REMEMBERING AGAINST FORGETTING Immodest reflections on independence
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by Azfar Hussain
Those who wax lyrical about oppression and injustice in the country and the world — while remaining silent about the questions of capital, empire, state, and class — may appear sympathetic to the oppressed, but in the final instance, they side with the oppressor and the unjust.—Maulana Bhasani
Did the morning breeze ever come? Where has it gone?Night weighs us down, it still weighs us down.Friends, come away from this false light. Come, we mustsearch for that promised Dawn.—Faiz Ahmed Faiz
MORE than five decades have passed since Bangladesh emerged as a distinct, independent state. And yet the soil of Bangladesh remains drenched in blood — flagrantly, relentlessly, and with a terrifying continuity that mocks the very promise of independence. It is the blood of workers and peasants, of women and children, of ethnic and religious minorities — of those who, in every meaningful sense, constitute the people. Pablo Neruda’s searing lines return to us not as metaphor but as indictment: ‘Come and see the blood in the streets.’
And we have seen it — again and again. We saw it under the fascist authoritarianism of the Awami League government since the regime of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself; we saw it during the July uprising; we saw it under the interim government; and we see it still, staining the present. The forms shift, the regimes change, the rhetoric mutates, but the blood remains. Not as an aberration, but as a structure. Not as an accident, but as history still being written.
A people’s history of Bangladesh has indeed been written in blood, though not always recorded, or even acknowledged, by those who claim to write ‘history’ in its professionalised form. For there are historians who celebrate heroes, and there are those — peasants, workers, subaltern subjects — who make history and keep it alive by telling and retelling their own stories. History, then, is not merely a matter of ‘time past;’ it is a terrain of struggle, a site of contestation over meaning, memory, and power.
Thus, the question persists, stubbornly and urgently: What is the significance of independence in Bangladesh today? And whither the emancipation of the people?
To approach this question, one must begin by rejecting the entrenched culture of hero worship that continues to dominate our political and historiographical imagination. History is not made by a handful of ‘extraordinary’ individuals, no matter how fervently they are deified. It is made by the people themselves. Mao’s formulation — lucid, direct — remains instructive: ‘The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.’
And yet, under the pressure of ideological apparatuses and partisan historiographies, history in Bangladesh has often been reduced to his-story — the story of men, their might, their myths. Women, in this narrative, are relegated to silence, to absence, to what Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night memorably captures as a ‘blank.’ But the struggle for freedom is also, and fundamentally, a struggle against such blanks — against forgetting itself. To historicise is to remember, and to remember is already to resist.
What we must remember, then, is this: the so-called independence of Pakistan in 1947, achieved through the anti-colonial struggle against British rule, did not inaugurate genuine freedom for the people of what would become East Pakistan. Rather, it opened another phase of domination — what may be described, in no uncertain terms, as a form of internal colonialism, structured by the uneven development of capitalism. The British rulers departed, but colonial structures, logics, and hierarchies remained intact, now mediated through the Pakistani state.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in his unforgettable poem, captured the disillusionment of that historical moment with searing clarity: ‘This is not that Dawn…’ The promise of freedom was deferred, distorted, betrayed.
IIFAIZ’S ‘false dawn’ continues to haunt our present. We inhabit a conjuncture in which leaders ‘polish their manner clean of suffering,’ while the night — heavy, oppressive — refuses to lift.
If one turns to the contemporary scenario in Bangladesh, one encounters not isolated aberrations but systemic patterns: brutal violence against women and other minorities, widespread dispossession, the plundering of financial institutions, the destruction of ecological resources such as the Sundarbans, unequal treaties with the US and others, and the relentless precarity of workers and peasants. These are not accidents of governance; they are historically produced outcomes of a political economy structured by exploitation and inequality.
But why does the promise of dawn remain deferred?
To answer this, one must return to the longer genealogy of struggle that precedes 1971. The Language Movement of 1952, often reduced to a cultural or linguistic struggle, must instead be understood as an overdetermined site where anti-colonial resistance and class struggle converged. Students, workers, and peasants mobilised not only against the imposition of Urdu as the sole state language but also against broader structures of economic exploitation and political marginalisation. The demand for linguistic recognition was inseparable from the demand for dignity, for participation, for self-determination.
This dialectic of language and labour, of culture and class, continued to unfold through a series of resistance movements: the United Front electoral upsurge of 1954, the education movement of 1962, the Six-Point Movement of 1966, and the mass uprising of 1969 against Ayub Khan’s dictatorship. Each of these moments intensified contradictions —between center and periphery, capital and labou, domination and resistance — laying the groundwork for the armed national liberation struggle of 1971.
The events of 1970 and 1971 marked a decisive rupture. The electoral victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League, followed by the Pakistani ruling elite’s refusal to transfer power, exposed the limits of constitutional politics under colonial domination. Mujib’s historic speech of March 7, 1971— declaring that ‘the struggle this time is the struggle for emancipation, the struggle this time is the struggle for independence’—articulated, in condensed form, the aspirations of millions.
Then came March 25: Operation Searchlight, the unleashing of genocidal violence by the Pakistani military. What followed was a nine-month war in which it was primarily the common, ordinary people — workers, peasants, students, and countless women — who bore the burden of resistance. Their land became their bodies; their bodies became their land. They fought not only against a military regime but against a structure of domination that was at once colonial, capitalist, militaristic, bureaucratic, and patriarchal.
The Liberation War, therefore, was not merely a nationalist struggle; it was also, in aspiration if not in fully realised outcome, an emancipatory project grounded in three principles: equality, social justice, and dignity. It also bore an unmistakable anti-imperial character, given the active opposition of US imperialism to Bangladesh’s liberation.
And this should come as no shock — though it remains a brazen betrayal of the very spirit of our independence movement — that the newly elected BNP government, in its foreign ministry’s recent statement on the imperialist war on Iran, refused to speak with clarity or courage. It would not call a spade a spade; it would not even name — much less condemn — the United States and Israel. Such silence is neither accidental nor neutral; it is deeply symptomatic. For the stubborn historical reality persists: since 1972, no government in Bangladesh has remained genuinely and adequately opposed to US imperialism — an imperial power that, let us not forget, actively opposed Bangladesh’s Liberation War, both diplomatically and militarily.IIIBUT what has happened to the three core principles enshrined in the Proclamation of Independence on April 10, 1971: Equality, Justice, and Human Dignity? To confront this question, one must examine the historical vectors and valences of post-independence Bangladesh. The transfer of state power in 1971 did not dismantle structures of domination; rather, it reconfigured them. One ruling class was replaced by another, while the war-ravaged economy became the site of systematic plunder, accumulation, and dispossession.
Bangladesh was decisively integrated into the global capitalist system, but in a position marked by dependency and uneven development. The economy became increasingly oriented toward extraction and plundering, rent-seeking, and accumulation by dispossession rather than equitable production. One might speak here of what I wish to call a conjunctural form of neo-primitive accumulation, in which wealth is concentrated in the hands of corrupt politicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats through mechanisms that are both legal and illicit, formal and informal.
Politically, the early promise of parliamentary democracy soon gave way to authoritarian tendencies, culminating in the establishment of a one-party state mutating into a historically determinate form of fascism. Even in subsequent decades, under different regimes, the fundamental structures of power have remained not only deeply undemocratic but also remained variously inflected by authoritarianism. Eqbal Ahmad’s notion of the ‘pathologies of power’ remains strikingly apt in describing this condition.
What has emerged over time is a political culture characterised by the commodification of politics, the militarisation of governance, the bureaucratisation of public life, the instrumentalisation of religion, and the steady autocratisation of the state. Politics has increasingly become a field of investment, transaction, and control, rather than a site of democratic participation. These developments point to what may be called politicide — the death of politics as a genuinely public, participatory, and emancipatory practice.
Such a political culture stands in stark contradiction to the foundational principles of the Liberation War. Equality remains elusive in a society marked by staggering inequalities of wealth and power. Justice is still denied to the marginalised. Dignity is systematically eroded under conditions of exploitation, patriarchy, and forms of internal colonialism to which minorities — ethnic, religious, linguistic, and sexual — are differentially and directly or indirectly, subjected.
Thus, liberation itself remains an unfinished project, the July uprising notwithstanding. Let me then turn to the dialectic between 1971 and the July uprising of 2024.
Reactionary voices, particularly the Awami League apologists and Jamaat-e-Islam have sought to set 1971 and 2024 against each other. Yet history refuses such crude oppositions. Although the two events are by no means equal on scale and in scope, the July uprising repeatedly brought to the fore the unfulfilled promises of 1971 — equality, social justice, and human dignity — thereby reinscribing and centralising the very spirit of independence in its discourse.
It was, by any measure, the largest mass uprising in Bangladesh’s history. With nearly 1,500 martyrs, it inaugurated a special political ‘moment’ in the Gramscian sense: a politically unaffiliated, student-led movement dismantled an entrenched fascist autocracy and forced Sheikh Hasina’s flight. Its significance lies not only in its outcome but in its form — a decentralised, non-hierarchical mobilisation that testified to the creative energy and collective resolve of youth and the wider populace. Its immediate success was built upon years of accumulated struggles — often thwarted, yet generative of political consciousness and insurgent will. To dismiss such an uprising as ‘conspiracy,’ or to reduce it to Jamaati maneuvering, is not interpretation but distortion — an affront to history and to the people whose blood and bodies made it possible. This was no single political party’s uprising; it belonged to the people themselves.
That uprising — of which I was a direct, unrepentant participant — reclaimed the foundational principles of 1971, long betrayed by successive regimes. It also shattered the Awami League’s cynical binary of ‘freedom fighter’ versus ‘razakar,’ laying bare its authoritarian logic and opportunist deployment. It is no accident that the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement repeatedly declared: ‘A new Bangladesh will be built through the student-citizen uprising — one where equality, justice, and human dignity will prevail.’ That declaration must be held onto — despite the many misguided steps of the incompetent interim government and amid ongoing turbulence, including the bitter irony that the Awami League itself rehabilitated and aligned with Jamaat-e-Islami, once the enemy of 1971. To remember is to resist; to forget is to concede defeat. Independence resides in memory.
Let us, then, reject the false binary that pits 1971 against 2024. These are not antagonistic moments but historical continuities — echoes of an unfinished struggle. Every emancipatory movement remains partial, contradictory — never fully triumphant, never wholly defeated. The struggle persists, even as forces — both internal and external — seek to diminish the legacy of 1971 and discredit the gains of 2024.True, the BNP is now in power. Its rhetoric seems polished and even promising to many — often even seductive — but its long history of right-wing, even authoritarian politics is neither incidental nor erasable. Anyone with a modicum of historical awareness can see its limits. Right-wing forces — whether BNP or the notoriously misogynistic Jamaat — may perform civility, elegance, even refinement. But politics cannot be reduced to mere theater; it is structure, it is power, it is material consequence. And structurally, their politics remains incapable of transforming the lived reality of the majority.
To isolate the charm or tone of individual leaders from the class politics they embody is not simply naïve; it is mystification. It disarms critique. It is dangerous. Our task, therefore, is clear and uncompromising: to subject the ruling class to relentless, unsentimental scrutiny — to hold it under permanent pressure.
IV
FOR the ruling classes of Bangladesh — enmeshed in transnational capital, regional hegemonies, and global financial regimes — continue to reproduce the very structures of domination the Liberation War sought to dismantle. And yet, as the Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci reminds us, hegemony is never complete. The history of Bangladesh is also a history of resistance — of workers, peasants, minorities, students, and women who continue to struggle. Their unfinished struggle reminds us: freedom remains unrealised. There is, therefore, no alternative but to envision and enact a radically different political future: one grounded not in the imperatives of capital and power, not in the imperatives of patriarchy and colonialism, but in the principles of equality, justice, and dignity. This requires not merely reform but transformation — a rethinking, a reimagining of politics itself as a collective, creative, and emancipatory practice.
Dr. Azfar Hussain is director of the Graduate Program in Social Innovation at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA, where he also teaches Interdisciplinary Studies. He serves as vice president of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (New York), where he is professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is also a summer distinguished professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.