Troubled Dhaka

After Fazlul Quader Chowdhury died — his family and friends were convinced he was murdered — in Dhaka Central Jail on July 17, 1973, his eldest son Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a qualified barrister from London, went to see Tajuddin Ahmed, the home minister and Bangladesh’s most important politician after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. “Your time will come”, he warned Ahmed. “Better have furniture, furnishings and air conditioners installed in those cells!”

Salauddin Chowdhury could not have known then how grimly prophetic his words were. Rahman and most members of his family were brutally murdered in his Dhanmondi house only two years later. Ahmed and other ministers were dragged out of their houses and thrown into Dhaka jail. Rahman’s murderers or their henchmen burst into the jail and put the men to a cruel death.

Now, Salauddin has also been killed together with Ali Ahsan Mohamed Mojaheed, the Jamaat-i-Islami’s general-secretary. The International Criminal Tribunal that Rahman’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, Awami Party leader and Prime Minister of Bangladesh, set up in 2010 sentenced Salauddin to death in October 2013. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court dismissed his appeal.

Due process was observed but what does that mean in the subcontinent where witnesses can be bought and sold and evidence is often not worth the paper it is written on

More important, how long will Bangladesh remain a prisoner of a past that blurs the distinction between revenge and justice When will it gain confidence enough to be truly independent

Salauddin’s death marked a further landmark in the cycle of death and destruction which could destroy whatever chance Bangladesh still has of enjoying social stability.

One parallel that comes to mind is Vietnam which fought a long and bitter war against the United States. Today, the bitterness of those years of conflict is remembered more acutely outside Vietnam than in the country. Having come to the mature decision that their national future is best served by composing their differences with the US, the reunited Vietnamese have mastered the past. They are not its slave, unlike Indians who change street names and remove public statues in a childish attempt to erase history.

Vietnam proudly retains all the tunnels and relics of the liberation war.

Another parallel is with South Africa whose blacks and Indians suffered much harsher racial discrimination over many decades of cruel repression. They too are making a heroic effort to rise above the enmities of the past to create a new life for themselves. True, many whites left for Australia rather than live in a multiracial society. But I know a white family that moved from the old Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to what they believed to be the more equal world of the new post-apartheid South Africa. They haven’t been disappointed. That is largely the doing of Bishop Desmond Tutu whose humanitarian outlook and all-embracing vision produced the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation and won him a richly deserved Nobel Prize for Peace.

That is what wounded and bruised Bangladesh needs so desperately. It is crying out for the healing touch of a statesman whose understanding of history enables him (or her) to look beyond the darkness of personal grief to a brighter, if still distant, horizon.

There are untidy ends in all countries that have known a drastic change of ruler.

It is idle to pretend that all the senior Indian members of the Indian Civil Service supported the Congress Party and the goal of swaraj during British rule. The sentimental Jawaharlal Nehru might have been tempted to purge them, but Vallabbhai Patel, the arch pragmatist, ruled otherwise. He must have realised it is unfair to judge public men outside the context of their times.

Salauddin’s father, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, was the fifth Speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly. He was one of the founders of the Convention Muslim League under Ayub Khan and, for a while, acting President of Pakistan. Like the Chakma chief Raja Tridib Roy of Rangamati, he opposed East Bengal’s secession as he had every right to do. But whether he committed the war crimes for which he was jailed I have no idea. His apparently sudden death in captivity spared the authorities the need to frame charges and bring him to trial.

Salauddin probably also opposed East Bengali Independence. By the time I got to know him, he had made his peace with the new reality and was set for a political career in Bangladesh. He was elected to the National Assembly no fewer than seven times from his native Chittagong. Although initially an independent, he served as parliamentary affairs adviser to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party Prime Minister Khalida Zia. The charges against him included anti-Hindu pogroms and targeted murder of both Hindus and Muslim Awami League workers. Many Indians suspected him of funnelling aid and arms to the north-eastern rebels.

Recalling the pyramids of bleached skulls one saw in Bangladesh after the liberation war in which three million people are said to have lost their lives, it may not be surprising that wounds should fester.

Communal animosity keeps them alive and bleeding. The 2013 Shahbag protests and the recent selective, if scattered, killing of secular bloggers reminded one of the fundamental instability of Bangladeshi society.

Perhaps some East Bengal Muslims expected witch-hunts even when Indians were celebrating the birth of what they thought was a secular democracy.

A Bengali-Pakistani diplomat who also opposed secession was on his way back to Dhaka when he heard of the Pakistani Army’s defeat. He and his belongings were then on the high seas. He got off the boat at the nearest port and had his belongings transferred to another ship bound for the US where he remained. He was wise.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author