OPED | Thursday, November 26, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Triumph of Justice
Hiranmay Karlekar
Gallows for Mujib’s killers will end a dark chapter
Bangladesh Supreme Court’s confirmation of the death sentence passed on former Armymen who were among those who killed the nation’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, on August 15, 1975, is a landmark event. Along with him, the murderers killed all but two members of his family, Sheikh Hasina and her sister Sheikh Rehana, who were abroad. This was a sinister crime irrespective of the identity of the victims.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a charismatic leader who had led his people to freedom. This and the fact that his assassination was followed by 15 years of military dictatorship and a serious attempt to destroy the secular nature of Bangladesh’s society, made it a crime against the entire people. Article 38 of 1972 Constitution, banning communal parties and organisations, was revoked in 1976 when Gen Zia-ur Rahman was Chief Martial Law Administrator. Later, as President, he removed, in 1977, the declaration in the same Constitution of secularism as a principle of state policy, and a definition of what secularism meant in practice.
Rehabilitation of the leaders and activists of the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and allied organisations, who had aided and abetted in the genocide of three million people and rape of thousands of women to squelch the fight against Pakistani colonialism, and murdered the country’s leading intellectuals, ran as a parallel process sharply underlined by the permission granted to Golam Azam, leader of those collaborating with Pakistani forces, to return to Bangladesh from where he had fled before liberation, and stay on illegally.
Gen Zia-ur Rahman and Gen HM Ershad, who became President a brief while after the former’s assassination on May 30, 1981, put Bangladesh on a course of Islamisation underlined by the 1988 declaration of Islam as the country’s state religion. Islamist fundamentalists became increasingly assertive and violent. The ouster of Gen Ershad in 1990 and the installation of an elected Government following the 1991 general election, brought no change. Begum Khaleda Zia allowed terrorist organisations to grow. The Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh was formed in 1992 and became active in promoting terrorism in Bangladesh and India. Meanwhile, Dhaka continued to harbour, train and arm terrorist groups from north-eastern India.
Sheikh Hasina tried to reverse the process during her first stint as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2001 but failed. Pro-Pakistan elements and Islamist fundamentalists allied with the Jamaat were strongly entrenched in the police, the Directorate-General of Forces Intelligence, the country’s all-powerful intelligence agency, the armed forces and the civil administration. The Prime Minister’s writ did not run beyond a point.
The 2001 parliamentary election and the formation of Government by a four-party coalition spearheaded by Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Jamaat, was followed by a relentless attempt to destroy the Awami League and the country’s civil society through murder and intimidation. A grenade attack on an Awami League rally in Dhaka on August 21, 2004, left 23 dead. Sheikh Hasina escaped by a whisker. The ISI had a free run of the country. Fundamentalist Islamist terrorist groups like the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, Ahl-e-Hadith Andolan Bangladesh and the Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh flourished until international pressure led to their banning on February 23, 2005. While they continued to function, the massive arms haul at Chittagong Port on April 2, 2004, underlined Bangladesh’s emergence as a major transit area for global arms smuggling, and its complicity in aiding Indian insurgent outfits.
The Supreme Court’s verdict is a striking symbol of the attempt to reverse the process which began with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s murder. It, however, needs to be followed by a trial of the collaborationist war criminals of 1971, the murderers of Awami League leaders in Dhaka jail on the night of November 3-4, 1975, those behind August 21, 2004 grenade attack and the landing of the arms seized in Chittagong. The perpetrators are all linked.
The mutiny by personnel of the Bangladesh Rifles in Dhaka in February—the trial of the accused has just begun — indicates the seriousness of the opposition Sheikh Hasina will face. She must not, however, relent. Her own survival, and the legacy of the liberation war and her father, are at stake. India needs to extend every assistance she needs. She is New Delhi’s best friend in South Asia.
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