Fear of truth in post-uprising Bangladesh

Shahidul Alam / Drik

by Saydia Gulrukh

A year ago, on July 30, a policeman, unable to bear the police atrocities on students, resigned. That night, I wrote in my notebook, the house of terror is crumbling. The tyrant fled the country, but the house is still crumbling, not fallen. Fear of truth prevails.

I

On July 36, after a rather unreal day, from a violent encounter with the police near the Science Laboratory intersection to the jubilant Shahbagh in Dhaka, when I first saw the image of the deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country in a military plane, my heart skipped a beat in anger and disbelief. She must face justice in this land for killing our children. How could the civil-military intelligence negotiate her way out to India? I felt a sting of betrayal. A year later, the question lingers, but the deep state never reveals. It presents a version of reality and instructs us to believe it.

II

Enlarged photographs of Shahbagh framed in July corners sprouting across the country show people’s power. These images reveal as much as they hide. They hide Shima Akter, resilient and brave, a July leader, slowly falling on the ground in front of the National Museum because her friend, Shakil, a young artist and defiant leader of the Bangladesh Student’s Federation (Ganasanhati Andolon), had just died. Shakil endured a bullet injury on July 35 (August 4, 2024). A journalist, injured and limping, still walking with the people, mumbling — why would they kill so many people in the morning if she were to resign in the afternoon? The seams of his shirt were blood-stained. He saw many bullet-hit bodies at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital morgue that morning. Some people were offering roses to the members of the Bangladesh Army patrolling the streets, protecting the Shahbagh thana. Bearing witness to such a moment was uncomfortable, disorienting. It wasn’t a perfect victory walk.

I wanted to mark my discomfort. The last few days of the uprising, I carried a jar of chilli powder, a can of spray paint, and a permanent marker — our ammunition against a deadly regime. A friend wrote Kalpana Chakma’s name on my face. Then I wrote her name on a few of my friends. We marched towards the Prime Minister’s Office, singing and chanting. Sweat from our excitement and exhaustion wiped her name off my face, but the question remained. In the emerging political moment, do we finally get to know the full truth of Kalpana Chakma’s enforced disappearance? Can the repressed truth finally find its wing?

III

Kalpana Chakma, a fierce and uncompromising voice from the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the then general secretary of the Hill Women’s Federation, was abducted from her home at New Lalyaghona in Rangamati by a group of men, ‘allegedly’ including an army officer, Lieutenant Ferdous Kaiser Khan. Kalpana’s brother, Kalindi Kumar Chakma, her family, and her comrades indefatigably carried the political work of remembering — retelling, recounting memories of the night of the abduction on June 12, 1996. Protracted legal battle, legal denial failed to tire her brother out. His unmoved pursuit for justice kept Kalpana’s story of courage and defiance alive in our public memory. In post-uprising Bangladesh, her name adorns the walls across the country. And thus, when we seek truth, it is not that we do not know what happened. We demand acknowledgement of the suffering that her family and community endured since 1996.

Her family has been living under state surveillance for nearly three decades now. In June 2009, after a public protest at Baghaichari, Rangamati, Kalindi Kumar Chakma told me, ‘I have learnt from the tragic mistake that I need to keep a record of every encounter that we have with the military, the BDR [now Border Guard Bangladesh], and the police.’ For a while, he kept a log of nearly every time either he had to visit the zone commander or the latter paid him a visit at his house. Then there are court hearings that he had to attend. He kept a log of court dates as well. During the Covid pandemic, when he was unable to attend court hearings for three consecutive dates, the judge scorned him. Never in the past three decades had the prime accused to appear before court. The burden has been unequal, but a dissident’s ledger never allowed the military account on her enforced disappearance to settle, to rule.

IV

War on truth is bound to be unequal. It became evident when the military account of the abduction steered the legal proceedings. On July 22, 1996, as the campaign for justice drew national and international attention, the Bangladesh Army issued a press statement on the abduction of Kalpana Chakma. Locals say that the statement was also rained on in the CHT from a helicopter. I read an abridged version of the statement published in the Daily Bhorer Kagoj (July 24, 1996, also published in Kalpana Chakma’s Diary, pages 110-114). It is long and demands detailed scholarly and activist attention, but I will focus on the instructive tone of the statement. It was issued with the objective ‘to dispel any suspicion that surfaced’ and ‘in the interest of full scrutiny of the incident’ [of the abduction] and summarily concluded that the abduction may have been related to the political dispute over supporting an independent candidate for the parliamentary election and squarely blamed the ‘upajatiyo santrashis (sub-national terrorists)’, in other words, political leaders of her own community. The last paragraph reads:

The sooner the mystery surrounding Chakma’s alleged kidnapping is solved, the better. The 24th Infantry Battalion of Chittagong has already announced a reward of Tk 50,000 for anyone who finds Kalpana Chakma. Finally, an earnest request to everyone, without knowing the details of the incident, to refrain from doing anything or making statements that could undermine the image of the security forces tasked with maintaining the integrity and sovereignty of the country in the hills. [Author’s translation and italics]

Read together, the objective of the statement and the ‘earnest request’ in the concluding line come as an instruction, an order to negate all other accounts that indicated that the abduction of Kalpana Chakma was an early case of enforced disappearance under the Awami League rule. It discourages questions. It tells everyone what they don’t know, even if it’s a negation of lived experience. An Ain O Salish Kendra team visited the site of abduction on July 2, 1996, and spoke with the people of New Lalyaghana, the local police, the district administrator, and the Brigade Command office. Their visit could, as the instruction of the press statement goes, only result in not knowing. The most important knowledge to survive the violence of the modern state, as Michael Taussig (1999) said, is to know what not to know. Olive coloured truth indeed comes as a silencing force.

V

In October 2024, I am sitting next to Kalindi Kumar Chakma in the small and crowded chamber of a lawyer in the Rangamati District Court. The case had already been dismissed in April that year. It will possibly be the first hearing date for a review petition to the dismissal order filed with the Chief Judicial Magistrate court. Kalpana’s brother reminds me, Nobel Laureate Dr Mohammad Yunus, now the chief adviser of the interim government, expressed his concern about the abduction of Kalpana Chakma at the time (Jay Jay Din, July 26, 1996). He asks in anticipation. Access to justice for him remains the same. Date after date, hearing does not take place — October 2024, February 2025, June 2025.

The tyrant is long gone but left the house of terror behind — the system of terrorising truth is yet to come undone.

Saydia Gulrukh is an assistant editor at New Age.