General Ziaur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first military dictator, died in a putsch in Chittagong on 30 May 1981. All these decades on, it is important to survey the damage inflicted on the nation’s social and political fabric, not to say history, of the Bengali nation by the regime he headed. In simple words, the Zia regime was symbolic of darkness, of truth being sidelined by forces inimical to the concept of Bangladesh.
Prising out of Two Fundamental Principles of Constitution - Secularism, Socialism
The five and a half years of the Zia military regime remain noted for the regressive politics, or call it patently anti-politics, it inaugurated in Bangladesh. The Constitution was brazenly tampered with when General Zia, yet to take over as President from Justice Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem but clearly the strongman of the regime following the so-called sepoy-janata biplob (soldier-people revolution) of 7 November 1975 which brought him to power, went for a prising out of two of the four fundamental principles enshrined in the document. Socialism and secularism were removed by dictatorial fiat, to be replaced with concepts of social justice and belief in Allah.
'Nara-e-Takbir' and 'Bangladesh Zindabad'
The trends were clear, indeed had been evident on 7 November when Zia’s loyalist troops raised the Islamic slogan of nara-e-takbir. For the first time since the emergence of Bangladesh as a secular state nearly four years earlier, slogans with a clear right-wing twist were being heard. Worse was the replacement of the Bengali nationalist slogan of Joi Bangla with Bangladesh Zindabad, a clear hearkening back to the discredited Pakistan Zindabad cry of pre-1971 times. Of course, Bangladesh Zindabad was voiced by the usurper Moshtaq regime immediately after the fall of Bangabandhu’s government and his assassination. The Zia regime took the slogan forward, to a point where it and its camp followers insistently made it part of policy.
Regression was thus in the air. For Zia, as he saw it, a surefire way of consolidating his authority at that early stage was to shape a strategy that would be a clean break with the concept of Bengali nationalism as it had come to be articulated since the mid-1960s when Bangabandhu and the Awami League had offered the Six Points as a path to wider autonomy for East Pakistan before redefining the points, in the face of Pakistani intransigence, as a measure geared toward full independence for Bangladesh through the 1971 war. Indeed, the Bengali struggle for autonomy followed by the guerrilla war for independence rested on the strong foundations of a secular nationhood which ensured the equality of all citizens of all faiths and political persuasions under the law. The guiding principle of the state thus came to be Bengali nationalism, a clear repudiation of the communal politics the state of Pakistan had employed between 1947 and 1971.
In the Ziaur Rahman dispensation, Bengali aspirations as embodied in Bengali nationalism came under a well-designed threat. For the first time – and this was a few months after November 1975 – Khondokar Abdul Hamid, a senior journalist noted for his right-wing views and effusive loyalty to the regime, spoke of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’ at the Bangla Academy in February 1976. One did not need much imagination to understand that Hamid was the regime’s messenger in informing the country that the nation was now confronted with a palpable new threat: that Bengali nationalism was being run out of town, that the secular nation of Bangladesh was being pushed into a political straitjacket reminiscent of the state of Pakistan.
Revocation of the Collaborators Act
Even as General Zia strengthened his hold on power, through turning on such benefactors as Col Abu Taher and the young leaders of the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) who had helped him ascend to power and carting them off to prison, the engineering of the decline of the secular state went on apace. Interestingly, as deputy chief martial law administrator, Zia had his policies underwritten by President Sayem (who had been installed at Bangabhaban on 6 November 1975 by General Khaled Musharraf only hours before he was killed early the next morning by mutinous soldiers). Towards the end of December, the Collaborators Act, in existence and actively implemented since 1972 as a measure toward identifying and trying Bengalis who had directly assisted the Pakistan occupation army in the 1971 genocide, was revoked by the regime.
And then came the clearest manifestation of where the junta meant to take Bangladesh on its watch. Air Vice Marshal M.G. Tawab, who had been brought over from West Germany, where he had been living, to succeed Air Vice Marshal A.K. Khondokar as chief of air staff, presided over a ‘seerat conference’ at Suhrawardy Udyan. There was no mistaking that the new rulers were encouraging the rightists, among whom were elements who had already gained notoriety as collaborators of Pakistan’s Yahya-Tikka-Niazi regime, to congregate in their support of it. It would be a mistake to suggest that General Zia and his fellow officers were doing things in stealthy manner. They clearly were not. What they were doing was whipping up religious, in this case Islamic, sentiments in the country to the detriment of the secular republic.
The irony of the situation was that despite being a freedom fighter himself, Zia went out on a limb to undermine the objectives that had been realised through a successful War of Liberation by the nation in 1971. Indeed, the rise of Zia to power was but the beginning of the process of the colossal damage that would be inflicted not only on the spirit of 1971 but also ensure the physical and psychological elimination of fellow officers who had fought in the war. Increasingly it was the military officers who had been repatriated from Pakistan in the early 1970s who were in the ascendant in the Zia era.
The Zia regime did little to in investigate the murder of Khaled Musharraf and scores of officers killed by rogue soldiers in the aftermath of the incidents of 7 November. The regime pursued its goal of doing away with the values of the War of Liberation with a determination unprecedented in the history of Bangladesh.
About the Author
Syed Badrul Ahsan is the Chief Editorial Adviser of The Confluence; a journalist and author. He previously served as the Press Minister at the High Commission of Bangladesh, London and authored a biography on the Founder of Bangladesh, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman entitled From Rebel to Founding Father: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
1 comment
Blistering Truths about Ziaur Rahman like a villain in Bangladesh’s history!!!
— Anwar Alam Khan, being a college student, was a direct witness of cruel birth of Bangladesh from a very close proximity in 1971 and a frontline FF of the 1971 war field.