A day of insanity

Us versus ourselves. Photo: peter bono

TWO week ago it was World Hand Washing Day. We have got Victory Day, Independence Day, Valentine's Day and many more national and international days. Why not observe one more, the National Depravity Day on October 28? Every now and then it will remind us that not so long ago this country was reeling on the brink of madness.
It sill does. But we had lost it on that day, may be we had gone around the bend already to precipitate that madness in our actions of that day. This country has gone through political upheavals. We have fought a liberation war when three million lives were lost. We have had our share of insanity, but this one was different. On October 28, 2006, we had a chastening glimpse of how a nation could ruthlessly turn against itself.
It was a day of civil strife, but it was also the sliver of time when, if I take the liberty of playing an amateur historian, this country for the first time in history experienced the horror of a civil war. It was not one religion against another. It was not one nation against another. It was not one language against another. It was instead the very grain of this nation pitted against its grain. This nation was divided into two halves, each half sworn to eliminate the other.
I propose this day should be marked with special significance. Flags should be kept half-mast. We should wear black badges. It should be a national holiday, a day of remembrance, not a day of mourning. There should be workshops, seminars, talk shows, discussions and speeches. All the amusement parks and recreation centres should be closed and celebrations banned for that day. People should stay home and talk amongst themselves.
American poet Edgar Allen Poe said about his own insanity: "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." October 28, 2006, was a day of insanity. It happened 35 years after we achieved independence. It happened only four years ago from last Thursday. Perhaps that was an interstice of insanity between two stretches of horrible sanity. We have been restless before and we are restless now. We have been confrontational before and we are confrontational now. We were disturbed before and we are disturbed now.
It is important to remember that day. It was a day we lost control. It was a day we misbehaved. Our rage had darkened the day as we clashed with each other, as we killed six of us and danced on the corpse. It was a day we invoked the Portuguese marauders, the Afghan warlords, the British colonialists and the Pakistani invaders, all those who occupied this land and persecuted us. We became them, all our tormentors rolled into us. We became our own tyrants and we became our own victims. It was a day of us versus us.
This madness has been raising its head ever since, once in Natore, again in Pabna, thereafter in Serajgonj and most recently in Rupgonj. Once again we saw smoke and fire, once again we heard gunshots, once again we saw people armed with sticks, bricks, guns and machetes openly pitching battles against each other. All the more reason for National Depravity Day.
We quickly tend to get split between they and us. It is some kind of national psychosis that our long history of subjugation has never left us. We still play domination and subservience, people by people, profession by profession, political party by political party, intellectual by intellectual, businessman by businessman, uniform by uniform, muscleman by muscleman.
The Afghan, the Mughal, the British and the Pakistani oppressors still live within us. They kept us divided so that they could rule and plunder this country. Now we have divided ourselves because some of us want to make more hay while the sun shines. Funny, we have got our homegrown colonialists who treat us like their dominion.
We talk about how businessmen are creating jobs for us. We talk about how politicians have given us a free country. It is also said that Ayub Khan gave us adult franchise, the "second capital" and a television station. Hussein Mohammed Ershad gave us many roads and poetry conferences. It is said that the British gave us education. The Mughals gave us an organised administration.
Yet we fought against them because they couldn't give us a sense of pride. In freedom and subjugation we have equally despised those who divided us. All the more reason why an official day should tell us we have got enemies within us. By hurting each other, we are only hurting ourselves.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is Editor, First News and a columnist of The Daily Star. E-mail: [email protected]