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When history needs careful retelling ..

Syed Badrul Ahsan appreciates a new work on Bangladesh

SYED BADRUL AHSAN
History matters in Bangladesh, for obvious reasons. The systematic manner in which it has been mutilated over the decades since liberation by military regimes and their civilian cohorts has taken a heavy toll on the nation, especially the younger generation. The good news, though, is that the return of the Awami League to power after a forced hiatus of twenty one years in 1996, followed by its second stint in office beginning in 2009, has been a boon for those whose interest in the events leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 has never wavered. In all these years since Sheikh Hasina has led the government, in two distinct phases, a restoration of history has been a priority both for the political class and the broad mass of the population.
Of course, the difficulties have been there, for the good reason that those who went to war forty years ago as well as those who observed its prosecution in occupied Bangladesh have all aged. All the key individuals involved in the war have died. A good number, politicians as well as military officers, have been murdered. On a bizarre level, the deliberate move to undermine history, indeed to give it a distorted form, that commenced following the bloody military coup d'etat of 15 August 1975, produced a set of circumstances where the fundamental principles of the state as enunciated before and during the course of the war were grievously undermined. The concept of Bengali nationalism came under threat horn quarters, led ironically by the well-known freedom fighter Ziaur Rahman, too eager to have the spurious idea of 'Bangladeshi nationalism’ assume centre stage in Bangladesh’s politics. The damage thus done has been grave. The price is yet being paid by the nation.
It is against this background that Rabindrantah Trivedi's Murder Mayhem & Politics in Bangladesh must be studied. For those who were around during the war, the vast treasury of information contained in the work is pretty much a recapitulation of history. And yet for some of them, the book is a reminder of certain significant facts that may have been lost to the memory over a long space of four decades. From such a point of view, the work is an excellent opportunity for individuals belonging to the 1971 generation to undertake a journey back in time and relive an era that was as terrible in its darkness as it was luminous in the possibilities it held out. The biggest appeal of Trivedi's work lies elsewhere: in its being a record of the turbulent politics which has characterised the Indian subcontinent since the 1940s. Trivedi resists the temptation of having
history commence either with the Language Movement of 1952 or the Six Point Movement of 1966 or the War of Liberation of 1971. He adopts this refreshing approach of an understanding of Bangladesh’s history through a looking back at the trauma of partition in 1947.
Which is as it should be. A comprehensive study of history is an imperative considering that there is forever a need to interpret events and nuances against a backdrop of reality. Trivedi does not miss a beat in his assessment of the personalities and trends that have influenced history in this part of the world. He makes a point of observing India and Pakistan as they came to be immediately after the deaths of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The objective is simple: to give readers a feel of the uncertainty which set in after the demise of the two men. Along the way, Trivedi throws in nuggets of information. You read of Nehru's remarks made at Bongaon, sometime after the vivisection of the land. Partition, India's first prime minister noted, had brought many evils in its train. Nobody said it would not, but for Nehru (whose role in the collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 remains rather disturbing) to say it makes a difference.
Trivedi takes the reader on a clear, unimpeded survey of politics in the new state of Pakistan and then continues the exercise, to a point where Pakistan has already begun to atrophy through a slow but sure undermining of its political construct. By bringing up the details related to the growing disillusionment of its Bengali population with the state, the writer appears intent on setting the record straight. And he does that to good effect. The slow degree with which Pakistan was losing popularity among the Bengalis comes into sharp focus through an enumeration of the growing nationalist movement in East Pakistan. Trivedi recounts the events which led to such defining moments as the Language Movement of 1952 and all the way up to the war in 1971. For the writer, for a student of Bangladesh's history, Bangabandhu’s non-cooperation movement in March 1971 remains a critical factor on the road to freedom. Trivedi revives the tale here and by so doing focuses necessarily on the events which could not but lead to a moment of reckoning, both for Bengalis and the state of Pakistan.
Trivedi weaves a careful pattern of the episodes which went into the making of a whole as also wholesome tale of Bangladesh between 1947 and 1971. He could have stopped there. He did not, which is indeed a boon for the reader. The writer, unlike so many others of his club, moves on. The critical mass of popular expectations which Bangabandhu’s government attempted to tackle in the three and a half years it was in office, the long regression the country was pushed into after 1975, until the moment of truth arrived with the election of 1996, are themes Trivedi puts across. And yet, as Trivedi reminds us, that was not the end of Bangladesh's tragedy. Darkness was to return in October 2001 and would only be pushed into the woods with the imposition of a state of emergency and the rise of a military-backed caretaker government in early 2007. Trivedi's narrative does not end until he arrives at the year 2010. You can therefore expect, within that ambit of time, a coming together of all the significant moments in the country's forty-year history.
In Murder Mayhem & Politics, it is an offering of history you spot before you. And then there is something more: it is a record of all the heartbreak we as a people have suffered through, here in what we were given to understand would be a people's republic. Rabindranath Trivedi revives memories. He causes the old pride to rise again in us. For the historian, he has a rich plate of the past on offer.
SYED BADRUL AHSAN EDITS STAR BOOKS REVIEW AND STAR LITERATURE.