COMES December, the month of victory with an exciting memorabilia --

one that brings to life the pain and exhilaration of the millions. It

comes making us relive some of the nation's finest hours. This is the month that witnessed the

denouement of the epic that

began with Bangabandhu's clarion call of freedom earlier in the year. It also brought to an end the 'festival of bloodshed' treacherously initiated on infamous 25th March of 1971. This is the celebration time for the Bengalis who saw their long nurtured dream coming true at long last.

Yet, this year it could not have come at a worse time when the achievements of our victory are all but in tatters. Never after 1971 our existence has so acutely been at stake with the rampart of our statehood almost crumbling before the onslaught of Islamist zealots. The ominous rise of militant Islam and its assaults on our existing system -- the administration, judiciary, public safety and so on -- have put to question if the ecstasy of victory on this day

in 1971 is any more reassuring. It seems after being deanchored from our moorings, with our values and ideals of liberation war consigned to oblivion and the nation's heroes ignored and trivialised we are now adrift groping for direction. As a result the nation is critically vulnerable to the machinations of those who opposed our independence and now want, under the spell of pseudo Islamic precepts, to throw

the country back to medieval ethos.

Worse still, the establishment itself is looked upon as suspect for complicity in the predicament. The militant squads of JMB (Jamatul Mujahidin, Bangladesh) allegedly sympathised by a component of the government are stalking the country with their killing mission. They have already wreaked havoc across the country taking their toll of innocent members of the public, judiciary and law enforcing agencies. They are learnt to have targeted the country's eminent citizens -- politicians, the high officials, intellectuals and so on -- presumably to paralyse our state machinery and

have set their gunsight on them. In a chilling development, highly motivated suicide squads have been fielded for the purpose presenting a spectacle of the final days of liberation war when their cohorts eliminated the best sons of the soil.

What are they up to? Apparently these militants together with their patrons want to perpetuate the political U-turn effected in the aftermath of the

tragedies of 1975 which also saw the rehabilitation of the defeated forces of liberation war. By now they have been able to bare their fangs with vengeance. Now they are also able to call the shots in Bangladesh politics thanks to their electoral nexus with the ruling BNP, which has since slided towards the right -- a position held by the right wing religious parties including the Jamaat -- from their traditional centrist position. With BNP's future at stake for its links with religious right it is unlikely that the BNP led government can do much in decisively dealing with the militants, although its establishment is willy-nilly making good deal of anti-JMB noises of late.

That they can not do much is evident from their repeated failure in apprehending JMB's top leaders as well as in unraveling the mysteries behind so many terrorist attacks perpetrated in last few years.

In retrospect we were confronted with the politics of religions soon after the partition of the subcontinent and creation of Pakistan of which we had then been a part. We were in no time

embittered with the murky politics of the country where Islam became an instrument of power struggle and tool for exploitation and intimidation of the constituent units. In the dirty power game based on religion, dirtier roles were played by the clerics as the lackey and agent of the power centre. In our case it is they who prolonged any of our moves towards progress and opposed tooth and nail our liberation. When our brave sons were facing the occupation forces in the battle field most of the clerics sided with the occupation forces joining the ranks of 'Albadr, Al shams and Razakars.'

At the peak of Pakistan's

Islamisation, Gen Ziaul Haq, the country's military dictator, in search of legitimacy, established federal sharia court and packed the 1972 constitution with the precepts of objective resolution rejected earlier. He threw in his lot with the US' anti-Soviet resistance war launched by Afghan Mujahiddin and introduced Jihadi culture of sorts in the country -- a legacy still plaguing Pakistan with the religious intolerance and

extremism.

At a tremendous cost we came out of Pakistan's stranglehold of religious politics in 1971. For that three millions courted martyrdom, many more millions were driven out of their homesteads and umpteen number of our mothers and sisters were dishonoured. Yet in post-1975 milleu the traders in the name of Islam could raise their ugly heads -- thanks to the patronisation of various quarters with different motives, so much so that the militants turned Frankenstein even for their patrons. The concern has therefore been expressed even by those who once seemed sympathetic to the militants and their

activities. Pushed to the wall they are also making moves to combat the menace. Unfortunately these are too little too late. In the meantime nothing less than national security is under threat of militants bomb terrorism.

Religion when mixed with politics becomes a heady brew with which some of our power hungry clerics are now drunken. They have baptised their followers with the mantras that run contrary to the founding principles of our country. A non-communal liberal democracy based on Bengali nationalism provided dynamics to our independence war right from the beginning in 1952 Language Movement and formed the raison d'etre of our statehood. Any departure from those principals will only weaken our national security. While the government's steps to combat the militants are indeed welcome, those are little more than firefighting measures. The virus of the religious militancy can be best fought with the resurrection of the ideals we up held in fighting for and creating our country. There are few signs that there will be a taker of the idea from the administration side as the country heads towards greater catastrophe.

Yet as the December comes and goes our mind is swamped with an insuppressible nostalgia for something great we were bestowed with and then we lost much of it with our default.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.