Holiday
Friday April 5th 2013
M.
Serajul Islam
The
government’s decision to arrest 3 Shahabag bloggers to appease Islamist forces
who are planning a march to Dhaka on April 6th, forces that the
government had called as a front of the Jamat, leaves no one in doubt that the Shahabag
Movement (SM) has finally ended unsuccessfully. Dr. Irman Sarkar, the leader of
the Shahabag Movement who had the power to ask and get anything from the
government just a few weeks ago, condemned the government strongly and demanded
their release. The government, under
threat from Islamists that the SM has awakened, is in no mood to even bother to
listen to Dr. Imran Sarker because he and the SM have become victims of
politics of the ruling party. Dr. Imran
Sarker and his Shahabag comrades would do themselves good if they woke up to
reality plus and went back to what they have been doing before Shahabag. Many
of them will and perhaps Imran Sarker too but if they have some of the qualities that those
who supported them have said they have when the going was good for them, they
should look back and find out why their movement failed after raising so much
hope.
The
drama surrounding the SM changed so abruptly that one has to scratch one’s head
to be convinced about the end of a movement that just two months ago was being
championed by the ruling party, a section of the secularists/intellectuals with
links to the ruling party and a media heavily favouring the ruling party as the
harbinger of a new dawn, a force that would
rekindle the dying “spirit of 1971” that had unified a nation to fight and win
freedom and finally bring home the fruits of our glorious war of liberation of
1971. The ruling party was one of the first to champion the SM because it saw
in it the potential to turn the difficult predicament into which it found itself
with the Padma Bridge, Hallmark, Destiny and the share market and general
failure in governance, to its advantage.
Initially,
the ruling party succeeded in turning a movement that should have been directed
against the government to its fullest advantage. The issue that had brought the
youth together was the failure of the ICT to hang Qader Mollah. The ICT and all
aspects of the trials of the alleged war criminals were the responsibilities of
the Government. The government/ruling party had spent the last 4 years
dismissing the claims of the opposition that the trials were politically
motivated and the ICT was not properly constituted to hold the trials. They had
assured the people that justice would be done and the accused in the war crimes
trials would be punished in the present term of the ruling party government. Therefore the youth should have gathered at
Shahabag and expressed their anger at the Government. They did not or could not
as the government/ruling party cleverly took control of the movement through
some known cultural activists of the ruling party and the secular/intellectual
forces with links to the ruling party backing them.
In
fact, the cultural activists of the ruling party who represents the secular/intellectual
forces very cleverly manipulated the SM and delivered it completely into the
laps of the ruling party after their initial opposition to allow ruling party
Ministers and leaders the chance to address the nation from their forum that
had raised hopes that the youth were non-political. The government then provided
the movement with all the logistics it required as well as security lest Jamat
and its activists caused its members physical harm. The government did not want such a heaven sent
opportunity to push the opposition into the corner to be wasted. All seemed to
be working in favour of the ruling party and the SM was soon carrying out the
political agenda of the ruling party against the opposition.
Had
the anti-Islam postings in the blogs of some of the Shahabag activists not been
revealed, the SM and the ruling party
together would have made the ambitions of the opposition in the context of the
politics of the country history, if not permanently at least in the context of
the next elections in the country. Instead, the ruling party finds the tables
turned on its head on the issue of Islam and caught with a new political
liability that may eventually prove to be more damaging to it than all the
damages that many thought that the Padma
Bridge, the Hallmark and Destiny and fraud in the share market would do to the
chances of the ruling party returning to power for another term.
The
ruling party is now taking steps to correct the mistakes they made with
Shahabag, like arresting the bloggers. They have also assured the Islamic forces
planning to march on Dhaka to demand that those amongst the Shahabag bloggers
who insulted the Prophet (pbuh) be hanged, that they will not allow anyone in
the country to do so. Ministers were
sent to these extremist Islamists to assure them that the offenders who
attacked Islam would be punished. Instructions have been sent to dismantle the
SM in an u-turn that is embarrassing and could be politically disastrous to the
ruling party. Only the future will tell whether the ruling
party has missed the bus in its attempt to correct the mistakes it made with
the SM. For the sake of the country, one would like to expect that it succeeds
in cooling down the Islamic sentiments that the SM has rubbed the wrong
way. If it does not, the country would
suffer in a very serious way. Nevertheless, there is a price that it must pay
for encouraging a force without checking its credentials and it may not find
the way to retrieve the harm that Shahabag has done it politically, that
easily. Supporting the SM in retrospect may have been a major political blunder
of the ruling party.
When
political parties make mistakes, they pay the price. It is the role of the
secularists intellectuals with links to the ruling party and the media in the
Shahabag movement that must be subjected to some serious scrutiny because they
would not be called to pay any price for their role although they also
contributed to SM’s ignominious end that has pushed the country towards a civil
war. The youth had undoubtedly attracted
the attention of the nation when they appeared initially with their message,
their enthusiasm. They could have been guided to achieve the ideals that they
sought to achieve. They could have united the nation and revived the spirit of
1971. Instead, these secularists/intellectuals went to Shahabag without
checking the background of the youth and straightaway, termed their movement as
the “Liberation war of Projonmo” when
they saw in the movement potentials for helping the ruling party politically
and furthering their own agenda on secularism minus Islam. In urging the
movement to fight a new war, a war they believed was not finished in 1971; they
pushed the youth into the conflict ridden politics of the country. In fact,
they did more. They pushed it to achieve their political agenda. They used SM to ban Jamat and remove the Islamic
provisions in the Constitution so that the state principle of secularism would
not be tarnished by Islam!
When
the youth demanded capital punishment for the accused in the war crimes, they
had the nation enthralled and expectant because except the Jamat, there was
consensus for such a demand. If they had
been allowed to pursue this line after the government changed the ICT laws so
that the government could plead once an accused was given punishment less than
a capital one, they would have been on course to ensuring that the accused
before the ICT would not get reprieve as Qader Mollah did. In fact, they had
even ensured that Qader Mollah would again be brought to trial and given
capital punishment. Then influenced by the secular forces, they demanded the
banning of Jamat. Thereafter, the partisan nature of the country’s politics
became as clear as day light in the Shahabag Movement. The ruling party through
the secular forces planted in the movement its political agenda one after
another. The secularists planted in the
movement their agenda of reviving secularism minus Islam. Together they pampered
the Shahabag youth in such glowing terms that it made the leaders of the Shahabag
Movement think of themselves larger than life. It was with their encouragement that
Dr. Imran Sarker made that audacious statement that the Shahabag Movement was
stronger than the government.
The
secular forces linked to the ruling party and the government with the media as
an ally worked hand in glove for the ruling party’s political agenda. It was
however the secular forces who worked as the conduit for the government with the
Shahabag leaders and supported all their demands without caring for their
legality. In fact, they did not just bother to care for legality; they also set
aside issues of human dignity and propriety. Thus when Shahabag demanded that
the government must change laws so that Qader Mollah could be brought to trials
again and hanged, the whole heartedly backed them. They should have cautioned
the Shahabag youth that their demand conflicted directly with the principles of
law and jurisprudence and that sensible people abroad would immediately dismiss
the movement on this demand alone. They should have also cautioned them that
after such changes in the ICT laws by the government under demand made by them,
death sentences on the accused would be suspect by simple application of common
sense to the outside world that was not happy with the way the Government was
conducting the trials. They watched and supported young children as young as
five/six years old crying hoarse demanding the hanging of the alleged
criminals! It is sad that not one of them saw the sadistic nature of such a
demand when young kids were brought to do such acts!
They
forgot that we have in the country a legal, elected government. They listened
to the Shahabag youth like it was the government and followed them obediently.
They thus urged people all over the country to answer the call of the Shahabag
youth and come to a standstill for 3 minutes. Their urging was so successful that the
Governor of Bangladesh Bank proudly led his staff out and stood in 3 minutes
silence to show their obedience to the Shahabag Movement. The Bank made sure
that the picture of the Governor and his staff obediently listening to the
dictates of the Shahabag youth was prominently displayed in the newspapers. In
fact, ministers did the same thing that the Governor did with his staff. When these youth leaders in a state of surreal
sense of authority that these secular forces had put in their heads demanded
that flags be hoisted as a time determined by them, the secular forces saw
nothing wrong in such a demand although they knew that there are prescribed
rules governing the hoisting of the national flag and no private individual or
group has any right to interfere with such rules!
The
movement of the youth took a critical part of Dhaka’s unbelievably weak traffic
system to create their space. Across were two major hospitals of the country,
PG and BIRDEM. Had the movement been for a day or two, it would have been bad
enough. The movement carried for days, weeks, months. It does not need common
sense to suggest that the Shahabag movement caused massive
damages/dislocations/losses to the traffic system of Dhaka, to patients trying
to get treatment in the two major hospitals and to businesses on the Elephant
Road. Yet the secular forces that guided the Shahabag Movement remained silent
to such gross interference in the lives of the people. In fact, the
secular/intellectual forces who guided and supported the SM took leave of their
senses and backed all demands made by the SM so that their own agenda on
secularism, Jamat and Islam would be fulfilled.
In
the belief that the movement would lead Bangladesh to glory by reviving the
spirit of 1971, these intellectuals asked no questions who these young men and
women were. They did not ask that although the demand to give the maximum
punishment to the war criminals was a great one and that the youth had to be
welcomed for making the demand, why they were silent about more serious
problems in society, like for instance, issues of corruption, Hallmark,
Destiny, sharemarket.etc. The last four years under this government have been
particularly a bad one for the youth. The educations institutions of the
country have been subjected to criminalization that the country did not witness
in the past and the ruling party’s student wing was using these institutions as
their fiefdom. These issues together
with many more, like eves teasing in educational institutions that have become
such a menace that regularly girls are omitting suicide, should have been the core
concerns of any youth movement in the country. Yet at Shahabag, the movement
was silent about these issues. Why did the secularists/intellectuals who saw
the omissions not speak out? What was the reason behind their silence?
When
the anti-Islam blogs became public knowledge, these secularists/intellectuals
failed to see the dangers or alert the leaders of the SM. In fact, they misled
them by trying to deflect the responsibility for these postings on the Jamat
and Shibir. On behalf of the youth, they expressed anger on those who exposed
these blogs. They demanded one particular newspaper be closed and its editor
arrested for exposing the bogs’ anti Islamic postings. As a consequence of their ill- motivated support
for the Shahabag movement, they were greatly instrumental in the expected
way the movement has ended; a movement, largely partisan in favour of the ruling
party and totally insensitive to the real issues of concern in the society and
totally oblivious to the importance of Islam in the country.
Unfortunately,
there is no way to hold these secularists/intellectuals responsible for their
role in the Shahabag Movement although their support and encouragement has to a great extent brought the country face to
face with the greatest dangers the country has faced in the last 42 years of
its existence. The aftermaths of the Shahabag Movement are still unfolding
although the movement has more or less ended with the ruling party now having
drawn the line with the arrest of the three bloggers. But at this stage, it may
be safely said that as much as a vast majority of the nation supported maximum
punishment for the alleged war criminals, they want much more that no one
should dare disrespect Islam and Prophet Mohammed (pbuh).
The
Shahabag movement has also revealed the force of the media in present
Bangladesh, albeit negatively. It has shown what the media can do if it gets
together for a thoughtless cause and ends owning it. Instead of being objective
of the Shahabag movement, it became partisan; in fact, it acted as the media of
the movement. It represented the voice
of the youth and the secular/ intellectuals as the voice of the nation without
caring to find the truth; that between Shahabag/ intellectuals and the nation,
there was the overwhelming majority of the people whose opinion on Shahabag
they assumed to be positive even after the anti-Islamic blogs became public. If
it had acted as a responsible media and pointed the mistakes that the SM did,
it could have done itself, the youth movement and the nation great credit
instead of pushing the country to the brink of a civil war. In the end, it gave
a small section of the country’s youth a national forum and tried to launch
them to national leadership. It also gave a section of the country’s secularist/intellectuals
a forum to carry forward their agenda of secularism through Shahabag. On both
counts, the media failed to do what it intended to do because it assumed things
and events without and did not seek truth and reality. To make amends, even
though partially, the media should now pursue the secular/intellectual forces
and tell the public what they would do now that the government has dropped SM
as a hot potato.
Shahabag’s
lessons will sink for better or for worse for the country depending on what
lessons the actors of the Shahabag drama as parties/groups/individuals take
from it. It is still early to conclude on all the lessons from Shahabag. This
notwithstanding, it may not be off the mark to suggest one major lesson from
Shahabag. No matter what the Constitution says about the state principles,
democracy, nationalism, socialism or secularism, all must find a way to blend
with Islam. It should not be difficult because Islam has blended with the most
important of these state principles for the Shahabag movement/and the section of
the secularists/intellectuals that supported Shahabag, namely secularism, for centuries
without any problem. Whether Islam and secularism would remain the way it has
blended for centuries would depend to a great extent on the secular forces and
what stand they take on Islam in future.
They
should consider the planned march of the Islamists towards Dhaka on April 6.
This could be the most dangerous development out of Shahabag so far. By its
insensitivity, the Shahabag movement has awakened this danger for the country
in which their contribution has been significant; the prospect of what was
never a possibility for the country; the prospect of fundamentalist Islamic forces
becoming strong to challenge for political power. One has to pray for the
country so that the government does not make any more mistakes with this Islamist
forces under the influence of the secular forces within it folds. It is time for the government/ruling party
to draw a line as it has with Shahabag with the secular forces for its own sake
and the country so that both Islam and secularism can find their own space in
society as it has for many centuries,
The writer is a
retired career Ambassador
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