By around 1973 or 1974 I was old enough to understand what was going on around me. The imam of our village mosque then was a grandfather from the house next door. In one sentence near the end of the Arabic khutba, the imam would pronounce the name of Pakistan. Right after it he would also say two more words — ya Filistin, ya Kashmir. Since ordinary villagers did not understand what these meant, the imam came to no harm by reciting them.
I understood later that the imam read the khutba from the khutba book he had bought in the Pakistan period. Long after the country became independent he went on praying every Friday for Pakistan’s wellbeing — whether he understood it or not.
At that time the Rakkhi Bahini, that is the Fazlu commanders, held sway on all sides. The frightening truth is that the man who claimed to hear the sound of the Pakistani military from a hundred miles away was in fact staying within greater Mymensingh itself. Had our imam recited that khutba in Bengali, the news would have reached the Fazlu commander of greater Mymensingh in no time.
This Fazlu commander now shows the nerve to stand in the present parliament and demand trials over the alleged killing of police. Our home minister has given a fine answer to that. He said that if police killed in the face of popular resistance in July are to be tried, then the killing of Pakistani soldiers and razakars at the hands of the Mukti Bahini in 1971 must be tried too. It is a very logical point — one we have been making for some time. It was gratifying to hear it from the home minister. Ministers, do try to hear what the public are saying, past the ranks of the Fazlu commanders and the Nilufar Manis.
Looking at the past few weeks, some Awami-leaning media in Bangladesh have been giving unusual prominence to events in Balochistan — sometimes in headlines, sometimes in talk shows, sometimes wrapped in analysis. One might think the future of Balochistan had become Bangladesh’s greatest national concern. These same outlets are all but blacking out news of the Cockroach Janata Party’s movement. They never say a word about Kashmir’s independence campaigners, never write about the Sikhs’ independent Khalistan, never mention the separatist groups of the Seven Sisters, even though separatist movements there are fiercer and more fraught than in Balochistan.
The question is: why?
One explanation may be that presenting Pakistan in a politically negative light has long been part of an Indian political narrative. In that context, magnifying any internal crisis in Pakistan may be politically attractive to the Indian media. But why is a section of Bangladesh’s media doing it?
International politics is certainly important. But it should be approached in the light of information, history, our own regional security and others’ positions relative to it.
Balochistan is a complex geopolitical region. Separatism, security, human rights, natural resources, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and competition between international powers together make up the reality there. If we wish to speak about it, we must do so in the light of our own geopolitical interests.
The people of Balochistan should rather learn from our history. The Gandhis now openly acknowledge that the grandmother, Indira Gandhi, extended that cooperation not to free Bangladesh but to break Pakistan. They should also learn from the glaring history of how we were then held in a complicated and terrible sense of gratitude and exploited and oppressed for 55 years. I see that there too an attempt is being made to turn a woman into a Sheikh Mujib.
Pakistan’s rulers and its intellectual society can take a lesson from Bangladesh’s history. Address the real concerns of the people of Balochistan properly. I pray that no reckless leadership of the kind of Bhutto, Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan grows up around Balochistan, and that Balochistan does not in any way become another Bangladesh.
Strange stories about the men of the Middle East circulate in the Western media. One of them is that if a fire breaks out in a women’s hostel there, male firefighters cannot enter to rescue the girls trapped inside — that is, let them burn to death rather than let a strange man’s touch fall on them. With the fatwas of their particular consciousness, the Bengali elite would keep us geopolitically crippled in just that way. Even if India openly threatens to occupy our Rangpur and Chattogram divisions, so much as remembering or naming the state called Pakistan is to be a mortal sin. That is why one champion of that consciousness advised that small children brush their teeth if the name of Pakistan is uttered.
It is for the same reason, he argues, that the account of three million martyrs and the honour of two hundred thousand mothers and sisters — figures he says were inflated many times over — has been forced down our throats. Japan can normalise relations with America even after taking American atomic bombs in the Second World War; we cannot do so with Pakistan — for a Bengali that is a cardinal sin.
Among the chameleon-like creatures in Bangladesh’s politics and intellectual space, the former Awami League member of parliament Golam Maula Rony is one of the foremost.
Sometimes he gets into Jamaat’s innermost heart with a story about Quader Molla’s fried eggs; sometimes he wins over the devout by speaking in parliament in imitation of Maulana Sayeedi’s cadences. In between he contested a parliamentary election on a BNP ticket. Now he has appeared as one of the Awami League’s saviours.
Lately several so-called “senior journalists” and a few BNP leaders, both hybrid and original breed, have set about making Sheikh Hasina relevant again. They had begun a campaign suggesting the people of the country were forgetting the July martyrs Abu Sayeed and Hadi. From his style of speaking it seemed to me that Mr Azazil had begun a kind of whispering. Watching the doings of several others who style themselves senior journalists, it seemed to me the nation should recite Surah Nas the moment it sees these few — because they have started a scheme to bring back a psychopathic woman who is one of the most ruthless killers of thousands in history and an embezzler of billions of dollars.
For making people aware of the whisperings of these new-version Azazils, I was called a “Pakistani fool.”
He looked at me, I think, with even more contempt than the pandit of Mujtaba Ali’s story looked at his student. I am so insignificant that he has not even heard my name. But without having heard it he has established that I am a “Pakistani fool” — although his column used to be printed in the same place in Naya Diganta as my op-ed column. He had even praised some of my writing at the time.
When Jaijaidin was snatched from Shafik Rehman’s hands, a few of us began writing in Naya Diganta rather like displaced refugees. Shafik Rehman himself and the BBC’s Serajur Rahman were among them. Serajur Rahman once told me with some pain that even after a long career in journalism at the BBC, and despite the role of the BBC Bengali service during the liberation war, the country’s so-called elite or brahmin newspapers would not print his writing.
Kader Siddiqui and Golam Maula Rony became refugees in Naya Diganta for a slightly different reason than we did. That reason is quite intriguing too. Nationalist and Islamic political and intellectual platforms serve as attractive refuges for political stars who suddenly fall from the Awami orbit. To put it more plainly, the BNP’s political platform is an ideal refuge, and so is Jamaat’s media platform.
After falling out of the Awami League, leaders such as Dr Kamal Hossain and Sultan Mohammad Mansur were received on the BNP’s platform in 2018 with the indulgence shown to a son-in-law. Their air then was that of a very expensive son-in-law of a poor father-in-law (the BNP). The BNP was on tenterhooks over their entertainment the whole time. Things reached the point where, in the 2018 election, Dr Kamal Hossain and his companions became the main leaders of the nationalist forces. The position became so awkward for the BNP that, let alone Dr Kamal Hossain, even Sultan Mohammad Mansur hesitated to utter the name of his new father-in-law or mother-in-law. The BNP accepted it all with a dry smile.
There was a clamour in the country’s media that this internationally renowned jurist would create a sensation at home and abroad. It was perhaps to create that sensational dilemma that Madam Khaleda Zia was escorted to prison under guard with a huge procession. He went to Ganabhaban for talks with his entourage, in a particular mood. But once there, instead of talks it turned into a reunion of former Awami Leaguers reminiscing. It turned out that Dr Kamal Hossain was not alone: those who went on the BNP’s behalf also joined in that reminiscing as former Leaguers. So nothing came of the hard political bargaining that had been promised.
That day made clear what the likely result of the 2018 election would be. But that ballot papers would be stamped at night and six or seven seats handed over — that Dr Kamal Hossain and his BNP admirers never for a moment suspected.
The Awami League does not only destroy political enemies utterly; given the chance it also finishes off untrustworthy companions like Dr Kamal Hossain for good.
Although friends and foes alike have been deceived this way again and again at the Awami League’s hands, that over-eager group in the BNP is being tempted to go under the same tree. For their own safety — to reduce the threat from the right — they want to give a mild League a little propping up. But they are perhaps not reckoning that the props and the platform together will sweep the whole nation away in the flood. I will not repeat Shafik Rehman’s famous joke, printed in his column day after day, since it is a touch too ribald. Various symptoms suggest as much. Begum Khaleda Zia said a snake can be trusted, but the Awami League cannot.
To this day not all central presidents of the Chhatra Dal have been able to enter BNP politics, or to be valued in that way; yet some four former Chhatra League presidents have found places. Not merely found places — they appear to have begun leading the whole party by the nose. The one most talked about among them is Fazlur Rahman, the member of parliament elected from Kishoreganj-4. Several others are alleged to have begun practising League politics from within the BNP. If Sheikh Hasina or the League returns, there is no doubt they will all be specially rewarded.
On the other hand, I have also stumbled over the idea I used to hold of the robust financial and moral character of Jamaat’s leaders. A senior leader in his seventies, who as a freedom fighter had brought Jamaat’s 1971 role to a somewhat more comfortable place, has himself become entangled in a complication involving a woman of his granddaughter’s age. In one video he is seen apologising for what he did, in the shock of the moment; in another his first wife is trying to do damage control for her husband. How far the lady will succeed is not clear.
Whether the whispering Iblis described above be a jinn or a human, citizen journalists have risen like the ababil birds of truth to confound him. I saw a section of them descend in flocks on Golam Maula Rony’s page.
So far, 99.99 percent of the thousand commenters on his page and the eight hundred on mine have condemned his role and encouraged me. My sincere thanks and gratitude to all these ababils of truth. I believe it is you who can keep our political, social, religious and administrative leadership on the right path when they go astray through the weakness of their own selves. This strength truly makes us hopeful of building a knowledge-based and accountable society.
The writer is a columnist.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report