Today the leadership of the Awami League is unhappy that a statue symbolizing justice stands before the Supreme Court. The ruling party is upset that the statue is a chaos arising out of a mixture of Greek and Bengali elements, the Greek being Lady Justice, the Bengali being the sari she is clad in.
Not many years ago, the Prime Minister roundly condemned the Hifazat-e-Islam outfit over its patently regressive thirteen-point programme. Of late, the Prime Minister has been hosting the very same Hifazat men at Ganobhaban and telling them, to their evident happiness, that she does not like the statue before the Supreme Court. The statue, says she, should go or should be covered — because where it stands gives the faithful at the nearby Eidgah grounds a clear view of it; and therefore is it an invitation to apostasy.
The head of government is miffed that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court did not consult anyone, meaning anyone in the government, before agreeing to have the statue come up where it has. That begs the question: Isn’t the Chief Justice the embodiment of the independence of the judiciary and is therefore beholden to no one in his acts and decisions?
A week ago, Minister Obaidul Quader informed us that the Awami League government was not capitulating to the religious hardliners, that it was not in appeasement mode. Really? The facts point to the contrary.
A few days ago, a ruling party lawmaker in Narayanganj, sharing the stage in public with some Hifazat men, loudly proclaimed that the outfit had not been involved in the mayhem which took the nation’s capital city hostage on a day in May not many years ago. He did not explain why then the Awami League government had sent the security forces into flushing the unruly Hifazat adherents out of town between midnight and the advent of dawn.
No one in the ruling Awami League has explained to the nation the rationale behind the mutilation of the textbooks our children study in school, a pernicious job done under pressure from the purveyors of bigotry. No one has told us why communalism is being injected into our children’s education.
The ruling Awami League, putatively a secular political party, was happy to have the Islamic Foundation celebrate recently, in glory and with huge fanfare, its forty-second founding anniversary. What message was given out through that celebration? Will the Hindus, Christians and Buddhists inhabiting the land as citizens ever come by an opportunity to sing praises of their deities and divinities in equal measure?
Today the bigots demand a removal of the statue that stands before the Supreme Court. If the ruling Awami League caves in to the demand, this secular Bengali nation will stand humiliated, the three million martyrs of 1971 will have dishonour thrown their way.
If today the statue of justice goes, tomorrow the voices of medievalism will demand that the Shaheed Minar be torn down, the National Memorial at Savar be blown up, the Aparajeyo Bangla at Dhaka University be removed.
Art will go into exile. Poetry will cease to exist. The ghosts of Khwaja Shahabuddin and Ayub Khan will return, to demand that Rabindranath Tagore be sent packing again.
And here is our grievance, loud and clear: this is not the Awami League we know. The party we have identified with for ages is another Awami League, the party which gave us a secular, liberal Bangladesh on a beautiful December afternoon long ago. Where is that Awami League today?
Give us back the Awami League of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, of Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, of Shamsul Haq.
Give us back the Awami League that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad forged in the 1960s through to the 1970s.
Give us back the Awami League Sheikh Hasina took charge of in the 1980s and led to electoral triumph in the 1990s.
But do not give us the Awami Muslim League again.
Dhaka, April 26 (www.bdnews,24.com): In the mid 1950s, the Awami Muslim League, having come upon the noble idea that the future of democracy in Pakistan rested on a turning away from communalism and toward secular politics, reinvented itself as the Awami League.
As the Awami League, it went into a long struggle for autonomy, for free elections, for a dismantling of the One Unit in West Pakistan, for a Six-Point based concept of Pakistan as a state and, finally, for the liberation of East Pakistan as the sovereign People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, seeking to strike a middle ground in national politics, the Awami League decided that in the space between the emotive and popularly accepted ideas of Joi Bangla and Joi Bangabandhu, it was quite in order to bring in a religious inscription, part of the belief of the principal religious community in the country, on its posters.
That was the earliest of signs that the Awami League was on its way to a reconfiguring of its position vis-à-vis the place of religion in politics on the national political canvas. If the move was made to draw the votes of the religious right to its corner of the field, it did not quite work.
Today the leadership of the Awami League is unhappy that a statue symbolizing justice stands before the Supreme Court. The ruling party is upset that the statue is a chaos arising out of a mixture of Greek and Bengali elements, the Greek being Lady Justice, the Bengali being the sari she is clad in.
Not many years ago, the Prime Minister roundly condemned the Hifazat-e-Islam outfit over its patently regressive thirteen-point programme. Of late, the Prime Minister has been hosting the very same Hifazat men at Ganobhaban and telling them, to their evident happiness, that she does not like the statue before the Supreme Court. The statue, says she, should go or should be covered — because where it stands gives the faithful at the nearby Eidgah grounds a clear view of it; and therefore is it an invitation to apostasy.
The head of government is miffed that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court did not consult anyone, meaning anyone in the government, before agreeing to have the statue come up where it has. That begs the question: Isn’t the Chief Justice the embodiment of the independence of the judiciary and is therefore beholden to no one in his acts and decisions?
A week ago, Minister Obaidul Quader informed us that the Awami League government was not capitulating to the religious hardliners, that it was not in appeasement mode. Really? The facts point to the contrary.
A few days ago, a ruling party lawmaker in Narayanganj, sharing the stage in public with some Hifazat men, loudly proclaimed that the outfit had not been involved in the mayhem which took the nation’s capital city hostage on a day in May not many years ago. He did not explain why then the Awami League government had sent the security forces into flushing the unruly Hifazat adherents out of town between midnight and the advent of dawn.
No one in the ruling Awami League has explained to the nation the rationale behind the mutilation of the textbooks our children study in school, a pernicious job done under pressure from the purveyors of bigotry. No one has told us why communalism is being injected into our children’s education.
The ruling Awami League, putatively a secular political party, was happy to have the Islamic Foundation celebrate recently, in glory and with huge fanfare, its forty-second founding anniversary. What message was given out through that celebration? Will the Hindus, Christians and Buddhists inhabiting the land as citizens ever come by an opportunity to sing praises of their deities and divinities in equal measure?
Today the bigots demand a removal of the statue that stands before the Supreme Court. If the ruling Awami League caves in to the demand, this secular Bengali nation will stand humiliated, the three million martyrs of 1971 will have dishonour thrown their way.
If today the statue of justice goes, tomorrow the voices of medievalism will demand that the Shaheed Minar be torn down, the National Memorial at Savar be blown up, the Aparajeyo Bangla at Dhaka University be removed.
Art will go into exile. Poetry will cease to exist. The ghosts of Khwaja Shahabuddin and Ayub Khan will return, to demand that Rabindranath Tagore be sent packing again.
And here is our grievance, loud and clear: this is not the Awami League we know. The party we have identified with for ages is another Awami League, the party which gave us a secular, liberal Bangladesh on a beautiful December afternoon long ago. Where is that Awami League today?
Give us back the Awami League of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, of Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, of Shamsul Haq.
Give us back the Awami League that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad forged in the 1960s through to the 1970s.
Give us back the Awami League Sheikh Hasina took charge of in the 1980s and led to electoral triumph in the 1990s.
But do not give us the Awami Muslim League again.
(The featured image at the top is that of the controversial Lady of Justice statue in front of the Bangladesh Suprme Court in Dhaka)
