Observe the list of those led to their doom by the collaborationist goon squads of the Pakistan occupation army in 1971.
As Bengalis prepare to recall the sacrifices of their intellectuals on the eve of Bangladesh’s liberation, we owe it to ourselves and to men and women of conscience everywhere to recapitulate the tale of the darkness seventy-five million citizens of Bangladesh lived in during the nine months of the War of Liberation.
The last 16 months of the Yunus-led interim government are not too different from the nine months of the War of Liberation. People are struggling at every step. Bangladesh is going through one of the most difficult economic periods in its recent history.
The promise of stability and reform that came with the interim government has quickly faded, leaving the country’s economy paralyzed and its people increasingly desperate.
Every passing month brings new stories of families struggling to survive, workers losing their jobs, and small businesses shutting their doors. In fact, Yunus’s Bangladesh is a nation drowning in theft, plunder, and anarchy.
Fifty-four years on, as Bangladesh’s people are once again engaged in an existential struggle brought on by conspiracy fomented at home and abroad to undermine history, determined to wrest back the ethos of a freedom struggle that is under organized and systematic assault in these times, we do not forget the three million of our compatriots we lost in the genocide perpetrated by the Pakistan occupation army and its collaborators in 1971.
How many of our intellectuals were pushed to their death by the collaborationist forces and their Pakistani masters in 1971? Here are the figures:
991 educationists, 13 journalists, 49 doctors, 42 lawyers and 16 individuals from other sectors of society. No fewer than three million Bengalis were done to death; ten million were forced to take refuge in India; anywhere between two lakh and four lakh women were subjected to rape, with many of these women giving birth to babies during or immediately after the war.
Mediocre men in control of the levers of power and touched by a dash of the medieval have never felt comfortable in the presence of intellect.
And that was precisely the reason behind the macabre killing of scores of Bengali intellectuals, imbued as they were with patriotism, during the War of Liberation fifty-four years ago.
As we prepare to observe Martyred Intellectuals Day this year, we recall all those brave children of Bangladesh who were picked up and then picked off by the murder squad, the notorious Al-Badr given shape to and nurtured by the Pakistan occupation army in Bangladesh, a half-century-plus ago.
We remember the martyrs, each one of whom was snatched from his or her family, to be brutally done to death in the final days of the war.
And as we remember, it is not to be forgotten either that beginning on the night of March 25, 1971, Pakistan’s soldiers went on a rampage all over Dhaka and then all across the country, shooting our intellectuals — academics, journalists, doctors, lawyers, writers, artistes — to leave the Bengalis intellectually impoverished as a nation.
It is that sense of tragedy which wells up in us this morning. And as we pay homage to our martyred intellectuals, as images of their battered and bruised corpses at Rayer Bazar (many were there whose remains were never to be found) come rushing back to our collective consciousness, we make a solemn promise in this fifty-fourth year of our sovereign nationhood: Never again!
To these martyrs whose lives ended even as we looked forward to life reviving in all of us through liberation, we bow in gratitude and in prayer. No sacrifice is greater than dying for a cause that touches the future of a nation.
These martyrs remain the ideal from whom we draw sustenance as we attempt, once again, to give to ourselves a decent and proper secular democratic order in this country.
It is fitting and proper that we remember them. And with our memories of them come the historical reminder of the ceaseless sufferings intellectuals have gone through in modern history, as well as in the times preceding it in other countries.
In Bangladesh, through the killing of GC Dev, Jyotirmoy Guhatakurta, Rashidul Hasan, Ghiasuddin and scores of intellectuals marched to their deaths by the al-Badr goons; it was only a repetition of history in its foul image we went through.
And such history was to repeat itself after 1971, in lands elsewhere.
And lest we forget, in post-1971 Bangladesh, indeed long after the nation’s battlefield triumph fifty-four years ago, the successors of the 1971 goon squads, in the shoddy raiment of religious and anti-liberal extremism, have murdered liberals, together with threatening to kill other progressive thinkers in the country.
It becomes our onerous task today to ensure that these dark forces do not rear their heads again, that they are identified wherever they are and neutralized firmly and fully.
In this month of December this year, as we remember the supreme sacrifices of our intellectuals in 1971, we tell ourselves that these patriots will not have died in vain; that the ideals they lived and died for will be a renewal of the message of freedom for this nation today — and always.
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From the depths of our souls, even as we mourn the intellectuals who were bludgeoned to death, the three million Bengalis falling prey to genocide, we reiterate the foundational principles of the state we freed in 1971. This morning, it is Joi Bangla that resonates all over Bangladesh and beyond.
