BANGLADESH celebrates its 54th anniversary of national independence today, the most significant day in the collective history of the Bangladeshis, for it was on this day that Bangladesh was born through a bloodied people’s war against the occupation forces of the erstwhile Pakistan in March 1971. The war began immediately after the Pakistan’s West-based politico-military authorities had unleashed a genocidal crackdown on the East’s unarmed people, instead of facilitating the formation of the government by the East-based Awami League that won the country’s first-ever general elections held in December 1970. The League leaderships, who politically presided over the war of independence, made some promises — equality, justice and human dignity — to be implemented in the independent Bangladesh and subsequently, the people at large actively participated in the war and achieved victory though nine months of enormous sacrifices.
While national independence from foreign shackles always remains politically precious for the social, economic and cultural emancipation of any people, Bangladesh has not yet succeeded in materialising that due primarily to the inherently undemocratic ruling classes of the country. While the rulers were expected to work for removing unbearable inequalities among the rich and the poor, men and women, Bengalis and non-Bengalis, Muslims and non-Muslims, their actions and inactions have rather widened the gap in some sectors. While they were expected to ensure social, political and economic justice, some of their deeds and misdeeds have rather stood in the way of ensuring justice in society. Under such circumstances, in the absence of equality and justice that is, the human dignity of the poor, in general, and those of the minority communities, in particular, cannot be ensured. It is not for no reason that every generation of Bangladeshi youths have taken to the streets against the self-seeking rulers for the realisation of the aforesaid spirit of the war of national independence. The overthrow of the two authoritarian regimes through vigorous student-mass uprising in 1990 and 2024 remains a couple of glaring examples.
However, it remains a matter of serious concern that following the last democratically oriented student-mass uprising that ousted the Awami League’s autocratic regime, certain ideologically undemocratic political forces who had actively collaborated with the genocidal forces of Pakistan during Bangladesh’s war of independence have succeeded to grab a significant amount of political space and they are using the space to propagate distorted narratives of the country’s independence war. In order to justify their opposition to the glorious independence war, they propagate the historic political event as nothing but the working of neighbouring India, a narrative that both the Pakistani and Indian authorities propagate only to belittle Bangladesh’s historic achievement. It is true that India helped Bangladesh in its political and military efforts to achieve independence, but India did it in its own strategic interest to dismantle Pakistan and, thus, Bangladesh’s interest merely coincided with that of India while it was primarily the Bangladeshi freedom fighters who wrestled out independence from Pakistan. But both India and Pakistan project the Bangladesh war to be an India-Pakistan war, for their respective interests — the first to exert their hegemonic policies in Bangladesh and the second to save their face from the humiliation from being defeated by Bangladeshi guerrillas. By asserting the same position, the Bangladeshi right-wing forces are simply backing the Indian and Pakistani narrative, which is not only unpatriotic but totally false, which ultimately does not prevail.
