The Ghost of Partition

THERE ARE SOME OF US WHO recall the grim commemoration of Independence Day on August 15, 1975—exactly 50 years ago. It was the first time that the anniversary of the restoration of national sovereignty was observed minus the democracy that all Indians had taken for granted since 1947. There is very little of Indira Gandhi’s Red Fort address I can recall today. However, even the lapse of five decades hasn’t been able to wipe away the profound shock and intense sadness that greeted the news of the murder of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family at his Dhanmondi residence in Dhaka.

To my generation, especially those who grew up in the shadow of the 1971 Bangladesh war, Sheikh Mujib wasn’t merely the iconic leader of a neighbouring country with which many of us felt an emotional attachment. He was an integral part of my life in the final years of my schooldays. Even now I can hear his booming voice declaim, “Amader sangram muktir sangram; amader sangram swadhinatar sangram (Our strug­gle is for liberty; our struggle is a freedom struggle)”—his legend­ary March 7, 1971 speech that re­defined both the history and the geography of the subcontinent. Bangladesh Betar, the radio sta­tion of the government-in-ex­ile, which was located within West Bengal, used to replay his speeches incessantly. We found the East Bengal accent of Mujib quaint—and very different from the Kolkata way of speaking Bangla—particularly his invoca­tion to his people to deprive the Pakistani forces of supplies—“bhate marbo, pani te marbo.”

There were jokes about the ‘Sheikh Saheb’ too, as I discovered during a seven-day visit (with my classmate Chandan Mitra) to Dhaka sometime in March 1972. Post-liberation Dhaka was un­settled but, considering the large number of firearms that were in circulation, security was rather lax. Our hosts took us to see the gaping hole in the ceiling of the Governor’s House that had been bombed by the Indian Air Force; we were stunned witnesses to the lynching of a Bihari, someone who had allegedly attempted to rob a residence in Purana Paltan; and we experienced the collective mirth of people on seeing the first currency notes of free Bangla­desh. The joke was that the authentic notes had Mujib with spec­tacles while the forgeries had him clear-sighted. It wasn’t a very funny joke. It was much later, in fact earlier this year, on reading Manash Ghosh’s Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind His Killing that I grasped the intrigues that lay behind the mockery of the new notes.

It was during a chance visit to the house of a prosper­ous businessman in Dhaka’s Gulshan that we first smelt the disquiet in some quarters over India’s involvement. At a convivial lunch, a gentleman who claimed to have fought in the Mukti Bahini took us aside and let loose a tirade on the venality of Indian Army officers. In his view, the Indian Army had helped itself quite indiscriminately to all that the Pakistani army and rich Pakistani businessmen had left behind. This apparently included luxury American cars (these weren’t available in the austere India of the times) and even in­dustrial machinery. It was from this disgruntled freedom fighter that we first got to hear of the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) that had been set up. The JSD and its leaders Major Jalil and Lt Colonel Abu Taher were to figure prominently in the November revolu­tion of 1975 that ended up installing General Ziaur Rahman as Bangladesh’s first military ruler.

If the popular narrative is to be believed, Mujib paved the way for his own downfall. It is said that his inept and highly personalised style of governance contributed to the corruption and high-handedness of both his family and the Awami League leaders. Additionally, Mujib was unduly influenced by the social­ist leaders he met during mul­tilateral gatherings, and they were responsible for nudging him in the direction of one-party rule. Whether the responsibil­ity for scrapping democracy and adopting the one-party Baksal model owed to the influence of Moscow or was shaped by his own sense of infallibility isn’t the point. What is relevant is that the conspiracy hatched by Major Dalim was an outcome of Mujib’s failure to deal with the injured pride of those at the receiv­ing end of political high-handedness. However, anger turned to murderous retribution and political assassination because of Mujib’s failure to create robust democratic institutions. Bang­abandhu failed to use his undeniable personal charisma to steer Bangladesh away from its Pakistani inheritance.

There was another factor whose importance has only now been belatedly recognised. This relates to the deep divisions that have plagued Bangladesh since its inception in 1971.

In the wake of the euphoria that surrounded the outcome of the 1970 elections in united Pakistan, it was assumed that East Pakistan was unflinchingly behind the Awami League. Having secured 167 out of the 169 National Assembly seats from East Pakistan, with a spectacular 74.9 per cent popular vote, Sheikh Mujib’s man­date was quite emphatic. Nevertheless, although the fragmented pro-Pakistan parties polled around 15 per cent votes—with the Jamaat-e-Islami polling a measly 6 per cent—the clout of those who were unhappy with the secession from Pakistan was always underestimated. Apart from many Bengali officers who fought the 1971 war on the side of Pakistan and were repatriated back to Bangladesh in 1973-74, there were powerful forces inside the Awami League who would have been happy with an understand­ing with Pakistan that stopped short of total separation. Most prominent in the latter category was Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad who inveigled his way into the inner circle around Mujib after 1972, and who guided the anti- Mujib conspiracy in 1975.

After the Pakistani surren­der in Dhaka in December 1971 and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s recognition of Bangladesh in 1974, the restoration of united Pakistan became a non-issue. With Mujib magnanimously declaring an amnesty for all those who were ‘col­laborators’ during the war of liberation, the stigma attached to those loosely dubbed Razakars was removed. However, this did not imply the divisions of the past were forgotten. Pakistan may have become history but Bangladeshi nationhood remained fractured.

At the heart of the division was the question of Muslim iden­tity. A bigoted and inept handling of East Pakistan’s regional aspirations and its distinct linguistic identity may have been responsible for the growing gulf between two wings of an un­natural country. However, the fact remains that Muslim separatism in united Bengal had deep socio-religious and po­litical roots. Apart from a brief convergence of interests during the Khilafat movement, Ben­gali Muslims had by and large stayed away from the national­ist movement against the British. This was even as Hindu Benga­lis had enthusiastically em­braced either the revolutionary groups or enmeshed themselves in one or other faction of Congress. It was no accident that Muhammad Ali Jinnah chose Bengal for his Direct Action Day to secure Pakistan in August 1946. The Calcutta kill­ings and the massacre of Hindus in Noakhali indicated that the political divide between Hindus and Muslims ran deep in Bengal.

This political divide may have been masked by a linguistic commonality. Till Partition, Hindu Bengalis jealously guarded their custodianship of Bengali language and culture, unwilling to concede space to the Muslim middle classes. I recall a con­versation a Bangladeshi scholar had with Nirad C Chaudhuri in Oxford. Asked if he counted the feisty AK Fazlul Huq as an example of composite Bengali bhadralok culture, Chaudhuri seemed astonished: “You can call Fazlul Huq a Mahomedan, a warrior or even a Pathan. But you can’t call him a bhadralok. Only Hindus can be called bhadralok.”

Although the Unknown Indian was an incorrigible polemi­cist, he had a point. With rare exceptions, Bengali Hindus and Muslims operated in separate compartments. This was broken in East Pakistan after 1947 following the departure of nearly the entire Hindu bhadralok elite of the new country to Kolkata. Hav­ing lost political power entirely and with no hope of ever securing it in Pakistan, there was a judicious intermingling of the middle classes of both communities in East Pakistan. The anger in West Pakistan about Hindus exercising a disproportionate sway over the intelligentsia of East Pakistan was not completely unjusti­fied. It can be said without exaggeration that a minority of Hindu middle-class professionals exercised a disproportionate hold over the language movement that arose as a reaction to Jinnah’s insis­tence that Urdu must be the sole national language of Pakistan. The commitment to a multi-religious society—if not to secular­ism—that defines the Awami League and leftist parties in Bangla­desh stems from this sustained Hindu engagement with Muslim Bengalis after 1947. The contrast with West Bengal is striking.

HOWEVER, THE ACCEPTANCE of a composite Bangladeshi culture has not been without its associated political compli­cations. The Jamaat, which was unequivocally in favour of the united Pakistan project, has been explicit in its desire to create an Islamic state, loosely guided by the principles of the Sharia. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its offshoots such as Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, the Jamaat is a transnational body that operates on the basis of its commitment to an Islamic future as de­fined by Maulana Maududi. The Islamism of the Jamaat has little place for secular Bengali culture and its one-size-fits-all approach has led to its refusal to field women candidates in elections. Apart from its use of Bengali as a language of communication, the Jamaat of Bangladesh is not shaped by its environment.

This is not the case with either the Awami League or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), both of which link their politics to Bangladeshi nationalism. However, while the Awami League is happy to project the cul­tural ethos of Bangladesh as something that is both secular and incorporates elements of pre-Partition Kolkata, BNP’s worldview incor­porates a larger dose of the country’s Muslim inheritance. If the Awami League stands for Bangladeshi nationalism, BNP is committed to Bangladeshi Muslim nationalism. Against the Awami League’s ‘Joy Bangla’, BNP responds with ‘Bangladesh Zindabad’. It is no accident that many Bangladeshi notables who trace their political lineage to the Muslim League have found a new home in BNP. Moreover, while the Awami League—cour­tesy its complete identification with the liberation war of 1971— views India as a natural ally, BNP nurtures deep misgivings about India’s apparent hegemonism. During the administration of both Ziaur Rahman and Khaleda Zia, bi­lateral relations between India and Bangladesh were extremely tense. BNP and General HM Ershad bear a cumulative responsibility for sour­ing the mood of the cantonments towards India. This tradition is be­ing kept up by the caretaker govern­ment of Muhammad Yunus.

The extent to which an under­standing of Bangladesh’s recent history has created faultlines in its nationhood is quite remarkable. The July declaration that Chief Adviser Yunus read to the people of Bangla­desh on the first anniversary of the ouster of Sheikh Hasina is a note­worthy document. Its narration of the journey of Bangladesh as an independent nation is unlikely to find all-round acceptance. The superficiality with which the declaration viewed the 1971 liberation and the complete absence of even the briefest of reference to Sheikh Mujib is bound to rankle with those whose political inheritance has been shaped by the libera­tion struggle. This is in line with Yunus’ promise to “reset” Ban­gladesh and the caretaker government’s conscious bid to wipe out all the symbols of the 1971 liberation. The demolition of Sheikh Mujib’s residence at 32 Dhanmondi was no ordinary bout of excess. It stemmed from a deep division in Bangladesh over the past.

Ideally, BNP doesn’t seek to ‘reset’ the 1971 button. Since General Ziaur Rahman made the first announcement of an independent Bangladesh on the radio station in Chittagong and was a Mukti Bahini commander, the party doesn’t seek to disavow the liberation struggle. It seeks to enlarge the scope of 1971 to incorporate national heroes other than Mujib. The Awami League’s single-minded devo­tion to the legacy of Bangabandhu and, by association, his family, has triggered a backlash.

It is, however, important to remember that the real schism over the past isn’t between the Awami League and BNP. Although these two parties have separate traditions, the main divide is between those who seek to define Bangladesh in terms of the 1971 inheritance and those who identify two landmarks for Bangladesh: August 14, 1947, the day Pakistan came into being, and August 5, 2024, when that inheri­tance was reclaimed after a five-decade break.

The battle to define Bangla­desh is a work in progress. As of now, the Islamists have the upper hand and there is a sustained bid to repackage the Razakars and col­laborators of the 1971 liberation as heroes. The change is as profound as any shift that would lead to the deification of Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime in France. It is a change that will also have a fallout in Bangladesh’s neighbourhood, not least because the children of Maulana Maududi believe that national boundaries have no place in the Islamic imagination.

It is time we in India recognised that 50 years after his death, the killers of Mujib have launched a civilisational war on In­dia. The turbulence in Bangladesh is not a subject of diplomacy. As in 1971, it is a battle against those who won’t stop unless they have undermined the very political and cultural foundations on which India rests. What happens in Bangladesh will also shape the future of India. Having crippled Pakistan in 1971, it would be foolish to allow the monster to return in a different garb.

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