When the Great leader of the Indian Muslims M.A. Jinnah, himself more English than an Englishman and less Muslim than any of his followers, formulated the two-nation theory and called out for the creation of a state or states comprising Muslim-majority areas, the theory part of it was hilariously ignorable. But the demand for dismemberment of the subcontinent into two or more states grew into something irresistible among the Muslims. And with covert fuelling from the colonist rulers, it became a Frankenstein which would not but be conceded in spite of opposition of three-fourths the populace of British India. The Frankenstein, monster that by and by came to be known by its master’s name, killed its creator, as parabled by Mary Shelley, and was sapping white into death its creator in reality the Bengali Muslims, when the latter had no way but to deal the monster an inglorious defeat and retreat for good.

My point in retelling this universally known tale in its regional version is to maintain that Jinnah and Pakistan sired in this 5000 year old continuous civilization for the first time the idea that a society’s political development into a state and government and all the rest that follows must of necessity be dependent on the majority that professes, but by no means practices, a particular from of religion. The British colonist rulers had made the rise of this Frankenstein inevitable way back in its Communal Award of 1911. Since then in India and Pakistan and Bangladesh this bizarre idea of making the political conduct and realities of a state into a handmaiden to this very much undependable label of Muslim as Hindu majority- a majority decided not by any formal house and election but by being born into particular families. This majority by birth practice is but a direct progeny of the much and rightly maligned Indian system of castes. That makes this foreordained label doubly injurious to the development of a just society. The fact why British rulers failed to counterpoise the Muslim label with any one or two or three other labels was plainly because there was in India no such monolithic religion as Hindu which historically meant just an Indian no more and no less. Not to speak of world religions like Buddhism, in religious terms, Hinduism was a strand of full bodied religious beliefs and practices more different one another than that exists between the Roman Catholics and the many-splintered house of Protestantism. The Jinnah revived new casteism has however taken so much strong and deep roots in the Muslim minds of the subcontinent- as also in the Hindu ones, that even after three decades of joint electorate the involuntary religious label offering one on birth an overall political, social and economic bundle of privileges and condemning another, on birth with a yoking to another bundle of all kinds of prejudices and discrimination, not unlike being born a black in apartheid South Africa, rules supreme in Bangladesh. Named very simply and conveniently communalism, the phenomenon has since taken on large shots of fanaticism insisting on a Nazimodelled idea of forcibly converting all mankind into one belief and only one way of life. The communalism incipient in Bengali Muslim minds in spite of the rise of Bengali nationalism, creation of secular state and many social and cultural institutions that could sustain and grow both the nationalism and the state, has made dangerous inroads into the potential of this polity to ever becoming truly democratic- driving the evil labels into insignificance.

A petit bourgeois alternative to the vanguard of Bengali nationalism has veered dangerously to the right and medieval sectarian prejudices, a harking back to Janna’s two-nation gibberish. Added to this the alliance with agents of international terrorism aimed not so much at setting an Islamic world order but more at unsettling the present order, has led the present governmental incumbents to put its own polity, the sub continental balance and the state of general non-intervention from outside powers into great jeopardy. A sure sign of this has been the election-centered orgy of violence, rape and extortion and eviction from homestead and forcible occupation of land and other property-all compounded into one. The new state fashioned through patriotism and idealism and a very high expression of culture has plummeted headlong into a nuisance for all around and a curse to its own people.

Jinnah believed in two very foolish things, out of sheer ignorance. That Muslims of all of the Indian subcontinent spoke one single language (he never traveled south, nor did he count his native tongue Gujarati as one). And he believed the violently dangerous Hindu-Muslim bipolarism had one and only antidote-cleaving the subcontinent into Hindu and Muslim majority ones. The repressive dominance of one community in a state balancing the excesses of the other in the state. Jinnah and not John Foster Dulles can lay claim to the patent of the Balance of Terror doctrine. The first of his beliefs can outright be dismissed. The second, incredibly, worked and cut the subcontinent in three pieces, making up two states, on a very communal line. It ignored not only the opposition of the majority populace of the then India, it also made minorities of a hundreds of millions of potentially repressed people. How many millions were made to abandon their homes of a thousand of years, how many millions were killed outright? No one seems to know. Worse, no one seemed to care.

Those who fought in the liberation war of Bangladesh and those that led them staked their lives to kill the legacy of Pakistan or seeing the society and the world at large through the eyes of Jamaluddin Afghani or the Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt- seeing every things in terms of Muslim and Non-Muslim, ignoring the overwhelming ramifications of the locale specific native culture. And they won the day, setting a wonderful record by the way of a Hindu-Muslim, so-to-say, co-operation obviating imagined divides of state and culture.

Soon enough a bloody backlash struck the new march towards the good for all in the subcontinent. The liberation War of Bangladesh was expected to, indeed it had to open the floodgates of new development of the Bangla language and culture and a secular revolution of the intellect and a national upsurge in things mundane more innovation and production, and import and absorption of technologies appropriate for the land and people and an education enabling that.

Instead, the backlash, wholly communal in spirit and Pakistani in inspiration, hijacked the true independence of `71 and replaced it with something more backward looking than Pakistan itself. A return to medievalism on the one, on the other a military dictatorship all of it contrary to the historically developed genius of the Bengali people. There is now no way for the Bengalee people of Bangladesh but to repudiate all this and go back to values championed by the liberation war, values ingrained in the Bengalees over centuries by savants of character and enterprise and the unremilling industry of the people. In this they must follow the beacon light thrown into the unknown future by Vidyasgar, Rabindranath and Nazrul and last but not the least Bangabandhu sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Jinnah’s fallacy was more cultural than political, the second emanating from the first only as a corollary. So is the case of communal musclemanry and prejudices, starting as a cultural question and then subsiding into economic and political consideration of profit by the few. An effective answer to this clear murderous ness and thuggery lies in a cultural resurgence, mostly through education but more effectively through a cultural movement or a series of such as those that presaged the six-point autonomy movement, the people’s uprising in `79 and lastly the War of Liberation.

Nothing to this end was done during the golden breathing space offered by the Awami League government of Shaikh Hasina. We do not blame the government for governments have for ages been unaware of their role in culture. But as once a part of Pakistan, they could well remember how that foreign based and alien government interminably worked to undermine the culture of the Bengalees. We do not say that government should have gone grandiose programmes featuring palaces of cultures. But possibly the project of Space Theatre including a planetarium, as also the Sonar Bangla Sangskritik Boloy were steps in the right direction. But these were decided upon very late in the day. There is said to be a science museum in the city. This could well be a fully-fledged government enterprise, building it up to some standard, say the museum in Wellington, New Zealand. Specialized museums based on the basic physical and biological sciences could go a long way to end religious bigotry and ignorance from the simple unlettered folks and school students. There are no incentives for visiting the archeological site museums making the citizenry, specially the students aware and proud of our past. This also would do well to usher in a change in the present narrow and sectarian worldview of our people, so on and so forth. No great funds were set for archaeological researches and diggings that could link the nation with its past very effectively.

Cultural movements were the best things to counter what Pakistan did to us culturally and the present BNP etc government is trying to emulate. But governments are not the best agencies to generate such movements. Indeed once their hand is suspected behind one, however covert it may, the movement may fizzle. Independence, freedom and spontaneity are the hearts and soul of such movements. The government’s part here is only to create conditions congenial to such and to see that even small upsurges do not dry up. An Institute of Film after the polish on British standard could do well to feed and make and intoxicate our budding talents in the line. The Hasina government has done nothing to improve the standard of film making and also of showing. Why? This film thing is the best way to reach the hearts of the people. The television medium, in spite of its tremendous possibilities, has miserably failed to inculcate taste and culture, knowledge and a sense of one world and one mankind –the world over. Our television is not going to be an exception. But its novelty may influence the minds of both the poor urban and the village rustic. The best way to get social benefit from TV is to make it classy, stuff it with programmes of worth. Not by government control but healthy competition, creative all the way.

These are puny things compared to the past dear government’s mountainous failure in education, in spite of some good spurts here and there. Let us start with the Education policy. The Qudrat-e-Khuda Commission report could outright be put into effect as the Hasina government was inducted in, Instead, the government squandered time, energy and money by interpolating it to better effect but watering it down to having no effect at all . And it came ready only when the time was over. Secularity is the foundation of any forward looking education. Hasina government was too generous with sectarian and theological education which helps the nation on to rails that only run backwards. 

While very zealous about madrasa education the golden government cared not to make the school appoint music and games teachers. Songs and games involve the students into creative innovation making them citizens useful to the society. Education by rote, basic technique of madrasa education, is an anathema to a creative and useful mind. But over the last decades education in school and college has also been infected by the memorizing and copying way of passing an examination, with education being simply the part of the exercise.

When the job is to resist cultural subversion and to give a free rein to imagination and reflection and connect to world cultural and our past achievements, We have left the whole field to who even are not competent to comprehend the task at hand.

The enemies of the people, from Pakistan down to the BNP, are bent whole heartedly on using education and the electronic media as an anti culture propaganda machine. We have failed to further the cause of culture through these facilities, built with so very poor taxpayer’s money. Awami League is the part of the people, the party of the toilers. It should be, in all rights, the party of culture which is yet to happen. The Awami league field worker should be a walking library, a preacher of wisdom, with full honesty and integrity. They should go down to each man and woman with the best that man has ever done, with the best the Bengalee people has done in cultural and science and literature. Moving teachers. Why shouldn’t Al and other pro-people parties have social programmes including running schools and libraries?

For the present, care should be rained on attempts to drench the society with poetry songs and dances, and plays in order to involving general people, specially of the remote fastnesses in these activities-drawing them out to join the cultural resistance.



The above is a prologue in true Shavian style. What is worse, repression by killing and maiming and making paupers of men and women of dignity, or making a whole people slavish to a point when it has no soul of its own? In 1971, nearly a hundred thousand invading troops from Pakistan made mince-meat of our Bengali-speaking society, killing at least three million and making about ten millions flee their own land of thousands of years. Against such stupendous challenge the Bengali mind did not flinch for a moment. In the name of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib, they rallied round the provisional Bangladesh, Government under the great Tajuddin. Before that a major’s call on behalf of Bangabandhu over a make-shift radio to rise and resist had truly electrified the persecuted nation.

The war inflicted on us by the Pakistani, ruling clique-as foreign to us as Eskimos, or better still headhunting land dayaks until the fifties, intended to kill our soul. Bodies they bayoneted and bulleted in heaps of millions, but could not bow down one single soul. The Bengalees of Bangladesh survived and unfurled a new flag in the comity of independent nations. That genocide of 1971 was a hung crime against humanity, defeated but unpunished.

The 2001 swoop on our society, criminally crafty and violent, has well-earned the epithet of a mini-71. But there is a great difference between the two. The doings, indescribable as they are, of the Caretaker Government and the election they held more as loot of robbers and of a beneficiary government of sorts, over a smaller span of six months, succeeded like the devil himself in making the whole nation, Hindus and Adivasis, Christians and Buddhsts, haves and have-nots- and Muslims of both AL and BNP persuasion soulless slaves to a seemingly interminable terror. Muslims even BNP-supporting and benefiting Muslims are as terrified as of the morrow as the other communities are of the live-long day.

Which is the worse crime against humanity? Killing or raping by the thousand who had no choice in their non Muslim birth or killing the soul of a nation them non-human crawling creatures? The latter crime continues with vigour, with a willing conversion to Taliban (very little to with Islam) terrorists by the perpetrators. The first also continues to keep the terror raw and live.

Whom do we appeal to for a way out of this nation-sized indignity interspersed with violent crime on the so called minorities. So-called because it was born out of an egregiously stupid misconception of Mr. Jinnah and that this exists in some three a four states because of courses other than religious. As the present situation in Bangladesh perfectly matches that of Nazi Germany except for the fact that even in the German spell of amnesia or insanity they gloried in its native brand of European culture, while the power that be in present day Bangladesh is doing all that it legitimately is capable of to erase wholesale the historically evolved three thousand-year- old native culture. A people without any history and culture that is what is wrought in Bangladesh through a spate of violence generated by the government, still fuelled by it but has gone completely out of its control. the Frankenstein that slays its master.

In 1971 as many as ninety-plus lakh fled to India. And perhaps each of them returned soon after December 16, the victory Day. If they had their way now, each of the twenty-plus million non Muslims would flee from post-July 15 Bangladesh and not even one would be persuaded to look back, not to speak of going back.

Why so? This time very close neighbours, living for generations close enough to be confused as being tribal blood brothers, attacked killed and raped and turned the inmates out of their homestead to spend nights of chilly winter and days of food and shelter less hunger. There has occurred a kind of dooms day the import of which has escaped both the pundits and politicians. Society, as sociologically and anthropologically understood, also as understood by Rabindranath, has ceased to be in thousands of minority pockets. Who would return to a non-society? Not even an animal. It is inconceivable that a victim would return to the present kind of Bangladesh. It is social norms that makes a community or village possible. As cities take over new areas of purity and green, law takes over slowly as the keeper of society. Even in cities the last word in bonding millions, complete strangers to one another into harmonious living-in spite of the laws-is social values. Values men are born into and live by the whole life. That thing of supreme and fundamental importance to humankind has had a complete collapse in Bangladesh as a whole and the thousand minority pockets in particular.

Even in the death camps of Auswitz Buchenwald, Treblinka, immersed as the inmates, children and oldies, young men and women, were in sure and ghastly death in furnaces and gas chamber, any hour, any moment, the victims stood the test of yawning fangs of death with stupendous examples of humanity. In Bangladesh things happened through near and dear ones that completely despaired the victims and they were bereft of all sense of courage and humanity. It is the faces that befuddled them out of every human attribute-faces of a brother or a nephew, or even a grandson, raping a sister or an aunt or even a grandma. Faces beating up even murdering brothers and uncles and grandpas. And it was not any case of momentary insanity. It was beginning of an interminable blackmail, one must pay manifold one’s earnings or savings or perish. In hundreds of cases some member of the house, a wife or a daughter, was kidnapped and held at ransom by the known and loved faces. After this what to expect? Courage and dignity? Resistance?

This is the crime against humanity of the first and worst order. How to make a recovery from this and when? The minorities will perhaps live on somehow, here or elsewhere. How would the criminals live, mired thoroughly by their sense of guilt? How we, the rest of the citizenry would live with them in a society of crimes? Criminals that were till the other day quite normal beings healthy both in body and mind. Who lured them into such inhumanity. Why isn’t administration moving again these dastardly lost? Why is police sheltering them and refusing to enter charges brought by the victims.. In many cases the victims themselves have been penalized for the stupidity or insolence of going to police-by the police. How came all these? In six months both civil administration and law enforcing agencies hate been turned into nincompoops. These are all being made to serve not the Republic but the party. The how of it we know. But the why of it would elude all sane and capable people. This price is just to ride to power? 

The truth must be out. And the criminals resisted, socially and through law and punishment. Social resistance will mainly be effective through cultural resistance. Books and songs and plays must expose this most heinous crime against humanity. But resistance has also to be positive-in making our land and culture, its history and ideals known to all and in all integrity. A love of nature and man in general and Bangladesh’s own people and their environment in particular must be widely cultivated and inculcated specially into the young minds. 

I do not expect to be cured of two nightmares that come to me whenever I lower guard and become complacent-the curse of my people, the Bengalees. Before sunset and it gets dark, the girls in a Nikli village and vicinity go down to the great water body by the thana and dip themselves shoulder deep, taking care not to drown. The whole night is spent in that fashion, for months on end. Just to save themselves from the rapist’s lust or the kidnapper’s muscles. Those heads of young and comely belles jutting above water, a little popping up and down with waves thudding against the beautiful and awed bodies-all night, till the first lights break.

The second nightmare, immensely more sad, borders on the lurid. One feels to kill oneself after knowing it. A horde enters a house and lands the landlady, a kind of aunt. After molesting to their libido’s content they head for the young daughter. The mother implores them, Please go to her in twos or threes. Please, be kind, don’t rush her, She is so small. Hardly past ten.