Editor's note: The Great Wave

Sushmita S Preetha

For the past three months, we’ve been living out a drama of epic proportions. We’ve felt the most thunderous highs to the most debilitating lows and every denomination of emotion in between—at times all in the span of a single day. We’ve moved from one gripping storyline to the next, with each day revealing new heroes and villains—masterminds and enemies—in an ever-shifting socio-political landscape that has left us on the edge of our seats, poised to take offence at the slightest hint of a different point of view amidst the age-old project of “othering” that is now viciously at play. The overwhelming love, empathy and respect we felt for each other during those beautiful moments of unity—and there were many, not just during the July uprising but in the days since, when anything, even a just and equitable society, seemed possible—appear to have now been replaced with fear, anger, anxiety, and suspicion. The collective calls for justice have somehow drowned under violent expressions of revenge and hate. For many of us, the once thrilling plot is starting to feel a bit stale, with the resurgence of the same old tropes we thought we had collectively rejected just the other day.

We have done the unthinkable—bring down a dictator—only to realise that the fascism within the body politic—and within ourselves—is much harder to dislodge than a once-invincible regime.

Perhaps it was always going to play out like this; perhaps it always does, when there is so much unresolved trauma among a people. For all our feelings, we really are terrible at processing them. We’d rather just engage in blame-games and dream up conspiracy theories than process what living under the Hasina dictatorship did to our individual and collective psyches, how it normalised and institutionalised greed, corruption, an intolerance of dissent and extrajudicial excesses. We’d really rather enact the same violences we have been subjected to on someone else than acknowledge the root causes of our frustration and anger. We’d rather just beat someone to death than talk about what it was like being systematically emasculated by the past regime through everyday and structural forms of violence, of being beaten into submission by a state which looted and laundered our own money as our incomes grew smaller and smaller. We’d really rather just criticise everyone else than admit to our own complicities in (re)producing structures of oppressions.

We’d rather just get embroiled in another toxic relationship than find out what makes us so vulnerable to being in one.

This issue is our humble attempt to make sense of this incredible and tumultuous time in the nation’s history. It’s easy enough to get swept up in the flurry of daily news and overdose of opinions, but it’s important to take a step back and take stock of where we are, what we have lost, what we have achieved, and what we have dreamt of—together—if we are to work towards a Bangladesh that can hold and nurture us all.

In many ways, the July uprising didn’t begin in July, after all. Its seeds were sown long before, as Kallol Mustafa points out in his piece, with every unjust act of the Awami League regime, as it looted and plundered public money, carried out extrajudicial excesses without any accountability, robbed people of their sacred right to choose their own elected representative, destroyed every democratic and financial institution in the country, and suppressed any possibility of resistance or a different opinion with unimaginable violence. Now that the Reign of Terror is (hopefully) beyond us, we ought to ask ourselves: How did we tolerate 15 years of an authoritarian rule? What conditions enabled the Awami League to turn on its own people, and why did so many of us provide direct and indirect support to this oppressive regime? As for those of us who now find ourselves wondering “what-just-happened,” it’s worth asking why we were so unprepared for the fall of Hasina’s regime in the first place, when so many others had not just done their homework but set the syllabus even, it seems? Did we really think the empire would never fall? Or did we already always know that it was going to end badly, and so held onto dear life under the dictatorship precisely out of this fear, when, instead, we should have been out there doing the hard work of organising, building alliances, dreaming of alternatives?

Gen Z, the generation to whom we owe our new-found freedom, came-of-age during an authoritarian regime, and knew no other truth except the merciless rule of Sheikh Hasina and the reign of BCL on their campuses. Deprived of even the most basic of rights that are afforded to citizens of a modern nation-state, they finally did what so many of us could not: call out the AL’s decade-old strategy of turning anyone who dared criticise it into an enemy of the state and a denier of 1971, using all the apparatuses at the disposal of the state to cower them into submission. In this issue, we document and analyse those historic days of July and how the protesters from different political and socio-economic backgrounds came together and initiated a movement that achieved what political parties and civil movements failed to do over the decade. We highlight the invaluable contribution and sacrifices of the working class and women, among others, in sustaining the movement, whose demands and priorities, unfortunately, have since faded into the background.

Two months ago, on that glorious day of August 5, Bangladeshis roared once again to celebrate the defeat of a fascist, and in that split second, you could almost touch freedom. You could finally see beyond the secular-extremist binary; you could hear the whispers of decolonial future(s) when young students spoke of reframing the constitution, repealing colonial-era laws, reforming the police, reimagining the state; you could feel the collective spirit when Gen Z took to the streets to control traffic, collect flood relief or organise volunteer groups to protect temples and homes of Hindu communities. But as is wont to happen post-revolutions, celebrations can easily turn into chaos, calls for justice swiftly translated to revenge, unfiltered emotions weaponised by those who know how to exploit them, and promises of much-needed structural reforms eventually drowned by majoritarian screams of victimhood. So new violences are enacted, giving rise to new victims and new trauma, and so the cycle continues.

In the “New Bangladesh,” we are finding out, some traumas are more important than others. Though we had forged a collective movement on the premise of non-discrimination, we are slowly realising that not all in the country have equal right to claim victimhood, that “hamar betake marlu kene?” does not illicit the same reaction as “maw pobore hittei majjo?” It’s important that we finally have an honest discussion about what we mean by “discrimination” and “inclusion,” and how we ensure that these feel-good terms don’t end up (re)producing similar injustices as the ones propagated by the Awami League in the name of “secularism” and “muktijuddher chetona” (spirit of the Liberation War).

It’s sad that 53 years on, we’ve not even come to terms with the 1971 Liberation War. Since independence, countless attempts have been made by different quarters to rewrite history, to establish propaganda as facts, to rewire memories themselves. We have been taught contradictory versions of history that are outright lies at worst and simplistic at best, to the extent that our political parties either use “muktijuddher chetona” as a pretext for justifying repressive measures and silencing dissent making a shameless travesty of the spirit and sacrifices of liberation—or disavow the atrocities of the Liberation War altogether to whitewash their complicity in the foundational violence of the country. We’ve still not processed, as a nation, why it took us 38 years to institute a tribunal to seek justice for the crimes committed by war collaborators in 1971, and why something as critical as justice for war crimes needed to be conducted by a trial process which was not up to international standards, and which ultimately paved the way for Jamaat-e-Islami to claim they were victims of political persecution.

But perhaps, most importantly, we are yet to process why, so many decades later, the foundational aspirations of the Liberation War remain still remain unfulfilled—to inhabit a society where the top 10 percent does not control almost 50 percent of the nation’s wealth; where justice is not up for sale; where our hard-earned money doesn’t fund lavish homes for MPs in Dubai, Toronto and London; where workers exist as valued citizens rather than as disposable bodies of late capitalism; where women, religious, sexual and ethnic minorities are equals in the constitution and elsewhere; where we have the freedom to believe what we do, and say what we believe? Isn’t that what we fight for, over and over again?

During the first month following the uprising, we saw many dreams, we spoke of countless reforms, the op-ed pages, after a decade of lull, exploded with ideas of how the state and its institutions could be reimagined. The students and people were categorical in asserting that they did not want the fascist rule of one to replace that of another. And yet, more and more, we see the same thirst for power among our political parties who are mobilising and strengthening their own position within organisations in which they had long been sidelined, often using the uprising to reclaim their stakes. Worse still, many are now resorting to vitriolic rhetoric to marshall the dispossessed masses to do their dirty work, hiding their true intentions behind the convenient mask of the “mob.” The tyranny of tagging—deployed so effectively by the AL—is now being used by so-called warriors of the uprising to suppress any criticism or difference of opinion.

In this issue, the writers have reflected on the complexities and contradictions of the present moment, and how unresolved pasts continue to circumscribe the limits of what’s possible in the future. Yet others have given their suggestions of how different sectors can be reimagined. If we are to do better as a nation than we have in the past, we must do the hard work of looking inwards and collectively figuring out the root causes of our dispossession and deprivation. We hope that these pieces initiate a deeper conversation around how we can finally heal our collective wounds, embark on a journey of genuine reconciliation and avoid another heartbreak and toxic relationship with our country.

Sushmita S Preetha is head of the editorial section, The Daily Star

Cover by Hasan Mahmud Sunny

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