Chatterji turned out to be too hasty in his judgment. The lathee, even in its heyday, could be an instrument of aggression as well as defence. More important, its use might have diminished in some areas of Bengali life; elsewhere, it was to become a formidable instrument of oppression in ways probably not foreseen by Chatterji.

Not very long after that lament, the lathee staged a come back. This time it was the police of the Raj who wielded it. And they were quite nasty with it. The use of the lathee sometimes called, rather euphemistically, the baton on totally peaceful political demonstrations was an essential ingredient of the history of the independence movement in British India. During the years of Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha the police used the lathee on countless occasions, each time leaving behind a desolation of broken limbs and bloodied, fractured skulls. In general, even the most peaceful protesters were thoroughly clubbed.

In 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai of the Punjab, leading a group of marchers demonstrating against the Simon Commission, was severely beaten up. He died a few days later. Rai was old and ailing and the death might not have been entirely due to the beating, but it was certainly a contributing factor. The marks of the beating were all too visible on his back and chest, and were carried prominently in national newspapers of the day. People from all walks of life were shocked at the beating of a man of his stature.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the future prime minister of India, too, was leading a group of demonstrators at about the same time, also against the same Commission. In his autobiography he described his first encounter with the police lathee thus:

I led one of the groups of sixteen ... My group had gone perhaps about two hundred yards ... when we heard the clatter of horses' hooves behind us. We looked back to find a bunch of mounted police, probably two or three dozen in number, bearing down upon us at a rapid pace. They were soon right upon us, and the impact of the horses broke up our little column of sixteen. The mounted policemen then started belabouring our volunteers with huge batons or truncheons ... (Soon after,) I looked round to find that a mounted policeman was trotting up to me, brandishing a long new baton. I told him to go ahead, and turned my head away again an instinctive effort to save the head and face. He gave me two resounding blows on the back. I felt stunned, and my body quivered all over, but, to my surprise and satisfaction, I found I was still standing ...

The very next morning, in a larger demonstration against the Commission, Nehru was beaten again, this time even more severely. He was "half blinded with blows," as he put it, with this result:

I felt pain all over my body, and great fatigue. Almost every part of me seemed to ache, and I was covered with contused wounds and marks of blows. But, fortunately, I was not injured in any vital spot. Many of our companions were less fortunate, and were badly injured.

The pain inflicted by the lathee on the non-belligerent, someone without a lathee of his own to defend himself, is not purely physical, however. Much of it is the pain of the humiliation of being at the wrong end of the stick. In the case of Lajpat Rai, the humiliation was perceived as national, brought on by brute force wielded by a foreign power against a national leader. It was a sense of national humiliation that drove Bhagat Singh to gun down the police officer said to have been responsible for the beating. Singh was hanged, making him a martyr.

The humiliation of a police beating is not, however, an unintended consequence of an action by the person wielding the lathee. Indeed, the major idea behind administering a lathee blow is to humiliate the individual receiving it. This is as true of the countless lathee charges on peaceful demonstrations throughout India's struggle for independence from British rule, as it is of police brutalities during the civil rights movement in the United States many years later. Neither is the intent to humiliate limited to the immediate wielder of the lathee; more often than not, those in positions of power who order the beating also have very much the same intention.

To be sure, this, so far, is history. But this is a tale with no ending, and continues to be told to this day. The police in Pakistan inherited the lathee, along with the tradition of humiliation that it represents, from the British, and passed it on to their Bangladeshi counterparts. There was a report in a section of the press in February that the police lathi-charged people lining up to enter the Ekushey Boi Mela. The crowd was large, there was some jostling, and the police resorted to the lathee to restore order. For me, the report took a long time to sink in, hence this rather belated retrospection. Lathi-charge in a book fair, and that too in a glorious month dedicated to Bengali culture, isn't something easy to comprehend.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the passing of the baton from the British police -- more strictly the Indian police employed by the British -- at the time of independence from British rule, must also remember how often the Pakistani police used it, and how effectively too. Used in full swing during the language movement of the 1950s, it produced a large crop of bloodied skulls and shattered bodies. Helpless political inmates in Pakistani prisons were lathee-charged on a number of occasions. The tumultuous 1960s saw a huge surge in use of the lathee along with firearms.

One would have thought that once we Bengalis were masters of our destiny, we would rid ourselves of the instrument of humiliation that the police lathee is. The facts speak otherwise. The use of the lathee by the Bangladeshi police against entirely peaceful political demonstrations harks back to the days when the police in British India were at their fiercest in dealing with pacifist protests. I have often heard it said that police lathee-charges on peaceful protests in Bangladesh have been more common and more brutal than even under Pakistani rule. I tend to agree. The frequency of lathee-charges on unarmed demonstrators, as well as their severity, seemed to peak during the past few years.

The beating up of demonstrators, actual or potential, by policemen has been among the most recurrent action photographs in newspapers in Bangladesh over the past three decades. One would see a heap of unarmed political activists and leaders lying or crouching on the street, having already been subjected to lathee blows, or about to receive some. Often the ferocity of the blows could be conjured from the width of the angle the staff made as it swung into action. Sometimes you could clearly see it in the face of the policeman wielding the lathee.

The person at the receiving end of the punishment could even be a prominent political leader. I have seen photographs of a former home minister, lately an opposition leader, being beaten up by lathee-toting policemen, the very men whose boss he had been just a few months before. That must be seen as the clearest case where humiliation is indeed the intended consequence of the lathee blow. I have seen women political activists and their leaders being clubbed by the police. In the latter case, sometimes an involuntary unraveling of the sari of the protester added to the humiliation of the beating. I have seen younger political activists desperately trying to shield their leaders from the assaults and receiving the blows themselves. I have read reports of people who took no part in protest demonstrations being clubbed by the police for merely being in their way. I have also read reports of a government plan to equip the police with longer and sturdier staves that would enable them to do their job of inflicting pain more thoroughly.

As a tale of pain and humiliation wrought by the police lathee, this should be enough. Let us divest the lathee of its power to intimidate. Let its use be made illegal, except as a weapon of defence. In a country where the dignity of the individual is trampled on in myriad ways everyday, let there be one fewer way of humiliating him or her. It is even possible that the idea might catch on and get translated into action in other areas. It is certainly worthy of attention of the guardians of "civil society."

These are quiet times for the policymakers of the country. Let them ban the police lathee of intimidation quietly, now.

Mahfuzur Rahman is a former United Nations economist.