The rise of Bengali nationalism throughout the
decade of the 1960s, precipitated as it had been
by the language movement of 1952 and again by the
clear attempts to strip away at the majority
status of Bengalis in the Pakistan state
structure, was clearly based on the principle of
secularism. It was felt, as much in those early
days as in later times, that the ethos upon which
Bengali politics shaped itself was all founded on
the heritage from which the culture of the land
and its people had taken root. One can argue, of
course, that the conscious move on the part of
the people of East Bengal to align themselves
with the patently communal movement for Pakistan
quite belied their secular background. The
argument would be right, up to a point. What
matters is the way history for Pakistan’s
Bengalis shaped up in the days immediately after
the creation of Pakistan in August 1947. Mohammad
Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan revered as
the Quaid-e-Azam, for the first time in his long
political career encountered vociferous
opposition to his policies when he peremptorily
suggested that only Urdu would be the language of
the state he had built. The fact that he was
Pakistan’s undisputed leader did not matter at
all when a band of young men quickly and even as
Jinnah spoke at Curzon Hall of Dhaka University
in March 1948 raised their voices in protest. It
was the earliest indication of a resurgence of
secular Bengali nationalism, even if the reality
was that East Bengal had turned into, and would
remain, part of Pakistan for the foreseeable
future.

The essential spirit upon which Bengali
politics was to develop would become increasingly
more manifest in the years after Jinnah’s death.
His successor Khwaja Nazimuddin and Prime
Minister Liaquat Ali Khan tried giving the
Bengalis more of what the country’s founding
father had tried doing. The result was badly
counterproductive. Indeed, it remains to the
credit of the people of East Bengal that the
first post-1947 banner of resistance to the rule
of the Muslim League was raised in a Bengali
ambience when Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and
Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani moved to give
shape to the Awami Muslim League in June 1949.
There was, despite the qualification of the term
’Muslim’ in the name of the organisation, little
mistaking the fact that it was unfettered
democracy of the Westminster sort the new party
aimed at. And that surely was pluralism as it
came wrapped in all the brilliance of secularism.
The 1952 upheaval over the place of Bengali in
the Pakistani scheme of things only added a
little more of substance to the struggle for a
democratic polity. In subsequent years, it would
be made clear to the West Pakistan-based
political classes that while they continued to
harp on what was becoming a worn-out theme of
Muslim nationalism for Pakistan, the Bengalis in
the country’s eastern province were moving in the
opposite direction. The triumph of the United
Front over the Nurul Amin-led Muslim League
government in the East Bengal provincial
elections of 1954 was fundamentally a victory of
secular forces over a communalistic cabal.
Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq, while visiting
Calcutta as the new chief minister of East
Bengal, basically gave out the right message
about East Bengali feelings when he reminisced
about the old days in pre-partition India. It was
behaviour that would soon lead to trouble for Huq
and the United Front ministry, but the point had
been made — that East Bengal, a mere seven years
into Pakistan, was not willing to be lumped with
the provinces forming West Pakistan into a
communal body politic. This theme of secular
democratic politics was carried a dramatic step
further when Moulana Bhashani made his
’assalam-o-alaikum’ address to West Pakistan at
the Kagmari conference of 1957.

The concept of secular Bengali politics, with
the ground thus prepared in the 1950s, was a
theme that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was to build on.
An important catalyst to the rise of Bengali
nationalism was the conscious move by the Bengali
cultural elite to go for an observance of
Rabindranath Tagore’s centenary of birth in 1961.
The association of such influential men as
Justice S.M. Murshed with the celebrations sent
out a very potent message of the Bengali being a
culturally and politically distinct entity within
Pakistan. It was a message that Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, even at that relatively early stage of
what would ultimately be a momentous political
career, heard loud and clear. There are reasons
to believe that it was in 1961 that his
disillusionment with Pakistan set in. The
commandeering of the state by the army in 1958
had only reinforced Bengali feeling that
democracy, rather than being the wave of the
future, was in sad retreat in Pakistan. Men like
Suhrawardy had grown unhappy with the decline of
the state. For Suhrawardy, who believed that the
country could have a future if it embraced
secular politics, the arrival of the Ayub Khan
military regime was a disaster. He was not
prepared, physically or psychologically, to put
up resistance to the dictatorship. His death in
December 1963 released men like Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman from any obligation to adhere to the
Pakistan ideology in the form it existed in at
the time.

By far the clearest and most powerful
expression of secular Bengali sentiment came
through the Six Point programme for regional
autonomy that Mujib presented at the Lahore
conference of Pakistan’s opposition parties in
February 1966. There was hardly any question that
the reforms which the Six Points aimed at were
underpinned by a very strong base of secularism
and were therefore a strategic way of presenting
the argument for Pakistan, especially its eastern
wing, to move away from the two-nation theory
that had midwifed its birth in 1947. In the years
between 1966 and the fall of the Ayub regime in
early 1969, the resurgence of Bengali secular
nationalism was complete. It would only be a
matter of time before the political class which
had initiated the movement would roll to
preponderance on an all-Pakistan stage. That
triumph came through the Awami League’s coming by an absolute majority of seats in the national
assembly elections of December 1970. With East
Pakistan already being referred to as Bangladesh,
with the religious and communal political groups
like the Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami
having been thoroughly marginalised by the
electorate, the moment appeared right for
Bangladesh to consider moving out of Pakistan
altogether. Had the military junta led by General
Yahya Khan not made a mess of things, it is
reasonable to suppose that Bengalis would have
eventually, through a democratic, confederal
process gone for the creation of their own
independent and necessarily secular state. The
genocidal action of the Pakistan army only
accelerated the path to separation. What happened
through the War of Liberation in 1971 was a
massive rejection of the communal state of
Pakistan and the establishment of a proper, fully
defined democratic and sovereign state for
Bengalis. Naming the country the People’s
Republic of Bangladesh and vesting all powers in
the people was the final embodiment of a secular
spirit that had been developed and improved upon
in all the twenty four years that Bengalis had
spent within the Pakistan framework.

Close to three and a half decades into
freedom, Bangladesh faces perhaps the biggest
challenge to its existence and survival as a
secular democracy. The carefully laid-out
strategy that has gone into a rehabilitation of
the communal forces defeated in 1971, first
through a failure of the first Awami League
government to hold such forces to account for
their complicity with Pakistan in the genocide of
three million Bengalis and then the insensitivity
with which all collaborators were pardoned by
Mujib, followed naturally by the return of the
communalists to the political centre per courtesy
of the military regimes of General Ziaur Rahman
and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad now has
Bangladesh up against a wall. The rise of Islamic
extremists, all of whom have been peddling ideas
that go against the very grain of Bengali
political belief, is a bad and heavy assault on
the civilised principles upon which Bangladesh’s
sovereignty rests. The Jamaat-e-Islami, which
clearly relishes the troubles secular democracy
is faced with today, cannot but look forward to a
time when the country reverts to a form of
theocratic rule. The murderous elements of the
Jama’atul Mujahideen clearly expect something
more radical, which is a state that will be ready
and willing to take the long, difficult path back
to religious medievalism. The suicide killings
and the threats constantly being held out against
any and all manifestations of secular power are
essentially a repeat, after a thirty four-year
interregnum, of the desperation that went into
the job of trying to save Pakistan in this
country back in 1971. The men who cheerfully
helped the Pakistani occupation army in shaping
such murder squads as al-Badr and al-Shams are
today safely and securely ensconced in political
power, thanks to men and women whose
understanding of Bengali history has been as
parochial as it has been outrageous.

As the nation recaptures the spirit of 1971 on
Victory Day this year, it is the goal of
secularism that takes fresh new meaning for
Bengalis once more. The raison d’etre for
Bangladesh has been its secular foundations,
which is why it is important that the old
principles be reasserted by the national
leadership and, more specifically, by those
forces which shaped the secular democratic basis
of the nation in the years leading to the War of
Liberation. The biggest lesson for the country,
in these fraught times, is that it can fulfil its
destiny through a determined adherence to its
original ethos of a modern democratic order. The
Islamic militants with the bombs out there are
therefore a warning to all Bengalis that should
secular politics falter, there will not be much
of a state of Bangladesh left to speak of. The
bottomline should be obvious: the People’s
Republic of Bangladesh and communal bigotry do
not go together. In the present murderous
struggle for survival into which the religious
medievalists have pushed the state, it is the
secular republic that must emerge, even if
bloodied and wounded, triumphant.