They test our piety, again!

Sadek Hossain Khoka, freedom fighter, former mayor and well-known politician, has served warning to our patriotic young people at Shahbagh. They must, he has said, desist from what they are doing. If they don't, he and his political camp followers will wage a movement against these young people in every locality. Now that is quite interesting. Not even in the worst days of Ayub Khan and Monem Khan did they or their loyalists speak of waging war against the young who wished to see democracy return to the country.
Khoka has his priorities wrong here. Besides, as a freedom fighter, he is in the wrong party. Any politician, any individual with a minimum of respect for the principles of the Liberation War cannot fail to see why these young men and women and with them an entire nation are today united in a movement against the war criminals of 1971. For Khoka, his very background as a freedom fighter should have alerted him to the dangerous game his party is today playing in alliance with the Jamaat. In 1971, he was engaged in a war against the Pakistan army and its local collaborators. That memory should have made him think twice before castigating the young people who, fortunately for us, are today much more of a vanguard of freedom than Khoka and his party are.
Khoka's threat of a movement against the young in every locality is fundamentally a call to war, an invitation to a crisis that will spin out of control for everyone in Bangladesh. The former mayor may not see eye to eye with the Awami League, but the fact that he appears to be seeing eye to eye with people who once opposed our struggle for freedom is troubling. It is troubling not so much for the nation but for those who, having fought for national liberty, have in these more than three decades cohabited with the enemies of freedom in the BNP and, in an alliance of questionable convenience, with the Jamaat.
The tragedy for the BNP is that its ambivalence about the War of Liberation has today pushed it into a corner where its friends are the very people we have known as the collaborators of the Pakistan army. The BNP did not have to be there, not in 1979, not now. The nation's problem with General Ziaur Rahman is not that he cobbled his political party into shape. It is, that in his intense desire to keep the Awami League at bay, he saw absolutely nothing wrong in letting the old murderous forces of darkness out of their lairs and back into politics without at all reflecting on the long-term damage his moves would cause the country. The BNP could have been a credible, respected political party had its leading lights gone for a harnessing of the light which comes of a serious, sustained reading of history.
And today, the BNP appears determined to place itself at an ideological variance with the rest of the country. Its chairperson thinks the Awami League-led government is committing genocide. Do we have to believe that no one in the BNP knows the meaning of genocide? Its acting secretary general suddenly decides that these perfectly Muslim, perfectly secular Bengalis at Projonmo Chottor are endangering Islam in the country. Haven't we heard all this before -- in 1952, 1966, 1969 and 1971 -- when the men responsible for leading Pakistan tried to pull the wool over our eyes with talk of Islam every time we demanded democratic justice and social equality?
Why must men like the BNP acting secretary general test our piety all the time? And why should we indulge them in their dark game of turning this state into a communal undertaking through attempting to prise us away from our historically secular moorings? Yes, it would be fine if the BNP and its followers wished to speak about Islam out of their own religious conviction. But Islam and the Jamaat? The two don't go together; and if now the BNP has banded with a historically Islam-damaging Jamaat to defend Islam, it's sheer nonsense.
Besides, whoever has suggested that Islam is in danger in Bangladesh? If there is any community which is truly and gravely in danger here, it is the Hindus. It is the Buddhists, whose temples were set afire and whose religious scriptures were burnt in Cox's Bazar last year, who are in danger. Have we, in this country and for all our diversity of political beliefs, ever reflected on the question of why the Hindu population in Bangladesh has been declining and why the Buddhist community, after Cox's Bazar, feels betrayed by a land it has called home for centuries?
No, it is not Muslim sentiments that are in danger. Those politicians who are worried about saving Bangladesh's Muslims from themselves should, if they have the courage and if they believe in the power of politics to do good, go out and reassure those Hindus and Buddhists that this country is a home for all and a shared heritage for everyone.
Sadek Hossain Khoka thinks the youths at Shahbagh are working against the country and its people. Perhaps someone should tell him those youths are the country, that they are the people? Perhaps he should be reminded, because he once was a soldier for freedom, that those who are up in arms against the country are those who vandalise property, beat up policemen and send terror sweeping down the streets? Perhaps he ought to ask people whose leadership he swears fealty to why they do not know what the definition of genocide is?
Khoka warns the young that they should understand the people's mind. That is again a fallacy. The people of this country know what they need; they know the enemies they must defeat for good; they know that three million of their compatriots died for a country they loved. That is the people's mind. If Khoka does not understand that, if his party is afraid to read the message, it will be a pity.
The Muslim League went against the people and so died a predictable death. The Jamaat, having helped the process of genocide in 1971, can do nothing more than call up its old tactics of scare-mongering. Why must the BNP emulate the Muslim League and the Jamaat? Where are the historians and intellectuals that will help it to come closer to the people of Bangladesh? Why must it be a party of perennially angry men and women?

The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: [email protected]