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Free up the Parliament building and history

A wall around the Parliament building would be like putting history in a box, tucked away in the storage room, hidden from everyday use. In the darkness of the box, without any introspection, history can only rot.

Adnan Morshed
Fifty years ago, on October 6, 1964, the construction of architect Louis Kahn's Parliament building began in the then East Pakistan. It is unfortunate that instead of celebrating the 50"' anniversary of this universally acclaimed building, the government of Bangladesh has decided to barricade it in the name of security.
Though security is important, it cannot suffocate democracy. Lest we forget, demos means people, kratos power. Democracy is people's power. Around the world, democratic values in public buildings are suggested or ensured by providing public accessibility, at least visually if not physically. An 8-foot tall metal fence all around the Parliament building could only represent a misunderstanding of democracy, paranoia of perceived security threat, and arguably a legal breach.
The legal community has recently pointed out in Article 24 of the Constitution that the state must protect buildings of historic significance from unlawful encroachment, disfigurement, and aesthetic compromise. Furthermore, “the open spaces around the Parliament building are designated for protection under the Protection of Open Spaces and Wetland Act, 2000." A metal barrier that cordons off the Parliament building from the city, changing its visual and experiential character, offers a compelling legal case in which the state itself violates the Constitution.
It is unfortunate, though, that the public has to invoke legal parameters to protect a building that embodies the democratic ideals of the nation. As much as it houses the assembly of the country's lawmakers, it is a virtual museum of the history of Bangladesh's emergence as a nation state. Why does the government not understand this?
Once he had received the commission to plan the Parliament complex, Kahn first visited East Pakistan in the early March of 1963. Five years earlier, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army, Ayub Khan, took control of the government after a military coup and imposed martial law. In 1960, the military man was "elected" to a five-year presidency, while the country was still under martial law. Pakistan's new constitution of 1962 warranted that a "democratic" election be held in 1965.
Aware of the political and economic disparity between the two wings of Pakistan and concerned about his own re-election bid, Ayub Khan came up with the political ploy to address the grievance of the Bangalis, already agitated with the language movement and demands for political balance between the two wings of the country.
Thus, the idea of the "Second Capital" was bom (Islamabad was the “First Capital"). The military man believed that a grand public building in the capital of East Pakistan would provide the Bangalis with a sense of power and they would repay him with their votes in the forthcoming election. That this building was Ayub Khan's mere political stunt is evidenced by the fact that he doesn't even mention it in his self-congratulatory autobiography, Friends Not Masters (1967).
The political drama that ensued from then on explains how the Parliament building, first conceived as a "bribe" for the Bangalis, gradually took on a whole new identity as a symbol of the people's struggle for self-rule. With rudimentary construction tools and bamboo scaffolding tied with crude jute ropes, lungi-saree-dad construction workers erected a monumental government building, slowly but steadily portraying the broader resilience of a nation revolting against economic and social injustice.
Meanwhile, Kahn was also invited to design a new Parliament complex for Islamabad (Pakistan's new capital after Karachi, 1947-1958, and Rawalpindi, 1958-1962). The government bureaucracy there demanded that Kahn articulate a clear "Islamic" visual language for the Parliament Dismayed by such unjustified interference, Kahn gave up on the project (eventually another American architect, Edward Durrell Stone, designed a rather uninspiring building). There was also a lingering rumour that Kahn's Jewish background was not exactly a nice fit for a military junta, mired in the politics of Islamic identity as an ideological bulwark against a perceived Indian threat.
In East Pakistan, however, political Islam did not drive the nationalist movement. Kahn could develop his design for the Parliament building without demands for domes and pointed arches, conventionally thought of as Islamic building motifs. Guided by the Yale-trained local Bangali architect Mazharul Islam (who was instrumental in bringing the American architect to East Pakistan), Kahn searched for inspirations from the Bengal delta, its rivers, its sweeping green, its expansive landscape, its raised homesteads, and its land-water geography. Soon after he had first arrived in Dhaka, he went on a boat ride on the Buriganga River and sketched river scenes to understand life in this tropical land. He didn't have any problems in blending Bengali vernacular impressions with those of classical Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture that he had studied thoroughly during the 1950s.
Kahn was not the kind of architect who would belabour a national or ethnic identity in his design for public buildings. In East Pakistan, though, as his design slowly took physical shape
and concrete walls rose (according to some sources, typically five feet a day, hence the improvised design element of the marble bands that adorn the Parliament's concrete walls), the agitated Bangalis began to envision in Kahn's edifice the kind of nationalist myths that seem necessary to galvanise a nation. If the Shaheed Minar symbolised the language movement during the 1950s, the Parliament building portrayed the rise of the independence-minded Bangalis during the 1960s.
As the war broke out on March 25, 1971, Kahn's field office in East Pakistan quickly closed and construction work discontinued. Only a half-done mysterious building remained, yet it was a powerful reminder of the Bangalis' fight for independence. During the Liberation War, an ironic story persisted that Pakistani pilots didn't bomb the building assuming that it was a ruin!
Upon completion in the early 1980s, that “ruin" eventually became an emblem of the country, adorning Tk. 1000 notes, stamps, rickshaw decorations, advertisements, official brochures, and so on. The Parliament complex is studied in not only design schools around the world, but also departments as diverse as government, cultural studies, history, and many others. There are, of course, many other heritage buildings in Bangladesh. But this is the most iconic building that the country presents to the world stage. It draws tourists from all continents of the world. A few years ago, I led a group of forty American architects, planners, authors, journalists, and investors who came to Bangladesh to see this building. One of them, an octogenarian gentleman who was part of the design team that worked for Kahn in Philadelphia in the 1960s, broke down in tears after entering the building. That was the first time he experienced the magic of the building that he had worked on from across the world. For him, it was no less a pilgrimage.
It is hard to comprehend why the government would not understand what this building signifies for the past and future of Bangladesh. Would you not preserve a heritage building that means so much to you?
A wall around the Parliament building would be like putting history in a box, tucked away in the storage room, hidden from everyday use. In the darkness of the box, without any introspection, history can only rot. And, this certainly will not be the sign of a country that aspires to be democratic, confident, enlightened, and a middle-income country by 2021, the 50"’ anniversary of the country's birth.
The writer is Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.