M. Serajul Islam
Imran H Sarker’s (IHS) brief tryst with history and glory is over but his downfall may not be a wasted one. There was at least one immediate outcome. One of his erstwhile guardians in the Ganajagan Mancha’s (GM) heydays said after his fall in a TV interview that the last one year has proved that in this country, there cannot be any politics without religion!
He and his secular friends were busy spreading the news that Bangladesh was on way to becoming a secular state where religion (Islam) would not be allowed a public space when the Mancha was to the AL led Government special and worthy of the highest attention. One of his comrades, albeit an elder one, even went to the extent and said; before the GM collapsed, that Bangladesh would cease to be a Muslim state and become a secular one!
It is true that the GM had captured the imagination of the nation when it suddenly emerged on the political scene. It is true that the vast majority of the people were very angry because Qader Mollah had been spared the gallows while Bacchu Razakar had been sentenced to die. It is also true that the Mancha had articulated the sentiments of the people in favour of the war crimes trials. These truths notwithstanding, the Mancha was never what it was made to be; it was never a movement where the Projonmo ever had the potentials or the control to lead the county to fulfil the objectives for which millions had sacrificed their lives in 1971. There were too many palpable flaws in the movement to ever reach the lofty heights that the media had predicted it would.
Ganajagaran Mancha’s demise
A new group has relieved IHS of his role as the Spokesman of the GM. Before and after he was relieved, he blamed the government for talking with Jamaat secretly and promised to lead the GM differently and independently of the government. The new group that replaced IHS has blamed him for failing to lead the GM, charging him of financial embezzlement. IHS has served the death sentence for the Mancha’s future by going against the government. In fact, his predicament and that of his followers would now be no better than if the Chatra Dal/Jubo Dal were to take over the GM. The new group that has been named has the ruling party’s imprint so largely written all over it that the people would have no reason to believe that the GM would be any different than the Chatra League or Jubo League.
The GM for all practical purpose is now history. It is however sad that it ended this way because the people had expected so much from the movement. Therefore it is a matter of obligation for those who write about politics and history of the country to look at the GM and find out answers for the people about what went wrong. With curtains down on the GM, it is time to find the palpable flaws in the movement and ask why the flaws had not been revealed and the people were kept in darkness. It was the duty of the media to expose these flaws and therefore it is the media’s primary responsibility for keeping the people in the dark.
The media did not look into the background of the young men and women who gathered out of nowhere as soon as Qader Mollah was given the reprieve from the gallows. It did not inquire why these youth who started by chanting slogans against the ICT and the government changed their slogans and chanted new ones that started with the spirit of 1971 and death to those under trial at the ICT but slowly and surely turned against the Jamat at first and then against the BNP. The media also failed to inquire and find out that amongst those in the GM who were part of a well know group in the Internet who loved humiliating Islam and Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). In fact, had the media questioned before it was too late it would have found out that some of those had been reprimanded in a Dhaka court for anti-Islam postings in their blogs. In that event, it could have saved the GM from its slide after just a few days of glory on the issue of Islam.Instead, the media grossly underestimated the strength of Islam in Bangladesh and instead pushed all these issues under the rug, particularly the anti-Islam bloggers and their postings.
Media’s intentional failure
In retrospect, the media’s failure was not unintentional. Unfortunately for the GM, the pro-BNP newspaper Amar Desh published the offensive postings that it picked on the Internet where it had gone viral and made it public knowledge. The postings were so unbelievably offensive that people deserted the GM as fast as they had gone there when the offensive postings became public. The media went into denial with the way people deserted the GM following the publication of the postings in Amar Desh. In fact, the electronic media misused technology to show that people were still with the GM and had not deserted it when in fact most of them had left it and a section of the print media turned a blind eye to such distortions.
The media’s more serious failures were that it turned a blind eye to the presence of the well-known cultural activists with deep links to the ruling party in the GM. These individuals were seen on live TV guiding the GM leaders. In fact, they became the self-appointed guardians and were with it all the time as if it was their movement. The media did not ask why they were glued to the GM when they were old enough to be the fathers and grandfathers of the Shahabag youth. Instead the media in league with them glorified the GM as a movement of the new generation that would relieve the country from its political and moral ills. The media also did not reveal that these individualso had an agenda of their own and was using the GM to fulfil it, namely, to banish the public face of Islam in Bangladesh in the name of secularism.
The leading media’s other major failure was not exposing the way the AL led government took control of the movement once the AL cultural activists had delivered the Mancha to its laps. The media turned a blind eye to the hands of the ruling party in bringing the crowds to Shahabag; to arranging the huge finance that was required to keep the GM going; to providing the security for the it and its leaders; to pampering and turning the GM leaders, in particular IHS, into adorable national heroes. The media did not ask why the government was taking orders from the GM, changing laws and doing its every bidding. Even if the media had played its role partly as an honest broker, it would have exposed that the government was using the GM openly and blatantly for its political objectives and not at all secretly.
GM served a purpose
The nation was hardly surprised that the GM has collapsed. To most of the people, it really existed at best for 2 weeks till the anti-Islam blogs became public. For the rest of the period till its inglorious end with accusations of financial embezzlement and alleged flirtations with anti-liberation elements, the GM was kept going by the combined efforts of the AL government and the media for achieving the political objectives of the ruling party. Nevertheless the GM did not really fail the people but not the way its leaders and the ruling party and its cultural allies wanted or expected. The GM by its rise and fall has established that to the overwhelming majority of people of Bangladesh, Islam is of the essence and that secularism can co-exist with it but not at its expense.
The lack of even a murmur at the downfall of the GM from the people has further established and strengthened the case of Islam. The cultural activist who said in the media that in Bangladesh there couldn’t be politics without religion has underlined that the efforts of the secular forces to use the GM to push Islam from public domain allowing secularism unchallenged acceptance in public life has not succeeded. The way the Jamat has resurged as witnessed in the upazilla lections has also established how important Islam is to the people of Bangladesh. People supported the Jamaat in large numbers not because of any love for the party’s politics but because they wanted to register their protest against the ruling party for allowing the GM to humiliate Islam. The discussions in political circles that the ruling party is now talking with the Jamaat, even if a baseless rumour, underlines that Islam as a political force in Bangladesh is now stronger than before and that this is not due to the fundamentalist forces such as the Jamaat. Perhaps in all these, the country may in the end benefit because the secular forces that were determined to fight Islam to the end, will now know how impossible their case is. The fall of the GM therefore has helped the country avert the possibility of a dangerous civil conflict and given the country the opportunity to let Islam and secularism co-exist as the two did over the centuries.
All united for war crime trial
The curtain over the GM has finally fallen. After all the sound and fury, it has only the head of Qader Mollah to show as achievement without a whimper. Â In that too, the circumstances under which he was hanged could some day return to haunt the nation that was as united on the issue of the war crimes trials and demand for capital punishment for the accused as it was in 1971.That unity was squandered because the GM allowed itself to be used by the ruling party for its political ends with the media as a collaborator. The final moments of the hanging of Qader Mollah, when Ministers participated live before TV in the count down left many wondering whether Qader Mollah was hanged in the due process of the law after all.
The writer is a retired career Ambassador. His email is ambserajulislam@gmail.com
Source: Weekly Holiday
