Shahbag and the Permanent Civil War

I don’t know much about the history of Bangladesh. To be honest, I have only a cursory understanding of it. Most of the details I learned from fragments of conversations. My grandfather smuggled oil to freedom fighters, my mother lived near the house of a Pakistani collaborator and could hear the torture at night. The post-independence period is even hazier in my mind, perhaps because these are contested histories. Those who come from political families hear one side of the story or the other, those who are passionate about learning more dig deep into whatever material they can find. We are still in the process of constructing our history – there is no popular history of that period. Only a failed, comical attempt to construct one based on the assassination of Mujib as the central tragedy of the post-independence period. They burned down his house, the museum commemorating the moment of his death, on the first day of the revolution.

At school we were mostly taught the standard story about 1971 – we declared independence, we were victims of genocide, we bravely won a guerrilla war against impossible odds, Bob Dylan gave us a concert. One day my school took us on a trip to the Drik Photo Gallery in Dhanmondi. I think we were 11 or 12, far too young for what we were about to see. It was a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo series by Associated Press photographers Horst Faas and Michel Laurent. On December 18^and In 1971, the Mukti Bahini organized a victory rally and gathered Pakistani collaborators – razakars – in a stadium. And then they tortured and murdered them in front of cheering audiences, proudly displaying their work for foreign photographers. Victor’s justice. I often thought of those images during the Shahbag movement. Razakars.

During the Shahbag movement, an attempt was made to extend the concept of the rajakar to all right-wing or Islamist politics. To link our war against Pakistan to a modern, progressive identity that opposed racism, sexism and homophobia. This cultural program would send a positive message to Western liberals during the War on Terror, especially those who flocked to Christopher Hitchens’ New Atheism. It would also send a positive message to India, by emphasizing a historical narrative that portrayed India and the Awami League’s Bangladesh as the secular, progressive counterweight to Pakistan’s regressive Islamism.

In retrospect, it is strange that a mass movement whose central demand was the death penalty – amra fashion chai(we want hanging) – could be seen as “progressive,” but we live in strange times.

All these problems started in Shahbag. Before Shahbag, the conflict between the Awami League and the BNP was a kind of soap opera, a mafia-like conflict between two corrupt political dynasties. After Shahbag, the foundation was laid for the permanent civil war—even the BNP were now razakars.

The war with Pakistan had become a distant memory, much of the country was ready to move on – and then old wounds were suddenly reopened and made fresh. Jamaat-e-Islami war criminals were tried in sham courts, David Bergman was labelled an Islamist agent, a rajakar, and expelled for the crime of demanding a fair trial.

Were you against racism, sexism and homophobia? Then you must also join the permanent civil war against all forms of rajakar that threatened the nation and the spirit of 1971. What was a dynastic struggle became a cultural struggle, dragging along the civil society and the general population.

We always fought razakars. We would always fight razakars. Till the end of time.

Who ultimately profited from all this? One political dynasty: the Sheikh family. And a hostile external power that slaughters our citizens at the border.

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Bangladesh is a homogeneous country – 99% ethnic Bengalis and 91% Muslims. The kind of sectarian divisions that have devastated countries like Lebanon and Syria, and that have been exploited by outside powers, simply do not exist in Bangladesh. Instead, we have an apparent secular-Muslim divide, which at first glance seems to parallel the situation in Egypt, Turkey or Palestine. But was this division real? The main Islamist party – Jamaat – has never won an election or seized power. For most of our existence, our politics have been dominated by two parties – the Awami League and the BNP – that emerged from two different political dynasties.

Both the Awami League and the BNP are secular, bourgeois nationalist parties that exist primarily to serve the class interests of the traditional elites. Ultimately, there are no real ideological differences between them, except for one: foreign policy. The Awami League is the pro-India party, the BNP is the anti-India party. And therein lies the rub.

Abrar Fahad was assassinated because he dared to criticize the Awami League’s client state relationship with India. They called him a Jamaat activist. A razakar.

This division was exacerbated and set in motion because it allowed the Sheikh family to remain in power and the Indian government to maintain an iron grip on our geopolitics.

What happened in the Monsoon Revolution was not just an overthrow of the Awami League rule, it was an overthrow of Indian rule. A second independence that will now give birth to a second republic. Shahbag and the Monsoon Revolution, two revolutions – the first as farce, the second as tragedy. Tragedy in the mythical sense, a heroic act of sacrifice culminating in the birth of a nation.

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There is a culture war raging between Islamist and secular factions in this post-revolutionary moment. The regressive cultural tendencies of political Islam, for example its inherent opposition to feminism and LGBTQ+ rights, are certainly things that must be condemned.

But what exactly are the issues that our secularists decided to fight for during this period? Amaan Azmi called for changing the national anthem and an event was held to commemorate Jinnah, which provoked much righteous wailing and gnashing of teeth. Are these progressive issues? Do they have anything to do with religious freedom? Not at all – they are purely nationalist issues. The idea that a liberal person cannot admire Jinnah would come as a surprise to my liberal Pakistani friends.

All of this reveals the inherent intellectual poverty in the Awami League’s programme of secular nationalism. It is an uncertain, negative ideology, pathologically obsessed with quantifying loyalty and policing history – frankly, the idea that a Bengali cannot think positively of historical figures like Jinnah or Gandhi is simply absurd. These are historical debates, not crude markers of national loyalty. National identity is constantly being renegotiated through dialogue (and coercion); the precise role of faith in our politics is yet to be determined. The process of Muslim identity formation that began after 9/11 is still ongoing, and its eventual resolution will be one of the defining features of the 21st century.

What happened in Gaza led to what happened in Bangladesh. We can no longer see Islamists as a permanent internal enemy that must be defeated. How could Fatah, after Gaza, denounce Hamas as regressive or backward? I could end with some liberal platitudes about how freedom of speech and the rule of law will protect progressive minorities, but I suspect that something much more profound is happening: the emergence of a civic collective consciousness, a synthesis of the secular and Islamist poles. A new national identity is being formed.●

Zain Ali is an analyst and commentator.