The histories of great nations tend to go back further than individual memories, their origin stories relegated to textbooks filled with stories of men fighting wars a long, long time ago.
But Bangladesh belongs to a small group of countries young enough that we don’t need to forage through unreliable secondary and tertiary sources to find out what its original independence day meant to the people. There are many still among us who rememeber that day -- this day, March 26 -- 45 years ago as clearly as if it were yesterday.
The murders that began on the night of March 25, the night which marked the beginning of one of the most brutal genocides in modern history are recounted by the elders of this country with fear and dread. Many consider themselves lucky to be alive. To that generation of Bangladeshis, the creation story of this nation is not history, it is autobiography.
The atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army and its local collaborators here in the lands that we now proudly call an independent Bangladesh, left a scar so deep that all our national conversations, dreams, and aspirations refer back to the bloody nine-month-long war in 1971.
As a nation, even when we talk about the future, we really just talk about the past.
But times change, they are bound to. Just like there are no living Americans who can claim to have met Washington or Jefferson or any of their founding fathers, or authentically speak of the excitement of starting up a nation based on values and principles that were utterly unique at the time, there will, very soon, be a time when no Bangladeshi alive remembers 1971.
I don’t mean to sound fatalistic. It’s just basic math. For a person to have any sort of reliable, clear, and politically meaningful memory of the independence, they would need to have been at least, say, 15 years old at the time. That makes that cohort of people over 60 as of this year -- all senior citizens. Given that the Bangladeshi life expectancy by the most optimistic counts is about 70, the day that it becomes very rare to find a person who remembers the joys and pains of independence first-hand is not too far away.
And that will be a different Bangladesh -- in fact, we are already moving towards a different Bangladesh. Demographically speaking, Bangladesh has one of the highest youth populations in the world.
These young people make up the bulk of our workforce, and are the ones doing all the innovating. And within the next decade or so, most of the large cultural, technological, and political changes the country will see will have to come from young people.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for the legacy of 1971. The pain and suffering that our people have endured -- the murders, the torture, the rapes, the looting -- these things don’t just go away. And we need to commemorate our independence year after year. But with that commemoration, we need to carefully take stock of what we have achieved so far, how much improvement we have made since last year’s Independence Day.
Taking pride in our history is all well and good, but we need to work towards a few things we can take pride in, here and now. The Bangladesh Bank governor, just a few days ago, resigned following an utter fiasco involving a massive digital bank heist, showing us that we don’t really have the capability to keep digital information secure.
In the meantime, biometric SIM card registrations, in spite of widespread concerns, have been mandated by the government, and landlords have been asked to submit private information about their tenants to their respective police departments, much to the dismay of many law-abiding citizens who like their privacy. The Sundarbans, one of our last remaining natural treasures, is threatened by the construction of an environmentally destructive coal-based power plant.
We know what independence meant when we first gained it. In 2016, with narrow self-interest, greed, and incompetence all around, what does it mean exactly? Is it possible for us to escape the ghosts of the past in order to a take a long hard look at our present, and really work towards building a country we can be proud of?
If, in the coming years, our young people can allow themselves to see things with new eyes, and solve problems in new ways without being held back by the outmoded ways of their parents and grandparents, we could still make a turnaround.