Within hours of Bangladesh’s liberation in December 1971, the provisional government in Mujibnagar decreed a ban on four communal parties that had actively assisted the Pakistan occupation army in committing genocide in the country.
The ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim League, Nizam-e-Islam, and Pakistan Democratic Party was a powerful statement of intent -- that only secular politics would be the norm in the new country, that liberal democracy would be the bedrock of national politics.
In the new country born in the crucible of war, therefore, it would only be parties like the Awami League, the two factions of the National Awami Party and the Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) which would shape the politics of the future. The future, therefore, was promising.
That future, apart from the role the AL has played in the decades since Liberation, was not to come to pass. Where successive military regimes encouraged as well as presided over the rebirth of communal politics in Bangladesh, parties of the nature of the CPB, NAP, and Workers Party were unable to send out credible messages outlining their programs to the nation. Where these parties should have been powerful instruments of resistance to creeping communalism, there was passivity followed by eerie silence.
The tragedy for Bangladesh is to be observed in the rise of the right wing, much of it tainted, in national politics. Where the CPB, NAP, and Workers Party ought to have developed and deepened their presence in the public eye, the precise opposite appears to have occurred. Rallies and demonstrations organized by these parties attract no more than a few hundred -- perhaps even fewer citizens -- in the nation’s capital.
Their presence in the public conscience has only been limited to the urban areas of the country when such presence should have been a loud reality in the rural interior. It naturally follows, therefore, that liberal democratic politics has been in a state of dissipation.
Expectations of Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani’s NAP playing a constructive role in the country were to prove unwarranted, for Bhashani and his followers soon made it known that they were regressing into the kind of communalism which had laid citizens’ lives low in the pre-1971 period in Pakistan. By 1973, Bhashani’s secularism had slipped to being the chaotic politics of a so-called Muslim Bangla.
His death spelled the end of his party and after his passing, the NAP was left without the will to explore politics under a new leadership. It was our first hint of religious communalism threatening to drill holes in the body politic of a nation-state that, during the war, had been an embodiment of justice and democracy.
Bhashani’s turning his back on post-1971 secular politics was but the first instance of the dissipating state of liberal democracy in the land. Post-liberation, Bhashani’s NAP was in a number of ways a disruptive force, in much the same way that a future Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal would cause havoc through its lack of a well-defined political strategy for the nation.
The birth of the JSD so soon after Liberation did not, in similar measure, enhance the quality of political discourse, given that it was, and remains, unable to explain its motif of scientific socialism as it battled the AL. In convincing itself that its concept of socialism had a unique chance of succeeding through association with coups d’etat conspiratorially forged in cantonment, the party hurt itself grievously and was never able to garner the support it initially received in the early 1970s.
Over time, ASM Abdur Rab would serve as leader of the opposition in the Ershad-dominated parliament a few years before the dictator’s fall, a role that was to be followed by his finding a berth in the first Sheikh Hasina cabinet in the 1990s.
With the JSD aligning itself with adventurous military officers in the mid-1970s, little chance, if any, was there for it to make an impression on the public mind. Its move to kidnap the Indian high commissioner to Bangladesh in November 1975 reflected its swift progression from politics to banditry. Overall, it has since been going through bad dissipation and has never recovered.
Its break-up into factions has only reflected its hollowness. With Shahjahan Siraj finding a place in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and in the government of Khaleda Zia, the JSD was further wounded. Hasanul Haq Inu’s entry into an AL-dominated government would only hold aloft a further sign of the JSD losing its sense of purpose and therefore national appeal.
Secular politics in the country went into a straitjacket when the parties that should have maintained their progressive nature succumbed to temptations of a wide variety. The Workers Party has not gone beyond its leader Rashed Khan Menon.
The CPB is seemingly healthy, but go looking for the party in the vast rural interior and you will come away disappointed. Communism must live and thrive among the huddled masses.
If the Bhashani NAP remains guilty of trying to repudiate the past, the faction headed by Professor Muzaffar Ahmed has indeed remained steeped in the past and in the ceaseless, long shadow of its founder-leader. It breathes, albeit in a wheezing manner, and waits to become a memory. Dilip Barua was once a minister, but that did little to expand the appeal of the small secular outfit he has headed for long.
Secular politics clearly has been in a state of enervation. The idealism which once governed thought and strategy among secular forces in the country has not translated into concerted programs of political education and enlightenment across the nation.
The consequences have been horrendous. Liberal politics is under assault and the political landscape is eerily barren. With the Hefazat-e-Islam pronouncing judgment on matters not its concern, with Ahmadiyyas coming under assault from the forces of fanaticism, the failure of secular political voices to reclaim history increasingly turns into a nightmare we will leave as a legacy to the generations to be.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
