The flame of liberty shines on

On Independence Day, there are the myriad thoughts that arise in my soul. They bubble up to the top, they gather in the core of my heart, to remind me that there was once a time when pride and tradition came together to let me know that I was a Bangali. 

In July 1971, as my parents, my siblings and I prepared to leave what is today Pakistan and make our way to an occupied Bangladesh, my teachers and my friends told me in something of a polite whisper that they hoped conditions would return to normal in 'East Pakistan' and that we could remain brothers for all time. 

I was in my teens. I had heard of the atrocities Pakistan's army was carrying out in Bangladesh. I had, with something of a macabre happiness, watched army trucks transport, along the road before my school, coffins carrying the bodies of Pakistan's soldiers killed by the Mukti Bahini in Bangladesh. My friends looked morose, naturally. 

For me, those sombre vehicular movements by the army were intimations that Bangladesh would be a free nation someday. Like millions of other Bangalis, I had no idea when that day would dawn, but that Pakistan would someday become a bad memory best forgotten was a truth we held on to. 

And so, as the time drew near for my family to board the train to Karachi and then a long, circuitous Pakistan International Airlines flight to occupied Dhaka, I told my teachers and my friends that the next time I found myself in Pakistan, it would be as a citizen of a free Bangladesh republic. 

They looked at me, aghast, as horrified as they had been on a day a couple of months earlier when I had refused to acknowledge Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the father of the nation. Predictably, a complaint made its way to the office of the school principal. 

I had not only rejected Jinnah but, challenged by a Punjabi classmate to demonstrate my courage, also ripped out Jinnah's photograph from my history textbook and flung it to the ground. 

The principal, a Dutch missionary, aware of my need for safety, simply wanted to know why I had committed such sacrilege. I told him I honoured my father of the nation. And he was not Jinnah. He was the imprisoned Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He looked at me for long seconds, before simply advising me, 'Be careful.'

It was on a cold, blustery January day close to a quarter of a century later that my English language and literature teacher, he who had advised me in the late 1960s to take up teaching or journalism as a profession (I have done both), recalled that moment a free Bangladesh beckoned me as I prepared to make my way out of (West) Pakistan. I was back in Quetta, no more a Pakistani but a happy, free and secular Bangali. 

For about a week I moved around that garrison town, walked along the old familiar streets, remembered that Colonel Taher too had walked those same streets post-March 1971 pondering his role in a gathering war of Bangali liberation. And I felt happy, meeting old friends, trekking down to the shops I had often visited with my father as he bought bread for the family every morning, feeling that certain sense of pride which comes from being part of a free nation. 

Back in school, for years I had led my platoon at the march past organised by the local authorities every time Pakistan's independence day was observed on 14 August. It was a story I recalled as I walked past the field where we had marched, saluting before a dais where a dignitary stood ready to enlighten us on the sacrifices, as he called it, that had been made in the struggle to achieve Pakistan. 

Those 'sacrifices' had led to the death of two million and the displacement of fourteen million, to say nothing of the thousands killed in the Calcutta riots of August 1946. 

It snowed as I stood there, before that desolate field, wondering at the sacrifices my own fellow Bangalis had made in 1971 in their war to be free of a menacing Pakistan. Three million of my own people had died at the hands of the Pakistan state. Tens of thousands of Bangali women had been molested by the Pakistan army, which had pillaged and burnt Bangladesh's villages for nine terrible months. It was these realities I remembered on that winter day. 

I felt no bitterness. I only tried understanding the mysterious ways in which history took shape at seminal points in the stories of nations. The universe was a strange place.

This morning, as we observe yet one more anniversary of Bangladesh's freedom, it is that secular spirit of Bengal I go back to. In 1971, as Pakistan's soldiers stopped Bangalis on Dhaka streets and intimidated them or simply shot them, we wondered long and hard if we could ever free ourselves of that communal dispensation. And yet there were the men who instilled courage in us. 

The incarcerated Bangabandhu was, and remains, our hold on history. It was that season of darkness when the principles the Father of the Nation had left us with, before he was carted off to prison, lighted up the pitch dark before us. There was the Mujibnagar government, to let us know day after day that only freedom mattered, that out of the strife and all the detritus around us we would reclaim our heritage and transform our geographically small land into an ideal democratic state. It was a dream that saw fulfilment on a December afternoon. 

Six days into liberation, as twilight descended on the country, the men who had given shape and substance to that government, the first on a national scale in Bangali history, arrived home. Nineteen days after that homecoming, it was Bangabandhu's turn to come back to a land that had freed itself on the moral strength of his political leadership. 

For three and a half years thereafter, we lived in sheer enjoyment of liberty. We went hungry, we joined those long queues for rations, we went looking for the bones of those the Pakistanis and their local henchmen had murdered. And yet we looked upon that era as a stirring period in our history, for it spoke to us of the flavour in which freedom manifested itself in the lives of people who possessed the courage to dream.

These are the thoughts that course through me today. The thrill I lived through as a teenager is the thrill I would love to go through again in my twilight. But then come the thoughts, brooding if you will, which throw up images of the nightmares that supplanted our dreams only three and a half years into freedom. 

You and I can count on our fingers the numbers of all the brave men of freedom we lost in the years after liberation. Does a revolution invariably claim its heroes? Do counter-revolutionaries, lurking in the bushes, always push patriots aside and commandeer what would have been a society of enormously talented, decidedly dedicated men of patriotism? Reflect on the answers, if you can, to these questions. 

These questions reignite the old pain in us. We have seen criminals murder the Father of the Nation and the Mujibnagar leaders. Our war heroes, having waged long, desperate battles on the fields of 1971, died in internecine conflict in their liberated country. Our democracy, our socialism, our nationalism and our secularism were all done in by men whose sinister politics dented our ideals, sought to pull us back into dark communalism. 

This morning, it is time, then, to renew the old pledge. Despite the trauma we have lived through post-August 1975 and till June 1996, it remains for us to light little lamps in our homes and sing old songs of patriotism in our villages, to pass the message on that the spirit of liberty lights up our world.

The old dream will not die. Joy Bangla will always be heard from the ramparts of freedom. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics and diplomacy. 

Sketch: TBS