Will the real razakars please stand up?

In a magnificent display of self-perpetuating hubris, delusion and sadism, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina poured scorn on the public university students protesting nationwide for reform of the quota system, by invoking the spirit of 1971. Surrounded by the intellectually and morally bankrupt lackeys who comprise her cabinet, with a press secretary standing to her right who boasts a father who colluded with the Pakistani military during the Liberation War, the autocrat proved not to understand the meaning of hypocrisy by insinuating that the protesters were progenies of razakars.

It is hardly surprising, then, that this confederacy of authoritarian dunces does not understand irony either. Hence, it is the students’ fault for ironically assuming the mantle of razakar thrust on them by their government and expecting said government to grasp the sheer magnitude of its idiocy. When idiocy meets inhumanity, corporal punishment is seen as the only way to make these impertinent students atone. Therefore, they asked for the violence being meted out to them. 

A defiant Hasina challenged the students to know their history. Unfortunately for her highness and her Mujib coat- and badge-donning court, history is yet another thing that they seem not to know. In 1969, in united Pakistan, an unelected dictator was brought down by a movement started by students of public universities across the country, joined by workers. While the revolutionary fire had been burning in West Pakistan since the second half of 1968, the East Pakistani students were kept on a leash. When they broke free from it, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose one political trick was opportunism over principles, planted himself at the head of the movement.

In 1971, this same Mujib sought to exercise his right to form the government of a united Pakistan, and spent the entire duration of the Liberation War behind bars. The War started with West Pakistanis in uniform and their East Pakistani cadres sans uniform, slaughtering students at public universities. Self-serving East Pakistanis colluded with the oppressive forces of West Pakistan for its duration. In other words, they were traitors. Once Bangladesh became independent, Mujib accepted the consolation prize of being the leader of a war-ravaged part of Pakistan by becoming Bangladesh’s first ever dictator. He betrayed democracy and his promises to the nation, to serve his own interests by oppressive means. In other words, the autocrat was the traitor. Like father, like daughter. 

In today’s independent Bangladesh, the spectre of 1969 looms large in the autocrat’s subconscious every time a student speaks up. A university student is especially dangerous since they have never been allowed to exercise their right to vote or participate in democratic discourse as a consequence of coming of age during the Awami League’s decade and a half-long autocracy. Their disenfranchisement has been escalated by crony capitalism, which robs them of employment and financial security, and government patronage of an anti-intellectual intelligentsia, which deprives them of a meaningful education and values. To call this university student a razakar, a traitor, when they set aside their disillusionment and demand to serve their country — which is precisely the demand they are making when they ask for the quota system to be reformed, so that they can participate in nation-building — is not only wilful dishonesty of the highest order, it is an unconscionable betrayal of those whose service in 1971 helped the country to be born. 

In Awami League’s Bangladesh, all dissenters and dissidents are razakars. Every time that dog whistle is blown, ministers, elites and intellectuals amplify it through a co-ordinated propaganda campaign, and the Chhatra League dogs of war obey to the incitement of violence inherent in it, by brutalising and butchering innocent people with impunity. The father of the nation, the liberation war and the spirit of 1971 are the holy trinity of Awami authoritarianism, the Chhatra League its militant inquisitors.

Authoritarianism requires the promulgation of a constructed ideology based on a false narrative, to function. Even if its proselytisation fails to garner new converts, it gives the chief beneficiaries of the oppressive system a framework of belief, to launder the oppression as serving a higher purpose. For the Awami League, the party of independence, this is their self-styled spirit of 1971.

Opposing the Awami League, then, is a betrayal of the very idea of Bangladesh. The greatest irony, lost on the moronic savages who rule the country, is that, by creating this false dichotomy between nationalists and razakars, the government has ensured that the only course of action remaining for the true patriot is to detest the spirit of 1971, adulterated by the Awami League’s monopoly over it. As heartbreaking as it is, this has laid the groundwork for a pragmatic rehabilitation of the razakar label, and decades more of an irreconcilable identity crisis — fertile ground for bad faith actors. 

If there is anyone currently fighting for the Golden Bengal promised at the birth of the nation anywhere in the country, it is the students. Their phenomenal patriotism is being repaid by breaking them, so that patriots never dare to fulfil their duties to dissent and demand better. Helming the repression is a rogue’s gallery of those who have betrayed Bangladesh. Its first entrant was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and, guided by his spirit of authoritarianism, it is currently filled to the brim with Sheikh Hasina, the Awami League, the Chhatra League, the elite class and the intelligentsia. By robbing the youth of the nation of their innocence, of their conscience, of their purity, by forcing a violent political awakening on them that pushes nefarious tropes, by humiliating them and wholly diminishing their worth, Hasina and her sycophants have taken away any possibility of a bright future and proven themselves to be the enemy of Bangladesh and its people. Pleading with them to let humanity prevail is futile. Rather, demand that when her highness next points the finger at perceived razakars, she positions a mirror large enough to fit herself and her entire party, in front of her and points all her fingers.●

Ikhtisad Ahmed is Managing Editor, Netra News.