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| Mahatma Gandhi in Noakhali in 1946. On Friday, Bangladesh security forces were protecting the Gandhi Ashram in Noakhali |
Dhaka, March 1: She is so young and so delicate she cannot stand in a jostling crowd, but she can publicly call for the hanging of men.
Held in a guardian’s arms, 9-year-old Ipsita took centre stage and the microphone at Shahbag this evening, where the people have been assembling for three weeks to demand the death sentence for the war criminals of 1971.
An image of delicate danger herself, Ipsita chants rhythmically: “Ai chhelera, ai meyera, Shahabagey aay… ( boys and girls, come to Shahbag).”
And the crowd responds: “Rajakar’er phaansi hobey Sonar Bangla’y (Rajakars — traitors — will be hanged in Golden Bengal).”
No one here has thought her too young to be introduced to the idea of executions. Such is the paradox in Bangladesh’s resurgent new politics that children demand death over a public address system and the men who feel targeted loot and plunder in fearful panic.
Both happen because of a connect with a present history, a connect that is organic, though 42 years may be too long for some and yet recent for others.
Around the time that Ipsita was raising slogans from a guardian’s arms in Shahbag, police were opening fire to keep away mobs in Noakhali who were protesting violently against the death sentence to “Delu Dalal” passed on Thursday.
The police and the paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) were protecting the Gandhi Ashram in Noakhali, the district in southeastern Bangladesh that India’s Father of the Nation visited historically after a wave of killings.
“The police have been here to protect us since last evening,” the director of the Gandhi Ashram Trust, Nabakumar Raha, told The Telegraph over telephone.
“We hope nothing will happen. I know the police had to open fire in Sonaimuri, the upazilla where our ashram is located, a short while back. We have also held meetings with local political leaders — including those of the Jamaat — and they are assuring us that the Gandhi Ashram will not be attacked. But there are villages we work in where houses and places of worship have been destroyed. We have been distributing food to the victims,” Nabakumar Raha said.
The wave of violence sweeping Bangladesh since the death sentence was announced on Thursday afternoon on the Jamaat’s Nayeb-e-Amir, Delwar Hossein Sayedee, has so far claimed about 50 lives.
In a repeat of past patterns of unrest, Bangladesh is also going through a wave of general strikes. The main Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader, Begum Khaleda Zia, who returned from Singapore yesterday, has called for a hartal on Tuesday “to protest against the explosive situation in the country”.
The BNP’s alliance partner, the Jamaat-e-Islami that had sponsored a bandh call on Thursday, has issued another for Sunday and Monday.
In Shahbag, the spokesperson of the Ganajagoron Manch, Imran H. Sarker, issued an appeal to foil the strikes “that have been called to protect the war criminals”.
The International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) set up by the Bangladesh government is set to give its verdict on nine more accused of crimes against humanity in 1971.
Among the accused are two BNP leaders, Aleem Choudhary, who was a minister under Zia Ur Rahman, and Salahuddin Qader Choudhary, BNP vice-chairman. The three sentenced so far were Jamaat leaders.
Ironically, the investigation under the ICT could also target a leader of the ruling Awami League of Prime Minister Hasina Wajed. Mobarak Hossein is likely to be tried on charges of murder, genocide, abduction and confinement of pro-liberation supporters in 1971 at Brahmanberia. The ICT may hear his case on March 11.
BNP leader Khaleda Zia alleged that the Awami League-led government “had divided the people in a planned way”. She said the ICT would not get international acceptability.
That is already in question with the UK and the US stopping short of fully endorsing the creation of the tribunal and international organisations like the Human Rights Watch questioning if it meets global standards for trying war crimes.
There is little doubt that the creation of the tribunal and the verdicts on the war criminals are informed by the protests in Dhaka’s streets. Whether that will lead to restorative justice or to retributive justice is yet to be mapped.
“As judges of this tribunal,” wrote Justice A.T.M. Fazle Kabir in the verdict on “Delu Rajakar”, “we firmly hold and believe in the doctrine that ‘justice in the future cannot be achieved unless injustice of the past is addressed’”.
In Shahbag, that resonates.
“We need to shed the burden of responsibility we have inherited from our parents’ generation. They defeated the Pakistani forces in 1971 for which they have paid a high price. Can we not rid ourselves and create a Rajakar-free Bangladesh where the fundamentalists have fattened themselves for 42 years?” wonders Imran H. Sarker, the chief spokesperson for the protesters.
The protesters have been labelled “atheists” and “blasphemers” by the Jamaat and its supporters.
Sarker and his associates have called for another round of public rallies in universities tomorrow to mark the anniversary of the month in which the first call for Independence was given by Bangladesh’s founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (March 26, 1971).
“We have just got a historic verdict,” Sarker says into the microphone. “It is a verdict of the people of this country against the hyenas of the Jamaat-Shibir (Chhattro Shibir is the students’ wing of the Jamaat) and now we have to ensure that we protect our minority communities,” he appeals.
The Azaan rings out from the Baitul Mukarram Mosque for the evening prayers and many in the crowd leave for namaaz. Sarker must pause.
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