by Anwar A. Khan
The 20th century is a remarkable story of progressive accomplishments against overwhelming odds everywhere in the world including Bangladesh.The events of 21st February 1952 in Dhaka, and elsewhere in the country, provided a basis for an understanding of the direction our struggles against the Pakistani colonial rule. The intense emotion and mobilisation that accompanied the brutal murders of revered Salam, Barkat, Jabbar and some other mortalsopened another significant chapter in resistance politics against the Pakistani tyrannous rule. For most of the students, joining the fermentation to fight against an unjust political system became the ultimate goal for our people then.
This signalled some other significant features of the post-1952 phase of intense struggle to generate defiance and stimulate the development of more mass movements in future. In early 1971, our people’s central task was to deploy mass scale of people against the Pakistani military government in a credible revolutionary offensive. Each people reiterated and refined the demands for rights and freedom and built support for the cause of establishing Bangladesh.
The Language Movement of 1952 is the fledgling mass movement of people ofall classes and religions that could herald a people’s movement truly independent of nationalism and Bengali, being our state language.Each generation of us faces a different set of economic, political, and social conditions. There are no easy formulas for challenging injustice and promoting democracy. But unless we know this history, we will have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make Bangladesh more livable, humane, and democratic.
The course of our movements explores the history, sociology, and politics of Bangladesh’s struggles for freedom and social justice. The organising class puts more emphasis on how to aspects of fighting for social change. The bottom line for course is to encourage students to see themselves as potential history-makers, by learning from the past and learning the skills and analytic tools to help mobilise people for action now and in the future.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. But we can be prideful and joyful especially because of our triumph or success in our just cause. 21st February, 1952 is a milestone in our history of struggles to establish Bangladesh and Bengali language as our state language.
21st February has taught us that this struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
In everyday parlance, that sometimes the time was ripe for movements to emerge, to grow, and to bring about change. Ultimately, movements are about real people making choices about how to use their time, talents, and resources. Our great leaders and patriotic people did the right thing at the right time to throw away the yoke of the roughshod Pakistani rule which persecuted us for more than two decades. Howard Zinncompetentlysaid, “Freedom and democracy does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice.”
Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform societies. Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive and even partially successful mass movements can alter the political calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of millions. All our struggles were hard-won outcomes of protracted struggle by progressive mass movements, every one of them are epoch-making.
A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilise, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience. All our mass movements are politically aggressive. And that’s why, we achieved success every time.
Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of outraged public opinion in the movement’s core values, political opportunity and aggressive leadership. The absence of any of these can prevent a mass movement from materialising, but in our movement of 21st February in 1952, the seeds of something may have been sown to eventually emerge Bangladesh as a new independent and sovereign state in 1971.
Mass movements are based on widely held beliefs, reinforced by dense communications between peoples. Mass movements are nurtured and sustained not just by vertical communication, between leaders and various places of a boundary line, but by lots of horizontal communication among the movement’s wider acceptance by mass people. This horizontal communication serves to reinforce the common people’s support and the movement’s core values. It emboldens both political people and ordinarily non-political people to engage in personally risky behaviour in support of the movement’s core demands, and builds support for this kind of risk-taking on the part of those who may not be ready to do it themselves.
Those progressive mass movements were built in that era of sprawl and locked down media monopolies and the organisers developed and deployed alternative communications strategies to get and keep the movement’s message into a sufficient number of ears to sustain its influence and momentum. No mass without masses and no movement without youth. Mass movements don’t happen without masses. A mass movement whose organisers cannot fill rooms and streets, and sometimes jails on short notice with ordinarily non-political people in support of political demands is no mass movement at all. Organisers and those who judge the work of organisers must learn to count.
A progressive mass movement is inconceivable without a prominent place for the energy and creativity of youth. The movements in 1952, 1962, 1966 and 1969 for the upright causes of our people were spearheaded, and often led by young people. Any mass movement aiming at social transformation must capture the enthusiasm and energy of youth, including the willingness of young people to engage in personally risky behaviour. A mass movement consciously aims to lead politicians, not to be led by them. Mass movements are civilly disobedient, and continually maintain the credible threat of civil disobedience. Bangladesh’s people remain in remarkable, consistent agreement on political issues, a shared commonality of views that holds strongly across lines of gender and age. A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. It makes politicians into followers. It truly happened in our country.
Sadly, the born of Pakistan consisting two Provinces – East Pakistan and West Pakistan in 1947 appears to have been a false dawn. Because we, people of Eastern Province,constituting54% of Pakistan’s total populationwho continued to be considered as second-class citizens for more than two decades by the West Pakistani rulers.Because the government machinery including banking and financing were generally controlled by West Pakistanis and discriminatory practices very often resulted. Bengalis found them excluded from playing the significant role despite we were Pakistan’s majority population.
One of the most divisive issues confronting Pakistan in its infancy was the question of what the official language of the new state was to be. Pakistan’s first Governor-GeneralJinnah yielded to the demands of refugees from the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrated to Pakistan, who insisted that Urdu be Pakistan's official language. Speakers of the languages of West Pakistan--Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushtu, and Baluchi--were upset that their languages were given second-class status. In the-then East Pakistan, the dissatisfaction quickly turned to violence. The Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority (54 percent) of Pakistan's entire population. Our language, Bangla (then commonly known as Bengali) has different script and literary tradition.
Jinnah visited East Pakistan on only one occasion after independence of Pakistan. He willy-nilly announced in Dhaka that "Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan”which was not accepted by our people and it encountered serious resistance from us. On 21stFebruary,1952, astrong-boned demonstration was carried out in Dhaka in which students demanded equal status for Bangla. The police reacted by firing on the crowd and killing two students. A memorial, the ShaheedMinar, was built later to commemorate the martyrs of the language movement.
Awami League headed by BangabandhuSheikh Mujibur Rahman had always been an ardent Bengali nationalist. He began to attract popular support from Bengalis in the-then East Pakistan. He put forward his Six Points that demanded more autonomy for the Provinces in general and East Pakistan in particular. He was arrested in April 1966, and soon released, only to be rearrested and imprisoned in June the same year. He languished in prison until February 1969 as the main accused of the Agartala Conspiracy Case.
Pakistan’s Punjabi dominated army in search of the elusive purity and to perpetuate its hold on power structures encourages the majority Punjabi population in its misadventures. In pursuit of power, the bogey of threat from India was conjured. In schools children were indoctrinated to hate Bengalis. Therefore, the genesis of the Pakistan’s Fault Line lies in the diabolically engineered mindset that created multiple fault lines and conflated into one deep and divisive nature of politics and abominable demeanor toward the Bengali people. They always artfully used our Religion-Islam to affright us. The February 1952 movement by our people aimed to establish Bengali Language as one of the state language in Pakistan and very soon it transformed into a mass movement and it rose to its peak on 21stFebruary of the same year.
It will not be exaggerated to articulate that Ekushey February (21st February) role-played as one of preludes to the creation of macrocosm for establishing Bangladesh. The first major setback to Pakistan occurred 24 years after inception when it lost 54% of its population in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and almost half of its territory in 1971. Their foxy use of religion could not act as effective glue due to the insatiable avarice the Pakistan’s Punjabi Army displayed in its refusal to share legitimate power with the eastern wing.
With millions of refugees pouring into India in 1971, Pakistan made its position in East Pakistan untenable, and India was compelled to initiate positive action at our call and in support of our just cause. Indian Army promptly withdrew from the soil of Bangladesh from the miseries and atrocities being perpetrated by the western wing of Pakistan on its own people. Thus Bangladesh was born in bloodshed and came into existence on 16th December, 1971.In 1950s, Hans J. Morgenthau, the then Director of Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at University of Chicago, in his book ‘The New Republic’ had observed, “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in common except one: dissembling fear of Bengali domination. Pakistan’s establishment, therefore, must realise that its possible vivisection, due to its flawed policies, dealt a fatal blow to the very so-called Islamic cause, that it purports to countenance and guide.
In 1966 the Bengali leadership of Awami League (AL) headed by MaulanaBhasani and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were treated badly by the Pakistani leadership and the Agartala conspiracy was unearthed flighty where India helped AL leadership to conspire to break Pakistan. However, no Bengali speaking people were found who could credibly stand as witness against the AL leaders held in prison in this matter. Therefore, Pakistani military rulers were forced to release SheikhMujib from confinement and Mujib declared 6-points for the equal treatment of East Pakistanis and the famous 6-points were incorporated in the Election Manifesto of AL for all-Pakistan based Nation Election held in 1970 and these 6-points formula became the focal point and MAGNA CARTA for the emancipation of the Bengali people.
AL could mobilise whole of the Bengali people to stand behind it and then the General Election of 1970 came where AL got absolute majority by winning 297 seats out of 300 seats and Pakistan People's party headed by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto got majority in West Pakistan, but not enough seat to become the Prime Minister since the population of West Pakistan was 55 Million and East Pakistan was 75 Million. Bhutto then started conspiring in collusion with the-then military president General Yahya Khan to make sure that BangabandhuMujib couldn’t form the government in the Centre and become the PM of Pakistan. This foolhardy decision of Bhutto and Yahya nexus was the last nail in the coffin of One-Pakistan with two wings (East & West). On the evening of 26th March 1971,Pakistani military arrested BangabandhuMujib and then started with their infamous genocide on un-armed civilians of the-then East Pakistan.
India was all along helping our Freedom Fighters (MuktiBahini) with all types of help, but covertly. When on 4th December 1971 Pakistan declared war on India and the people of Bangladesh, then only the Indian soldiers with their tanks and heavy equipments came to the help of our MuktiBahini who were fighting by their own till that date. After 12-days of fighting the Pakistani Army surrendered to the Joint forces of India-Bangladesh command.
21st February is a memorable day for people of Bangladesh. This is the day when, 67 years ago today, in 1952, the seeds of Bengali Nationalism and building of Bangladesh were sown. As a matter of fact, the majuscule 21st February Language Movement of 1952 acted as a prelude to the creation of Bangladesh. This is a solitary event in the world history that a sovereign and independent country was born in 1971 based on a nation’s mother tongue.Ekushey February (21st February) has taught us not to bow down to any sort of oppression. Let us pay our tribute to the fallen heroes of our Language Movement and the able leaders who did their best to the sacred cause of our people and mass people who actively participated in this august movement.
-The End –
The writer is a senior citizen of Bangladesh, writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
The 20th century is a remarkable story of progressive accomplishments against overwhelming odds everywhere in the world including Bangladesh.The events of 21st February 1952 in Dhaka, and elsewhere in the country, provided a basis for an understanding of the direction our struggles against the Pakistani colonial rule. The intense emotion and mobilisation that accompanied the brutal murders of revered Salam, Barkat, Jabbar and some other mortalsopened another significant chapter in resistance politics against the Pakistani tyrannous rule. For most of the students, joining the fermentation to fight against an unjust political system became the ultimate goal for our people then.
This signalled some other significant features of the post-1952 phase of intense struggle to generate defiance and stimulate the development of more mass movements in future. In early 1971, our people’s central task was to deploy mass scale of people against the Pakistani military government in a credible revolutionary offensive. Each people reiterated and refined the demands for rights and freedom and built support for the cause of establishing Bangladesh.
The Language Movement of 1952 is the fledgling mass movement of people ofall classes and religions that could herald a people’s movement truly independent of nationalism and Bengali, being our state language.Each generation of us faces a different set of economic, political, and social conditions. There are no easy formulas for challenging injustice and promoting democracy. But unless we know this history, we will have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make Bangladesh more livable, humane, and democratic.
The course of our movements explores the history, sociology, and politics of Bangladesh’s struggles for freedom and social justice. The organising class puts more emphasis on how to aspects of fighting for social change. The bottom line for course is to encourage students to see themselves as potential history-makers, by learning from the past and learning the skills and analytic tools to help mobilise people for action now and in the future.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. But we can be prideful and joyful especially because of our triumph or success in our just cause. 21st February, 1952 is a milestone in our history of struggles to establish Bangladesh and Bengali language as our state language.
21st February has taught us that this struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
In everyday parlance, that sometimes the time was ripe for movements to emerge, to grow, and to bring about change. Ultimately, movements are about real people making choices about how to use their time, talents, and resources. Our great leaders and patriotic people did the right thing at the right time to throw away the yoke of the roughshod Pakistani rule which persecuted us for more than two decades. Howard Zinncompetentlysaid, “Freedom and democracy does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice.”
Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform societies. Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive and even partially successful mass movements can alter the political calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of millions. All our struggles were hard-won outcomes of protracted struggle by progressive mass movements, every one of them are epoch-making.
A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilise, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience. All our mass movements are politically aggressive. And that’s why, we achieved success every time.
Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of outraged public opinion in the movement’s core values, political opportunity and aggressive leadership. The absence of any of these can prevent a mass movement from materialising, but in our movement of 21st February in 1952, the seeds of something may have been sown to eventually emerge Bangladesh as a new independent and sovereign state in 1971.
Mass movements are based on widely held beliefs, reinforced by dense communications between peoples. Mass movements are nurtured and sustained not just by vertical communication, between leaders and various places of a boundary line, but by lots of horizontal communication among the movement’s wider acceptance by mass people. This horizontal communication serves to reinforce the common people’s support and the movement’s core values. It emboldens both political people and ordinarily non-political people to engage in personally risky behaviour in support of the movement’s core demands, and builds support for this kind of risk-taking on the part of those who may not be ready to do it themselves.
Those progressive mass movements were built in that era of sprawl and locked down media monopolies and the organisers developed and deployed alternative communications strategies to get and keep the movement’s message into a sufficient number of ears to sustain its influence and momentum. No mass without masses and no movement without youth. Mass movements don’t happen without masses. A mass movement whose organisers cannot fill rooms and streets, and sometimes jails on short notice with ordinarily non-political people in support of political demands is no mass movement at all. Organisers and those who judge the work of organisers must learn to count.
A progressive mass movement is inconceivable without a prominent place for the energy and creativity of youth. The movements in 1952, 1962, 1966 and 1969 for the upright causes of our people were spearheaded, and often led by young people. Any mass movement aiming at social transformation must capture the enthusiasm and energy of youth, including the willingness of young people to engage in personally risky behaviour. A mass movement consciously aims to lead politicians, not to be led by them. Mass movements are civilly disobedient, and continually maintain the credible threat of civil disobedience. Bangladesh’s people remain in remarkable, consistent agreement on political issues, a shared commonality of views that holds strongly across lines of gender and age. A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. It makes politicians into followers. It truly happened in our country.
Sadly, the born of Pakistan consisting two Provinces – East Pakistan and West Pakistan in 1947 appears to have been a false dawn. Because we, people of Eastern Province,constituting54% of Pakistan’s total populationwho continued to be considered as second-class citizens for more than two decades by the West Pakistani rulers.Because the government machinery including banking and financing were generally controlled by West Pakistanis and discriminatory practices very often resulted. Bengalis found them excluded from playing the significant role despite we were Pakistan’s majority population.
One of the most divisive issues confronting Pakistan in its infancy was the question of what the official language of the new state was to be. Pakistan’s first Governor-GeneralJinnah yielded to the demands of refugees from the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrated to Pakistan, who insisted that Urdu be Pakistan's official language. Speakers of the languages of West Pakistan--Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushtu, and Baluchi--were upset that their languages were given second-class status. In the-then East Pakistan, the dissatisfaction quickly turned to violence. The Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority (54 percent) of Pakistan's entire population. Our language, Bangla (then commonly known as Bengali) has different script and literary tradition.
Jinnah visited East Pakistan on only one occasion after independence of Pakistan. He willy-nilly announced in Dhaka that "Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan”which was not accepted by our people and it encountered serious resistance from us. On 21stFebruary,1952, astrong-boned demonstration was carried out in Dhaka in which students demanded equal status for Bangla. The police reacted by firing on the crowd and killing two students. A memorial, the ShaheedMinar, was built later to commemorate the martyrs of the language movement.
Awami League headed by BangabandhuSheikh Mujibur Rahman had always been an ardent Bengali nationalist. He began to attract popular support from Bengalis in the-then East Pakistan. He put forward his Six Points that demanded more autonomy for the Provinces in general and East Pakistan in particular. He was arrested in April 1966, and soon released, only to be rearrested and imprisoned in June the same year. He languished in prison until February 1969 as the main accused of the Agartala Conspiracy Case.
Pakistan’s Punjabi dominated army in search of the elusive purity and to perpetuate its hold on power structures encourages the majority Punjabi population in its misadventures. In pursuit of power, the bogey of threat from India was conjured. In schools children were indoctrinated to hate Bengalis. Therefore, the genesis of the Pakistan’s Fault Line lies in the diabolically engineered mindset that created multiple fault lines and conflated into one deep and divisive nature of politics and abominable demeanor toward the Bengali people. They always artfully used our Religion-Islam to affright us. The February 1952 movement by our people aimed to establish Bengali Language as one of the state language in Pakistan and very soon it transformed into a mass movement and it rose to its peak on 21stFebruary of the same year.
It will not be exaggerated to articulate that Ekushey February (21st February) role-played as one of preludes to the creation of macrocosm for establishing Bangladesh. The first major setback to Pakistan occurred 24 years after inception when it lost 54% of its population in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and almost half of its territory in 1971. Their foxy use of religion could not act as effective glue due to the insatiable avarice the Pakistan’s Punjabi Army displayed in its refusal to share legitimate power with the eastern wing.
With millions of refugees pouring into India in 1971, Pakistan made its position in East Pakistan untenable, and India was compelled to initiate positive action at our call and in support of our just cause. Indian Army promptly withdrew from the soil of Bangladesh from the miseries and atrocities being perpetrated by the western wing of Pakistan on its own people. Thus Bangladesh was born in bloodshed and came into existence on 16th December, 1971.In 1950s, Hans J. Morgenthau, the then Director of Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at University of Chicago, in his book ‘The New Republic’ had observed, “Pakistan is not a nation and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in common except one: dissembling fear of Bengali domination. Pakistan’s establishment, therefore, must realise that its possible vivisection, due to its flawed policies, dealt a fatal blow to the very so-called Islamic cause, that it purports to countenance and guide.
In 1966 the Bengali leadership of Awami League (AL) headed by MaulanaBhasani and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were treated badly by the Pakistani leadership and the Agartala conspiracy was unearthed flighty where India helped AL leadership to conspire to break Pakistan. However, no Bengali speaking people were found who could credibly stand as witness against the AL leaders held in prison in this matter. Therefore, Pakistani military rulers were forced to release SheikhMujib from confinement and Mujib declared 6-points for the equal treatment of East Pakistanis and the famous 6-points were incorporated in the Election Manifesto of AL for all-Pakistan based Nation Election held in 1970 and these 6-points formula became the focal point and MAGNA CARTA for the emancipation of the Bengali people.
AL could mobilise whole of the Bengali people to stand behind it and then the General Election of 1970 came where AL got absolute majority by winning 297 seats out of 300 seats and Pakistan People's party headed by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto got majority in West Pakistan, but not enough seat to become the Prime Minister since the population of West Pakistan was 55 Million and East Pakistan was 75 Million. Bhutto then started conspiring in collusion with the-then military president General Yahya Khan to make sure that BangabandhuMujib couldn’t form the government in the Centre and become the PM of Pakistan. This foolhardy decision of Bhutto and Yahya nexus was the last nail in the coffin of One-Pakistan with two wings (East & West). On the evening of 26th March 1971,Pakistani military arrested BangabandhuMujib and then started with their infamous genocide on un-armed civilians of the-then East Pakistan.
India was all along helping our Freedom Fighters (MuktiBahini) with all types of help, but covertly. When on 4th December 1971 Pakistan declared war on India and the people of Bangladesh, then only the Indian soldiers with their tanks and heavy equipments came to the help of our MuktiBahini who were fighting by their own till that date. After 12-days of fighting the Pakistani Army surrendered to the Joint forces of India-Bangladesh command.
21st February is a memorable day for people of Bangladesh. This is the day when, 67 years ago today, in 1952, the seeds of Bengali Nationalism and building of Bangladesh were sown. As a matter of fact, the majuscule 21st February Language Movement of 1952 acted as a prelude to the creation of Bangladesh. This is a solitary event in the world history that a sovereign and independent country was born in 1971 based on a nation’s mother tongue.Ekushey February (21st February) has taught us not to bow down to any sort of oppression. Let us pay our tribute to the fallen heroes of our Language Movement and the able leaders who did their best to the sacred cause of our people and mass people who actively participated in this august movement.
-The End –
The writer is a senior citizen of Bangladesh, writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
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