I REGARD the people of Bangladesh as one big family. We have our individual likes and dislikes, abilities and interests, and preferences and limitations. But we share and celebrate one special identity — Bangladeshi.
Perhaps, our firmly anchored roots in Bangladesh become more prominent when we live outside the country. However, those who are inside Bangladesh bore the brunt of misrule that gripped Bangladesh for 15 years. They are the real heroes who have now liberated our country. We all have now regained confidence in our ability to rescue our country from the brink of collapse.
Let’s recapitulate what happened in Bangladesh the past weeks.
Students of the country’s colleges and universities launched a movement against discrimination in government jobs. Since Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic regime was not only unelected and autocratic but also corrupt, it felt threatened by any wave of public mobilisation — political or non-political. It approved the use of force to quell the peaceful student movement. As a result, bullets, sound grenades, poison gas and tanks and also airstrikes from helicopters were used to kill young people of the country.
Conservative estimates suggest that more than two hundred students and young people were killed and thousands of them were maimed in what is now known as red July 2024 alone; and killings in the streets of Bangladesh continued until Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled our country. Innumerable young people have lost their eyes and sustained life-changing injuries.
Generally, such attacks on a population happen when a hostile force invades another country. But people in Bangladesh suffered such hostility at the hands of their own government that was supposed to protect them. The state-orchestrated carnage in the streets of Bangladesh in the second half of red July brought traces of worry and restless anxiety on the face of all who love this beautiful but blood-stained land.
After committing mass slaughter and other gruesome crimes, Sheikh Hasina’s government took further punitive measures — such as mass arrests and mass prosecutions — to frighten protesting students and others into political acquiescence. It also made offensive and pejorative remarks to caricature the student protesters. Additionally, it unleashed ruling party men who attacked the protesters with firearms and conventional weapons, often resulting in fatalities and injuries — to which people of Bangladesh were subjected for more than a decade.
Adding insult to injury, Sheikh Hasina declared July 30 a national day of mourning to commemorate those who her government had killed. Earlier on July 28, she arranged a session to meet some of the bereaved family members and to shed crocodile tears over their losses. It was part of her efforts to evade responsibility for all the killings. After using degrading words to slander and malign the student protesters, her government used all such gestures evidently for the purpose of making fun of the victims of its crimes.
There is one conclusion that we can draw from the government-orchestrated mass murder and Sheikh Hasina’s mockery of its victims. The ostentatious gestures of declaring a day of mourning and meeting the bereaved family members were nothing but Sheikh Hasina’s systematic attempts at memoricide or her memory-killing tactics. She wanted the people to forget who had killed the young people of Bangladesh in the streets and in their houses.
In retrospect, since the birth of Bangladesh, people of this land have not been able to taste the fruits of liberation. Freedom, equality and justice for which our freedom fighters fought in 1971 are still absent in our country; thanks largely to Sheikh Hasina’s misrule. Conversely, the spirit of the 1971 war has routinely been exploited by a privileged group for their own vested interests. They have sloganeered the 1971 spirit to conceal their corruption and thus become rich and super rich, and many of them siphoned off our money abroad through capital flight.
Current reality for us as Bangladeshis can be summarised in the following way. Some of us have gained the power to kill and harass the rest of us; however, when others kill us or exploit our resources and infrastructures, all of us — both the oppressor and the oppressed among us — feel absolutely helpless and are unwilling or unable to lift a finger to help each other. The power of some of us to oppress the powerless among us and the vulnerability of all of us to outside forces attest to a sad truth: our collective doom.
A little elaboration is perhaps helpful here. We have different state apparatuses and institutions, such as, the army, the police, the border security force, the rapid action battalion, the judiciary system and the bureaucracy. These are meant to protect us and our interests, and people who work in these sectors are paid by our money.
Over the years most of these state institutions have been destroyed and converted into different arms of Sheikh Hasina’s party. For instance, the Border Guard Bangladesh that is supposed to protect our borders has failed to protect Bangladeshis in the border region. What is worse, BGB personnel were often deployed in our streets to harass and kill us. In other words, they fail to save us in the border region and kill us inside the country.
Is there any other nation on earth that is more vulnerable than us and suffers at the hands of its own security forces in this manner?
We can go on and on describing our collective predicament.
Generally, we blame the politicians and their behaviour for the mess and for our collective calamity. But what about the role of academics, writers, intellectuals and media professionals? A significant number of them acted as apologists for Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian government and as a smokescreen to cover up its monstrous brutality and oppressive practices.
The broad-daylight mass slaughter of our young people by Sheikh Hasina’s government makes it clear that our life has reduced value. Academics, writers, intellectuals and media professionals with access to the corridors of powers may have felt invulnerable. But the truth is that a government that can kill hundreds and thousands of our students and young people does not have any regard for the life of any of us.
But what brought us here?
This requires a long answer, and I don’t think our intellectuals can dodge responsibility for our plight.
Now is the time to remember our heroes who laid down their lives before, during and after the red July to liberate our country. We must record their sacrifices and we must defeat Sheikh Hasina’s memory-killing tactics.
Ìý
Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is professor of English language and literature, International Islamic University Malaysia.
