The people of Bangladesh today observe Ekushey February, the anniversary of the martyrdom on 21 February 1952 of young Bengalis demanding that Bangla be recognized as the state language of Pakistan.
The demand was grounded on the conviction that since Bangla was the language of the majority population of Pakistan, it was not acceptable that Urdu be imposed on the country.
The Bengali demand was rudely cast aside by the entrenched non-Bengali central leadership in Karachi.
On 21 February 1952, the security forces resorted to shooting down young Bengali students and others in Dhaka, which further inflamed the situation.
It is the spirit of Ekushey that Bangladesh’s people recall this morning. Then again, there was a beginning to Ekushey, back in February 1948, when Dhirendranath Dutta first informed the people of the newly created state of Pakistan that the language of the Bengalis mattered as much as any other in the country. His demand was simple and forthright: Bengali ought to be a language employed in Pakistan’s constituent assembly, for the good reason that it was the language that the majority of Pakistanis, the Bengalis inhabiting East Bengal/East Pakistan, expressed themselves in.
Of course, the ruling establishment was dismissive of the notion. It was a time when the idea of Pakistan came to mean a combination of Urdu and Islam and to that end; it was a radical change in the way Bengali or Bangla was spoken that the ruling classes aimed at. The consequences would, at times, be quixotic.
The quixotic was of course pulled up to the level of the serious when, in March 1948, on his visit to East Bengal, Governor General Mohammad Ali Jinnah told Bengalis that only Urdu would be the state language of Pakistan.
Anyone who militated against that idea, said he, was actually engaging in a conspiracy against Pakistan! It was hauteur at its best and foolhardiness at its worst. From one end of Dhaka University’s Curzon Hall, where a seemingly superhuman Jinnah let his sentiments flow, a loud protest in the shape of a ‘NO’ reverberated across the hall. For the first time in his political career, Pakistan’s founder faced open resistance to his politics.
It was defiance that would spill out into the streets, into a gathering movement of protest. Jinnah’s successor KhwajaNazimuddin tried to get into his predecessor’s shoes. Urdu, he echoed Jinnah, was the language Pakistan would speak in. He was shouted down by Bengalis across the spectrum. And thus it was that time moved on, to come full circle in the tragedy of February 21, 1952.
In that broad term of the meaning, Ekushey was but the beginning of a long, arduous struggle for an assertion of Bengali rights. And just how potent politics was turning out to be for the people of East Pakistan/East Bengal was to be manifested powerfully through the rout of the Muslim League in the provincial elections of March 1954.
The Jukto Front was, in that sense, much more than a political platform vying for a share of power. It was a loud message to the entrenched political classes based in Karachi that a new configuration of power was required for Pakistan if the state was to forge ahead. Of course, the Jukto Front ministry would be shot down a bare two months later.
The momentum generated by the language movement of February 1952 was not to be halted or even slowed down.
The imposition of martial law by Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan on October 7, 1958 seemed, in the initial stages, a damper on Bengali aspirations. Leading voices of dissent in East Bengal were swiftly hauled away to prison; politics was outlawed; and the soldiers made sure that anyone who might threaten the grip of the military was muzzled through the Elective Bodies’ Disqualification Ordinance (EBDO). But then came 1961, with all the passion that remembrance of culture could bring forth.
Through a celebration of the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengalis sent out the powerful message to the rest of the country, to the military regime, that while Pakistan was the state they inhabited, it was a centuries-old culture, indivisible and secular, they lived by.
Tagore’s birth centenary was the new catalyst, based on the momentum of Ekushey 1952, which would mark out the route to a re-creation of the Bengali nationalistic spirit.
A major step toward an assertion of the Bengali spirit, if not Bengali nationalism, was taken in 1964 only weeks after the death of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in December 1963. His young protégé Sheikh Mujibur Rahman revived the Awami League, which had earlier been subsumed in the National Democratic Front, a grouping of politicians aiming to return Pakistan to civilian rule by bringing an end to the Ayub Khan dictatorship.
It was a case of the Bengali spirit fleshing itself out into Bengali nationalism which served as the backdrop of the Six Point programme of regional autonomy in early 1966. Mujib, prevented by Pakistan’s opposition politicians from announcing the Six Point plan at a conference in Lahore in February 1966, made himself heard through a news conference in the city.
The irony was not lost on anyone who took an interest in Pakistan’s politics: Lahore had been the spot where Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League had launched the struggle for Pakistan in 1940; and Lahore was again the place where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League were calling for a radical overhaul of the state of Pakistan through giving its federating units incredibly huge dollops of autonomy. Mujib was to be put under arrest three months later under the Defence of Pakistan Rules.
But the spark of nationalism the Six Points had set off would gather steam, enough to bring East Pakistan to a grinding halt through the observance of a general strike in support of the points on June 7, 1966.
And then came the ultimate means the regime would employ to destroy Mujib and discredit Bengali aspirations for a greater role in national politics. In December 1967, it instituted the AgartalaConspiracy Case, implicating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and 34 other Bengalis in what it called a conspiracy to seize East Pakistan by force and declare it an independent state. In the event, the case boomeranged. It only inflamed Bengali passions; and Bengalis convinced themselves that in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman they finally had a leader who could speak for them loudly and boldly.
The Agartala case was withdrawn in the face of mass protests and the following day, a grateful Bengali nation anointed Mujib as Bangabandhu, a friend of Bengal, at a million-strong rally organised at the Race Course in Dhaka.
Ayub Khan would quit power in late March 1969. The Awami League would sweep Pakistan’s first general election in December 1970 but would be denied the right to govern Pakistan.
On March 25, 1971, the Yahya Khan regime unleashed a genocide in East Pakistan and Bangabandhu was taken into custody and flown to West Pakistan to face trial on charges of waging war against Pakistan.
On April 17, 1971, with Tajuddin Ahmad as prime minister, a provisional government of Bangladesh would be formed and a guerrilla war would get underway against the Pakistan occupation army; 10 million Bengalis would go into exile in India; three million Bengalis would be killed by Pakistan’s soldiers and 200,000 Bengali women would be raped.
In early December, Pakistan would attack Indian air force bases in the west, forcing India to enter the war. On December 16, 1971, the Pakistan army, with 93,000 soldiers, would surrender to the Joint Command of Indian and Bangladesh forces in Dhaka. The People’s Republic of Bangladesh would emerge.
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The Ekushey spirit had triumphed. Nineteen years and ten months after the shootings on the campus of Dhaka University in 1952, Bengalis had managed to scale the heights of collective self-esteem.
