& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

They lived for dream, died in nightmare

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
I don't know which would be more appropriate on the thirty-nineth anniversary of the Martyred Intellectuals Day. Should we mourn the loss of some of our best brains? Or, should we celebrate their sacrifice? Each year we remember them precisely on the same day. Each year the Day throws back the same images of decomposed bodies, blindfolded and both hands tied behind the back, strewn like broken dolls in a brickfield at Rayerbazar. What do we do? Do we resent how they were killed? Or, do we remember what they had died for?
Business as usual, there will be fireworks of fiery speeches. Auditoriums will be packed with audience. Speakers will speak. Singers will sing. Poets will write poetry, not to speak of newspaper scribes who will write ream after ream. One of the ironies of observing any day of significance year after year is that it becomes hackneyed. People get used to the motions. The emotions are . forgotten.
That is why, the most haunting question of the Day is how should we remember the martyred intellectuals? Floral wreathes will be laid on their memorials. There will be photo exhibitions where visitors will pore over the grisly photographs of the killing fields. Once again parents will cover
the eyes of their children and briskly skirt the picture, which shows the mangled corpse of a female journalist, a hungry dog nibbling at its flesh.
As adults, we cover our eyes and skirt much more. How can we observe a day without being curious about who killed these intellectuals? Who planned their killing? Who picked them up from their homes? Who blindfolded them and tied their hands? Who actually fired the lethal shots at them? Who gave the order? How can we feel anything for these victims without being angry with those who killed them?
Instead, we have mechanically bifurcated the observance of this Day into two different strands. One strand is for holidaylovers, who enjoy the Day as an opportunity to rest and relax. They eat rich food watch movies and visit families and friends.
The other strand has the political opportunity-seekers who use it as an occasion to joust with their opponents. Hand on heart, how many people in this country are actually bothered that these intellectuals had to bear the mortal brunt for our freedom? For them the Day is no more than another break from the drudgeries of business and work.
It's possible that as a nation we are culturally deficient in our sense of gratitude. No offense, it happens. The killing of intellectuals didn't create the same kind of backlash in
Algeria as it did in Lebanon and Egypt. When Egypt's secular author Farag Fouda was assassinated in the early 1990s, his death sparked both an Egyptian national and a panArab debate. But the reaction has been rather lukewarm in Algeria where more than 80 intellectuals have been assassinated by the fundamentalists. The only reaction so far is general outrage that the country has been slipping into violence.
Four factors have been identified as the cause of this difference in Algeria: (1) historical precedents for targeting intellectuals during the French colonial days; (2) linguistic duality that has diminished readership and precluded the emergence of broad-based literature; (3) pseudo-religious justification that does not discriminate between those who wield gun and pen; and (4) a lack of government commitment to protecting the intellectual and journalistic community.
1 am not saying any of these is true for us in Bangladesh. We probably have our own reasons. We probably don't even see it as a problem. Independence Day, Language Day, Martyred Intellectuals Day, Victory Day and many other days we observe are mere milestones, which tell us more about distance than destination.
So, we need to take a decision on how to remember the martyred intellectuals. Do we
remember them as a means to an end, or an end to a means? We need to sort that out in our minds to segregate cause from casualty. We need to sort that out before we decide whether to lament their loss or laud them as libation to the cause of our freedom.
There are nations who despise their intellectuals. In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, anyone wearing spectacles or looking bookish was target for elimination. Kim Jong II of North Korea believed that intellectuals were vulnerable to infiltration of decadent capitalist culture. In the Soviet Union many intellectuals ended up in gulags to do hard labour. Chairman Mao is known for his attack on the Chinese intellectuals for their divorce from reality.
In that respect, our record is far better. We hold our intellectuals in high regards, and that's why we separately observe the day of killing a handful of them as landmark in a war that claimed three million lives in nine months. But what are we going to tell our children? Why should they observe the Day if we don't know why we do it ourselves?
Even in ancient days, intellectuals were not popular with rulers. Somehow the clash of pen with sword is the longest running form of conflict in the history of mankind. The Roman emperors had their writers erase their writings with their tongues. Many intellectuals
were branded as heretics and burned at the stakes or thrown to lions. Many more were hanged or beheaded.
So, it shouldn't come as surprise that the Pakistan army and their compradors should have killed those intellectuals. It has been proven time and again, that in the ultimate sense the pen is mightier than the sword. The invaders and conquerors believe in subjugation. Their armies and weapons are engaged in suppression. Creation of fear in others is the source of their ambition.
On the contrary, intellectuals are in the business of freedom: freedom of thinking and freedom of expression. They oppose subjugation, oppression and exploitation. They unfetter truth from the dungeons of fabrication. In an ideal scenario, the intellectuals are, therefore, natural enemies of the powerful and the greedy. Infusing courage in others is their aim of erudition.
A TIME essay has described the human brain as 31/2 pounds of pinkish-gray material with the consistency of oatmeal. In this sticky mass of brain cells, the entity of a person is assembled, his faculties connected like network. This is where thoughts are filtered, emotions are refined, impulses are censored and instincts are defined.
Intellectuals are believed to be brainier than others. What that means is that intellectuals
are more cerebral compared to rulers. Of course, there could be intelligent and clever rulers as there could be silly and disillusioned intellectuals. Both could be thinking people, but there's a rule-of-the-thumb difference. The rulers think in favour of the constant. The intellectuals think in favour of the change.
Needless to say, our intellectuals died for change. All those blindfolded and hand-tied bodies thrown amongst bricks strewn across the shallow rim of a swamp stand for nothing but change. They died because we wanted change. They were killed because they wanted change.
If we should celebrate anything on this Day, we should celebrate change, measured year on year because that's the best way to remember them, the best way to tell that their sacrifice hasn’t gone in vain. Anything short of it becomes platitude. We mourn the martyrs and ignore the intellectuals. We ingest the casualty but ignore the cause.
By the time this article is published, this Martyred Intellectuals Day should be already in progress. But this will leave us enough time to plan for the next. Next time we should focus on celebrating the dream in which the martyred intellectuals lived, while mourning the nightmare in which they died.
The writer is a columnist.