solomon’.
“Since only a very small minority does not profess the faith of Islam, Your Majesty might treat it as an Islamic country,” said Justice Chowdhury.
The ‘small minority’ – predominantly Hindu – were those who were attacked and fled to India in 1971. This same minority is being systematically targeted and killed following Sheikh Hasina’s deposition. The old political joke about Deng Xiaoping’s car at a traffic light, with him instructing his driver to ‘Signal left, turn right,’ can be rephrased in the Bangladeshi context as ‘Signal Secular, Turn Wherever.’
What’s characteristic about this small minority—around 8 per cent of the country’s population—is that they found themselves on the wrong side of arbitrarily drawn borders not once, but twice. This has compounded the trauma of the Bengalis. Both times, they had to acquiesce to new political and cartographic realities as a fait accompli.
The Awami League, the vanguard of the liberation movement turned political party, has been their best hope to keep the tide of Islamism in check and to secure some semblance of dignified access to state institutions. Sheikh Hasina’s regime was a barrier, albeit a creaky and decrepit one, that stood between them and the Islamist thugs and hoodlums baying for blood, as the incidents since August 5, 2024, have unambiguously proved.
In a 2016 article, the Dhaka Tribune quoted economist Abdul Barkat of Dhaka University, who stated, “In the next 30 years, there would be no Hindus left in the country”. From 1964 to 2013, around 11.3 million Hindus left Bangladesh due to religious persecution and discrimination. According to Barkat’s 30-year-long research, this exodus mostly took place during the military governments following independence.
This is food for thought for the conveniently blind in India, who euphorically welcome street power and army custodianship as the herald of the glorious sun. Empirical facts and numbers don’t lie, and unfortunately, can’t be modified to suit one’s whims.
Founder’s Anxiety?
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the political protégé of the suave, Oxford-educated barrister Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former Mayor of Calcutta and orchestrator of Direct Action Day in 1946, which incited the Great Calcutta Killings. Suhrawardy went on to become the Deputy Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Within four years, the Brother Leader, Bangabandhu, transformed from the most beloved figurehead to one of the most reviled figures, meeting a tragic end akin to the Russian royals in a palace coup. For his acolytes, his legacy is perhaps best summarised by his own last statement, which could serve as an excellent epitaph: ‘No one understands what I do for my country.’
What usually takes decades—the disenchantment with authoritarian leaders and the irrepressible desire for change—was hyper-accelerated in Dhaka. From becoming the first head of state to speak at the UN General Assembly in Bengali and being the man of the hour, to meeting a fatal end in less than four years, the story of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman unravelled remarkably swiftly.
The nexus of corruption, cartelism, and criminal impunity among party cadres, along with the bid to establish a single-party ‘revolutionary state’, was his undoing. Corruption and patronage were corroding the body politic, much like Chiang Kai-shek’s China, about which Indian journalist Frank Moraes wrote, “It was an oligarchy of personal power”.
The Daughter’s Return
Salman Rushdie’s magical realist novel Shame is a comical allegory about an ‘artificial country’ and its web of self-deceit, delusions, and existential dilemmas. Focusing on the intertwined lives of three sisters and two families, the novel serves as a fable about the foundation of Pakistan. It then delves into the Shakespearean dynamics between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq, two figures who represented the spectrum between fancily profligate left populism and austerely fanatic right mobilisation.
The Hobson’s choice in Islamic countries has often been along similar lines. What’s tragically real in the autumn of Sheikh Hasina’s matriarchal fall is that the protests against her father were also initially led by students. The two poles of Bangladeshi democracy are perpetually suspended in the past, which makes the present dynamic: past memories, past events, past interpretations, and a desire to repaint it.
The major political parties in Bangladesh, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, each have their own versions of the past and their own retellings of the nation’s foundational event, liberation, and key protagonists. The two parties are led by individuals closely related to the original leaders: Mujib’s daughter and General Zia-ur-Rehman’s widow. The battles of the past are fought on the stages of the present, borrowing the same fervour and rhetoric.
“The three mothers of the imminent Omar Khayyam Shakil were using the past, their only remaining capital, as a means of purchasing the future”, writes Rushdie.
The Inexorable Trap
Politics is a slippery slope, and one wrong move at the precipice can be fatal. Leaders who remain in power for long periods master, among other things, the art of concessions, accommodation, and approbation. The art of consensus is really the science of feigning, overlooking, defusing tensions, and balancing antagonisms.
In a story laden with twists, turns, and dramatic ironies, Taslima Nasrin, the country’s dissident and exile who has received numerous death threats and survived assassination attempts from Islamists, adds another element of drama with her recent statement. Known for her outspoken views and never shying away from stirring the hornet’s nest, Nasrin has claimed that Sheikh Hasina has been driven out of power by the same forces she appeased decades ago. Nasrin’s book Lajja, which translates to ‘Shame’ in English, details the anti-Hindu riots and carnage in 1990s Bangladesh.
“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence”, writes Salman Rushdie in Shame.
The shame springs from a prolonged identity crisis inherited from the throes of birth, the implacable conflict between the hardline religionists and the modernisers, the unresolved questions surrounding the cataclysms of 1947 and 1971, and the search for a definitive meaning, unity, and an idea of a nation that can transcend the past.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past” ~ William Faulkner
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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