Serajul Islam Choudhury

1971 changed many things including politics, though not as radically as was expected to. The hope cultivated was that the state would change, making way for a social revolution of democratic nature. The state did, of course, change; it was no longer to be perceived as an enemy of the people. But that perception remained unfortunately, limited to a small and fortunate ruling class and did not reach the public, to whom the state remained as antagonistic as before.

The independence of 1947 was patently incomplete inasmuch as it had failed to give the people of East Pakistan their expected economic and cultural freedom. A new struggle was, therefore, inevitable; and it did begin in 1952, culminating in the liberation war of 1971, putting an and to the rule by the civil-military clique of West Pakistanis. In the new dispensation, those who had led the liberation struggle, the rising Bengali bourgeois, found itself suddenly free, those above it having left.

The bourgeoisie was quick to occupy all the vacant places, and turn itself into new rulers, behaving in no way differently from those who had been forced out.

Politics, which is essentially about state power, became the prerogative of the new ruling class, which continued to be powerful with the increase in its acquisition of state-control.

Very soon politics turned into a struggle within the ruling class itself, comprising the politicians, civil and military bureaucracy, tradesmen and professionals, with the common man remaining where he was before. The rulers were bent upon, as was only natural for them to do, consolidating their hold on state power and began to impose autocratic rule through the elective as well as bureaucratic machinery. And what was even impossible to imagine in 1971, really happened; military occupation came into being, one after another. Government changed, but the politics of aggrandizement continued to be both relentless and naked. The anarchy encountered and complained of today is primarily a product of the plundering enterprises of the unhindered ruling class.

The state of Bangladesh has not failed it has, indeed, thrived, remaining bureaucratic in form and capitalistic in content as it was before giving the Bengali rulers opportunities to get rich. But the founding of a state by the Bengalis was not without a profound political significance, which was the discarding of the so-called two-nation theory on which the state of Pakistan was based. Having resolved the national question, the politics after 1971 should have aimed at the resolution of the most vital class question which had so long remained subordinated to the national question of the relationship between the Bangalis as a nation and the non-Bangali rulers of Pakistan. But the bourgeois had quite naturally, no interest in confronting the class question. Fearing such a confrontation would eventually lead to a social revolution, which they knew, people expected to happen after the war and to which expectation the ruling class had to bend itself backwards, even if unwillingly, while framing the constitution of the new country. The inclusion of socialism among the four state-principles was not an imposition from above, its necessity had arisen from within. But the bourgeois did not, as it could not, believe in that principle, and had, therefore, no hesitation whatsoever in throwing it overboard at the earliest opportunity.

The newly opened-up class relationship should have been the basis of politics after 1971. And indeed it did become so; but in a totally negative rather than positive way. The people in general saw and felt the necessity of a change in that relationship, because for them liberation was not more than a catchword without emancipation from subjugation by the rich and the powerful. But they did not have the political party to fight for their cause. The rulers, on the other hand, were, despite the quarrels amongst themselves, organised in the matter of safeguarding their class interests and united in their understanding that rise of people's politics would bring all of them down, irrespective of their political affiliations. To obfuscate the issue of class antagonism and divert the attention of the discontented public, they introduced ideas of Bangladeshi nationalism, promoted the use of religion in politics, encouraged madrasha education, marginalised the religious and ethnic minorities, and, what is more, repressed the leftist and left-learning political parties. The media, controlled as it is by the bourgeoisie, denied information about these parties to the public.

Without exception, every segment of bourgeois politicians believes in, and is working for, the promotion of the capitalist ideology and interests. Needless to say that the ideology of capitalism is more pervasive and influential than the backward-looking and discarded two-nation theory could ever have been. Capitalism is, by its very nature, exploitative. It creates alienation and self-centredness; makes the individual turn into a being which eventually becomes not only unsocial but positively anti-social. Corruption is rooted in its very essence. Under it, inequality rises and patriotism declines, in inverse proportion. Unemployment, despair, insecurity and drug-addiction are peculiar, and unavoidable, gifts of the capitalist system.

The rulers here need, as much as those in erstwhile Pakistan did, masters for themselves and they have found their masters ready at hand in the capitalist world led by the Americans. Everyone in that would had opposed the founding of Bangladesh for fear that it would go under the control of the extremists, meaning, of course, the leftists. The rulers today compete with each other in winning favour from the capitalist countries. Their surrender is total. In pursuing the harmful guidance of institutions like the World Bank and IMF, the ruling class has found it fit to transfer state owned industrial enterprises to private hands, leading most of them to ruination. This class has privatised many of our social properties and is collaborating with trans-national corporate bodies in handing over our mineral resources, electricity management, the Chittagong port and even archaeological artefacts to foreign powers. Thanks to their machination, the patriotic politics of 1971 has turned full circle, in the reverse gear. The collective dream of building a new society has been shattered and trodden by dreams of personal property. The Islamist extremist outfit, which was created to face the 'exigency' of the socialist movement, has turned, in the absence of the socialists, against its own creators.

1971 was an uprising of the entire people. It had its beginning long ago, indeed in the revolutionary uprising of the sepoys in 1857. Since then politics in the sub-continent has moved in two parallel and really antagonistic channels -- the one of bourgeois petitions and protests, and the other of a determined struggle for a social revolution. Owing to obvious historical reasons and state patronisation, the bourgeois stream flourished to the detriment of the one carried on by the anti-imperialist revolutionaries.

The liberation war of 1971 represented a stage in the revolutionary struggle but was halted before it could reach the goal of democratising the state and society through the ensuring of equality of rights and opportunities for all, decentralisation of power and rule by elected representatives in all spheres. This happened because the leadership was taken over by the bourgeois nationalists and not by the leftists, who, on their part, had failed to realise that during the days of Pakistan the principal contradiction was between the state and the Bengali people, and that the class question could not be brought to the fore without the resolution of the national question.

The nationalists have done what they wanted to do and were capable of doing; but the leftists have not been able to carry the nationalist uprising further ahead to the goal of achieving real democracy. That in brief, constitutes the scenario of politics after 1971 and accounts for many of our miseries.