Prevailing political narrative and Victory Day

We fought and defeated our enemy, the Pakistani occupiers, 41 years ago. The reason we fought for independence from Pakistan was that their ruling class had deprived us of all our rights as people -- socio-economic, democratic, individual and human.
Since March 25, 1971, they began to treat us like animals. And that was the last straw that broke the camel's back, the state of Pakistan, of the day. People of this part of the world became totally disillusional about Pakistan, where they found no future; neither of their own nor of their future generations. So, they decided to change their lot, rose up in arms and drove Pakistan's occupation army out of the country. The victory was won.
Nationalist aspiration of the Bengali people that crystallised during the language movement, in 1952, did play the key role in rallying the entire Bengali people behind the cause of independence. But the common people's aspirations were not limited to only the nationalist slogans, devoid of any programme to free the peasantry and the working classes from the age-old bondage of feudal exploitation as well as the domination of the traditional forces of reaction including landlords, the village gentry and representatives of international capital.
The leadership of the time, due to its class limitations, was not capable of carrying through its promises in taking the programme of independence deeper and free the entire masses of the people from all kinds of exploitation and subjugation. Had it been able to garner that kind of representation from all the political and social stakeholders during the war, the war of independence could have become a war of total national liberation. But the lack of maturity in leadership of the working masses of the time, together with the predominance of coterie interests among the nationalist leadership, deprived the people of the great opportunity that opened up before them.
Small wonder the political leadership that assumed control of state power after the liberation lacked that kind of vision due to its class limitations. The pre-independence general election of 1970 that was held under the Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan was still the point of departure for the Awami League, the post-Independence claimant to state power. It could not draw all the political forces that supported and took part in the Liberation War into the fold of power. And that was enough to sow the seeds of future discontent in the nation's political landscape.
So the political history of independent Bangladesh is one of uprisings and instabilities. In the interregnum, military rules banished constitutional politics out of power. A semblance of constitutional democratic governance rose for a short while on the political horizon in 1991 following the overthrow of the last military dictator. But constitutional democracy in its truest spirit has again sunk in the maelstrom of mean and violent rivalries for supremacy and power among contending political forces.
Four decades plus years after the independence, the nation is now divided into two hostile political blocs under Awami League (AL) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). To all appearances, their sole aim is to destroy each other.
Of late, the two major groups of the ruling class, the Awami League (AL), now in power and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), in opposition, have been able to rally different coteries of political aspirants in two fronts under their leadership. The AL claims that the front it leads represent all the pro-liberation social forces, while the other front led by the BNP as anti-liberation, since Jamaat-e-Islami and different Islamic parties are its partners.
But such compartmentalisation of pro and anti-liberation forces hardly stands a rigorous scrutiny as the AL itself has a history of hobnobbing with Jamaat during its movement for caretaker government in the later part of the 1990s against BNP, which was then in power.
However, though their groupings are essentially electoral alliances, they conveniently try to show it as a big ideological divide and use it as a rallying cry to polarise the nation between pro and anti liberation camps. The show of spite between these two hostile camps has crossed all civilised limits. That is reflected in the political debates and talks shows, in which the leaders or supporters of either party participates, or in the street confrontations, in which their activists engage.
The recent killing of a youth named Biswajit Das, during such a street confrontation between the supporters of the two camps, during a road blockade enforced by the BNP-led front, exposes the height of such hostility between the two camps. Biswajit was brutally beaten and hacked to death by the activists of one camp, who mistook the victim for a member of its rival camp. The killers did not care to listen to the dying youth's appeal that he was an innocent passer-by.
The blood of the youth, who had no stake in the power rivalry, was spilled on the eve of the Victory Day.
What message does the 42nd Victory Day convey to Biswajit's parents and other near and dear ones? Does the pro and anti-liberation discourse of politics bear anymore significance to Biswajit's family?
What the politics of the day was able to achieve is only a robbing of all modest hopes of a family of small means. Biswajit's death has again brought to the fore the pointlessness of a prevailing narrative of confrontational politics.

The write is Editor, Science & Life, The Daily Star.
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