By Shafiqur Rahman
As all politically aware Bangladeshis know, a furious battle of narratives is currently going on among the victors of the July Uprising regarding the spirit and goals of the national revolt against the Hasina regime. BNP, Jamaat, Students, radical leftists, and YouTube agitators are all loudly clashing with each other to frame the uprising in their own preferred ideas and terms. In this battle of five or more armies, one idea keeps surfacing that proclaims that the spirit of the July Uprising is a complete negation of the spirit of our 1971 Independence War. It is mostly the people who are aggrieved with Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan in 1971 that are championing this claim. These revanchists are not insignificant in number in today’s Bangladesh, especially in social media and online. Some people have started calling them East Pakistanis. However, their actual strength in the offline world remains to be seen, pending a free election and electoral politics.
The East Pakistanis first took heart from the July Uprising when students in Dhaka University collectively raised the slogan, ‘tumi ke? ami ke? Rajakar! Rajakar!’, in response to Hasina’s dismissal of the quota movement agitators as descendants of 1971 collaborators. Interpretations of that sloganeering vary. While many of us saw that seminal event as a clear indication of the complete failure of the Hasina regime’s fifteen years of indoctrination, East Pakistanis regarded it as the new generations’ denying of the legacy of 1971. Their conviction grew as a social boycott of well-known regime apologists like Zafar Iqbal spread wildly during the course of the movement.
The apogee of East Pakistanis perceived vindication was the afternoon of 5th August when scores of statues of Sheikh Mujib were demolished all over the country and the house at Dhanmondi 32 was put on fire. Again, interpretations of those events vary wildly. Many of us saw that as a natural reaction of the masses to breaking free of fifteen years of cult worship of Sheikh Mujib by the regime. After all, when did a successful mass uprising not result in the toppling of icons of the fallen regime in history? However, East Pakistanis saw those iconoclastic scenes as Bangladeshi people’s total rejection of everything Mujib represented in the country, even the 1971 war and independence. The final icing on the cake for East Pakistanis is the ongoing active hostility of the Indian government and media towards the new Bangladesh after the fall of the Awami regime. Undoubtedly India was Bangladesh’s closest ally in 1971 and instrumental in our victory over the occupying Pakistani army. India was the midwife that helped give birth to our freedom in 1971. East Pakistanis are pointing out naked Indian antipathy towards to risen people of Bangladesh during and after the July Uprising as proof positive that July 2024 is an antithesis of December 1971.
Do all these superficial contrasts put 2024 and 1971 in opposite positions in our national history? Most definitely not. There is a fundamental unity between 1971 and 2024, and I also daresay 1947, that put all these seminal events as successors in one unifying thread. 2024 is but the continuation of 1971.
The funny thing is that supporters of the fallen regime regard the July Uprising as exactly as East Pakistanis, a negation of 1971. Before the cataclysmic afternoon of 5th August totally turned their world upside down, Awamis were vociferous in condemning the Uprising as a naked power grab of anti-liberation forces. After The Catastrophe, Awamis have mostly retreated into their respective sealed cocoons to find succor from each other, but glimpses of the conversations that leak outside indicate that they are holding on to that narrative of the uprising. It’s a curious example of the Horseshoe Theory, where ideologically opposite camps meet each other in the same narrative of the world.
There is no denying that one narrative of 1971 was used as one of the main ideological crutches to prop up Hasina’s authoritarian regime. This narrative, along with the cult of Mujib and ‘development rather than democracy,’ were the three main tools of legitimization deployed in various combinations throughout Hasina’s tenure. A whole industry, costing the nation many billions of takas every year, grew up to use these ideological tools to propagandize not just the people in Bangladesh but the wider world as well. Like pure propaganda, these tools were mostly based on falsehoods, distortions, and exaggerations, the narrative of 1971 was no exception. We know the litany of excesses regarding 1971. Roles of important figures of 1971 were diminished, exaggerated or downright slandered. The list of freedom fighters ballooned many times over towards creating a partisan force within the government through quotas. The number of deaths in 1971 became a sacralized figure, while massacres of Bihari people within Bangladesh before, during, and after the war became taboo subjects. Every December 14th, organized lament over the irreplaceable loss of intellectuals became routine, along with sham promises of making a list of martyred intellectuals, which never materialized in 15 years because the truth may be inconvenient.
We need to confront how the Awami League used 1971 and Mujib as an ideological justification for its regime. That is an essential part of the reckoning process. In effect, the Awami League imposed a political quasi-religion upon the nation based on 1971 and Mujib. And like religions, the regime left no space to ask questions about 1971 and Mujib, the twin pillars of the faith. Only hagiographies and propaganda were given public space. The regime actively suppressed academic research and public discussions in 1971 and Mujib through various punitive black laws, physical intimidation, and social pressure. However, as the July Uprising and the subsequent opening of the public space have demonstrated clearly, the fifteen-year-long, full-state religious indoctrination based on 1971, and Mujib failed spectacularly.
Why this decade-and-a-half-long, multi-billion-dollar national indoctrination failed is still a mystery. Social and anthropological studies may clear up some aspects of this puzzle. In the absence of those, we can safely speculate that a substantial part of that mystery must be the sheer cognitive dissonance associated with the Awami indoctrination and the nature of the Awami regime. The contradiction between the Awami hagiography of 1971-Mujib and the regime’s public behavior was too big to escape even the dimmest of bulbs. The brazen looting, murdering, lying, dominating, oppressing, leching, and vulgarizing behavior of the regime members did not comport with its narrative of 1971 and Mujib. People instinctively understood that such dishonest monsters were not being truthful about either 1971 or Mujib.
For more than fifty years, the Awami League has been distorting facts and using a self-serving interpretation of 1971. Research, studies, and debates in a free environment can present many important facts to the people. However, interpretations of grand historical events can never be objective; the scale, complexity, embeddedness, and influence of such events preclude settling on a consensus interpretation. People are still debating interpretations of events thousands of years ago. There are many interpretations of 1971. Some call it the negation of the Two-Nation Theory; for some, it is a triumph of Bengali nationalism; to some, 1971 is the outcome of India’s meticulous masterplan; for some, it is a victory of Bengali Muslims over Pakistani Muslims, and so on. All these interpretations have a kernel of objectivity in them; none of them are completely right or wrong.
Most patriotic Bangladeshis would agree that the heart of the 1971 Independence War comprised our people’s desire to be free of domination, freedom from the domination of West Pakistanis. The basic theme of the six-point program of 1966 was also freedom from domination, and 1971 is but a continuation of that political program. The people of this land were extremely aggrieved at the blatant efforts by the West Pakistani military and political establishment to dominate us, and they absolutely hated the overt racism and chauvinism towards our people. All the talks, words, songs, poetry, and speeches during the 1971 war overwhelming show that ending West Pakistani domination is the one common theme inspiring all our Muktijodhas. History has shown us that even in 1947 when people of this land widely supported the partition of Bengal into the East and the West, the desire mainly animating them was freedom from the domination of Calcutta-based businesses, landowners, and political and cultural elites. 1947 shaped the territory that we call Bangladesh, and we have been very much a territory-based nation since then.
July Uprising of 2024 will have many interpretations. However, it is safe to say that one of the core themes of the uprising is our people’s desire to be free of domination, this time from domestic domination. Hasina’s was the most oppressive, tyrannical regime in our history. In terms of political oppression, it far surpassed the Pakistani regime of the 1960s or even the British colonial regime in the 1920s and 1930s, when local democracy was implemented in India. In terms of economic predation, it is again safe to say that the Awami looting and transferring of wealth from this land to foreign shores, far exceeds the Pakistani or the British regimes. As Sheikh Hasina said in one of her leaked phone calls of July, this land was her ‘baper desh,’ family property, and no one could stop her from doing anything!
July 2024 is primarily about freedom from the domination of a domestic occupation regime. In the first student movement at Dhaka University, then the iconic martyrdom of heroes like Abu Sayeed, Mir Mugdho, Wasim, then students and youth of private universities, schools, colleges, and madrassahs coming to the streets defiantly facing bullets and machetes, then general people of localities everywhere coming to the streets, the loud and clear inspiration was freedom from domination and oppression. In fact, many of the slogans, graffiti, songs, and social media memes show that the youth of the July Uprising were drawing inspiration directly from the 1971 Freedom Struggle. They regarded themselves as direct heirs of the Freedom Fighters.
Bangladeshis have been a people of a particular land since 1947. Our nationhood has become quite definitive in these nearly eighty years since. Ethnicity, religion, language, and civic values are all important elements that make people of a land a nation, and Bangladeshis have all elements in strong support. However, ethnicity and religion are less inclusive elements in our age because they often cause division as much as unity. Language and especially civic values such as democracy, freedom, social welfare, etc. are more inclusive because they can bind anyone into a community. For the past eighty years, our people’s struggle for freedom from domination and oppression has demonstrated this as a core and unifying civic value of our nationhood. Whether that domination came from Calcutta, West Pakistan, domestic forces like the Awami League, or domination by India, our people eventually rose up to resist.
1947, 1971, and 2024 are glorious markers in our nation’s history. However, 1971 still stands out because we obtained the country of Bangladesh in 1971. The sheer scale of the sacrifice made by our people and the sheer achievement of our people in that year makes 1971 stand taller than all our momentous years of national history.
