Shahbag and the Permanent Civil War

I don’t know too much about Bangladesh’s history. To be honest, I have quite a superficial understanding. Most of the details I learnt through fragments of conversations. My grandfather smuggled oil to freedom fighters, my mother lived near the house of a Pakistani collaborator and could hear the screams of torture at night. The period after independence is even more hazy in my mind, perhaps because these are contested histories. Those who come from political families hear one or another side of the story, those who are passionate to learn more dig deep into whatever material they can find. We are still constructing our history – there is no popular history of that period. Only a failed, comical attempt at constructing one based on Mujib’s assassination as the central tragedy of the post-independence period. They burnt down his house, the museum commemorating the moment of his death, on the first day of the revolution.

At school we mostly got the standard narrative about 1971 – we declared independence, we were the victims of a genocide, we valiantly won a guerilla war against impossible odds, Bob Dylan threw a concert for us. One day my school took us on a trip to the Drik photo gallery in Dhanmondi. I think we were 11 or 12, far too young for what we were about to witness. It was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo series by Associated Press photographers Horst Faas and Michel Laurent. On December 18^th 1971 the Mukti Bahini staged a victory rally and gathered Pakistani collaborators – razakars – in a stadium. And then they proceeded to torture and kill them in front of a cheering audience, proudly displaying their work for the foreign photographers. Victor’s justice. I thought about those images often during the Shahbag movement. Razakars.

During the Shahbag movement an attempt was made to extend the concept of the razakar to all right-wing or Islamist politics. To marry our war against Pakistan to a modern, progressive identity opposed to racism, sexism and homophobia. This cultural programme would send a positive signal to Western liberals during the War on Terror, particularly those flocking to the New Atheism of Christopher Hitchens. It would also send a positive signal to India, by emphasizing a historical narrative that paints India and Awami League’s Bangladesh as the secular, progressive counterpoint to the regressive Islamism of Pakistan.

In hindsight it is strange that a mass movement whose central demand was for capital punishment – amra fashi chai, (we want hanging) – could be seen as “progressive”, but we live in strange times.

All these problems started in Shahbag. Before Shahbag, the conflict between the Awami League and BNP was a kind of soap opera, a mafia-style conflict between two corrupt political dynasties. After Shahbag, the groundwork was set for the permanent civil war—even BNP were razakars now.

The war with Pakistan had become a distant memory, much of the country was prepared to move on—and then suddenly old wounds were reopened and made fresh. Jamaat-e-Islami war criminals were tried in kangaroo courts, David Bergman was called an Islamist agent, a razakar, and driven out of the country for the crime of demanding due process.

Were you opposed to racism, sexism and homophobia? Then you too must join the permanent civil war against all the forms of razakar that threatened the nation and the spirit of 1971. What had been a dynastic struggle became a cultural struggle, dragging in civil society and the general population.

We were always fighting razakars. We would always be fighting razakars. To the end of time.

Who ultimately benefited from all this? A single political dynasty: the Sheikh family. And a hostile external power that slaughters our citizens at the border.

III

Bangladesh is a homogeneous country – 99% are ethnically Bengali and 91% are Muslim. The kind of sectarian divides that devastated countries like Lebanon and Syria, that could be exploited by external powers, simply do not exist in Bangladesh. Instead, we had an apparent secularist-Islamist divide, which on the surface seems to parallel the situation in Egypt, Turkey, or Palestine. But was this divide real? The major Islamist party—Jamaat—never won an election or took power. For most of our existence, our politics has been dominated by two parties—the Awami League and BNP—derived from two distinct political dynasties.

Both Awami League and BNP are secular, bourgeois nationalist parties that primarily exist to serve the class interests of the traditional elites. Ultimately there are no real ideological differences between them, save for one: foreign policy. Awami League is the pro-Indian party, BNP is the anti-Indian party. And therein lies the rub.

Abrar Fahad was killed because he dared to criticize the Awami League’s vassal-state relationship to India. They called him a Jamaat activist. A razakar.

These divisions were exacerbated and engineered because they kept the Sheikh family in power, and to ensure that the government of India could maintain a stranglehold on our geopolitics.

What happened in the Monsoon Revolution wasn’t just an overthrow of Awami League rule, it was an overthrow of Indian rule. A second independence that will now birth a second republic. Shahbag and the Monsoon Revolution, two revolutions – the first time as farce, the second as tragedy. Tragedy in the mythic sense, a heroic act of sacrifice culminating in the genesis of a nation.

A cultural war is brewing between Islamist and secular factions in this post-revolutionary moment. Certainly the regressive cultural tendencies of political Islam, for instance its inherent opposition to feminism and LGBTQ+ rights, are things to be condemned.

But what exactly are the issues our secularists decided to fight over in this period? Amaan Azmi called for changing the national anthem, and an event was held to commemorate Jinnah, triggering much righteous wailing and gnashing of teeth. Are these progressive issues? Do they have anything to do with religious freedom? Not at all – they are purely nationalistic issues. The idea that a liberal person cannot admire Jinnah would come as a surprise to my liberal Pakistani friends.

All of this reveals the inherent intellectual poverty in Awami League’s programme of secular nationalism. It is an insecure, negative ideology pathologically obsessed with quantifying loyalty and policing history – frankly the idea that a Bangladeshi cannot think positively of historical figures like Jinnah or Gandhi is simply absurd. These are historical debates, not crude markers of national loyalty. National identity is constantly renegotiated through dialogue (and coercion); the precise role of faith in our politics remains to be determined. The process of Muslim identity formation that began after 9/11 is still ongoing, and its final resolution will be one of the defining features of the 21st century.

What happened in Gaza led to what happened in Bangladesh. We can no longer see Islamists as a permanent internal enemy to be defeated—how could Fatah disparage Hamas as regressive or backward after Gaza? I could end with some liberal platitudes about how freedom of expression and the rule of law will protect progressive minorities, but I suspect something more profound is occurring: the emergence of a bourgeois collective consciousness, a synthesis of the secular and Islamist poles. A new national identity is being formed.●

Zain Ali is an analyst and commentator.