India slept through a revolution in Bangladesh
by RICHA JHA
Dhaka, Bangladesh. 18th February 2013 — A woman shouts on a microphone. — A demonstration for the death penalty to be given to war criminals, is continuing at Shahbag crossroads, and has reached its fourteenth day
Not many among us born in or after the 70s will know that independence for Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) from Pakistan came at an enormous price. In the events leading up to the independence, millions of Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis were raped, burnt alive, chopped, butchered, massacred, both systematically and arbitrarily, by the Pakistani army and the Urdu-speaking pro-Pakistan supporters, or Razakars (volunteers) as they were called. The much detested term ‘Rajakar’ has since come to stand for traitors in the Bangali parlance. For years, the people have been riled up at the sight of seeing a bulk of these Rajakars thriving in the political arena; Abdur Mullah is the chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the two largest opposition parties in the country. To most, this life sentence seemed too lenient a punishment for their crimes.
Millions of men, women and children, regardless of the religious faith they follow, continued to spill into the city’s Shahbag Square for nearly three weeks, making it the largest social awakening for the nation since its birth. It was history in the making for Bangladesh. Until a couple of days ago, few in India were even aware of this near tectonic shift within a country we share more than four thousand kilometers of land border with.
…
I began writing this piece a few days ago. The first draft came out as a passionate plea to my country-people to wake up and look east. I gave the history behind this outrage and the details of the protest. It found no takers. It may have come across as a mad woman’s meaningless rant. So for my second draft, I did a thorough online scan to see if I had missed spotting news items covering the uprising. As I had suspected, there was pittance of a coverage by mainstream media in India (barring The Hindu). This was on Tuesday (Feb 19), and the protest was just entering its third week. I found little that could be called substantive news bytes. So I posed the question to a few editors and news-persons. I was informed that a reporter-photographer team from the Indian Express was due to reach Dhaka on Wednesday morning, while the Times of India had ‘just’ sent their diplomatic editor to Dhaka to ‘step up the coverage while the crisis folds out’. A beginning, was it? It had taken us two full weeks to even acknowledge that the events happening next door merited attention.
Kafila for more
Shahbagh: The Forest of Symbols
by NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Drawing inspired by Lucky, “Agni Kanya of Shahbag” © Shujon Chowdhury
There is a particular way of lensing mass movements, when we are observing from within immediate tactics. In a fast moving situation, with opponents and allies squared off, the first thing to shrink is the space for internal critique. Professor Azfar Hussain uses the term “critical solidarity” for his approach to Shahbagh. A critique that seeks to help the movement, but also a critique some are not ready to hear yet.
For the last sixteen days, Bangladesh has been in an intense new political phase. The ground has shifted and been recast by the scale of the Shahbagh movement. The flash point was the sentencing of the “Butcher of Mirpur” (a war criminal who collaborated with the Pakistan army in 1971). But, by now, the demands have expanded to a call for a ban on the main Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, or even Islamist politics altogether. Older leftist thinkers like Badruddin Umar are daring to ask questions of the hallowed place of “state religion” in the constitution. Younger bloggers are urging all to make it clear that the movement is about war criminals, not religion. But of course, with war criminals conflated with the Jamaat-e-Islami, and that party eager to present themselves as standing for “Islam,” category errors will happen.
Kafila for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar for both articles.)
Shahbag: Story of two hangings; differences in their dynamics
By GARGA CHATTERJEE
The name Shahbag will not evoke much recognition from the Indian pretenders to ‘global citizenship’. Dhaka is the city many Indians believe that ‘they’ liberated in 1971. Shahbag is one of the main street intersections of Dhaka where the events taking place as I write may have historic consequences. If you walk from the Science Lab intersection in Dhaka and hear passionate slogans from the young and old shaking the ground beneath your feet, you are at Shahbag.
After the 1971 Liberation war of Bangladesh, the governments of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reached a tripartite agreement. One of the despicable results of this was the granting of clemency to some of the worst perpetrators of crimes against humanity in the last millennium. Some Bengali collaborators of the Pakistan forces indulged in mass-murders and rapes that have few parallels in recent memory. They have never faced the judicial process, until now.
The International War Crimes tribunal in Bangladesh has been pursuing some of the biggest leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Razakar, Al-Shams and Al-Badr militia — a process that has stupendous public support. One of the most hated of these characters, Kader Mollah, has been handed a life sentence and not a death sentence. This resulted in a protest assembly started by a bloggers and online activist network that was quickly joined by progressive and left-wing student organisations.
DNA for more