Absurdities can sometimes be asphyxiating.
When some loyalists of the late General Ziaur Rahman unabashedly informed us some years ago that it was he who was Bangladesh’s first president, we were not amused.
And we were not because of so many other silly happenings we have come across over the years. So when we were enlightened on the fiction of Zia being our first president, we wondered if one of these days someone would not spring forth to inform us that Zia also had a secret role to play in the formulation of the Six Points in the 1960s.
We are being serious, only because we have experienced similar absurdities in our lifetime. Let your mind dwell on some of the politicians who sometimes tell us that in their youthful days as students in Britain in the mid 1960s they worked vigorously for an independent East Pakistan.
That is rather hard to believe, considering that at the time it was the harshness of the Ayub Khan regime that was the reality, considering too that had these men actually engaged in the activities they speak of, the junta would have made life miserable for them and their families back home.
That takes us back to the lies peddled by some academics not so long ago. Among them were some former vice chancellors of public universities and naturally you would expect them to be emblems of truth and ethics. But then they ended up dishing out the lie that General Zia had declared Bangladesh’s independence on March 26, 1971.
Having known all along that he had actually taken to the airwaves on March 27, this new bit of “information” was truly a mockery of history.
Why did these academics go along with this downright falsehood? It is almost like asking why earlier cabals of Bengali academics went around spreading the lie abroad in 1971 that the Pakistan army had killed no one in “East Pakistan.”
You could, in a cynical mood, suggest that politics these days is all about absurdities -- and not just in our part of the world.
Tony Blair and George W Bush invented the absurd lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
And then they went coolly into destroying the beautiful country that was Iraq. Blair speaks these days of his religious convictions. You watch him and think of the thousands that his search for Churchill-like glory had pushed to premature death.
A particular absurdity we have been pelted with over the years is the claim that General MAG Osmany was the supreme commander of Bangladesh’s liberation forces.
He was commander-in-chief. If he was supreme commander, where would you place Acting President Syed Nazrul Islam? Move on, to hear followers of Moulana Bhashani let you in on the thought that he was the first man to declare Bangladesh’s independence, twice.
To our lasting embarrassment, the general asked the Father of the Nation: ‘Can you come out of the house, sir?’ It was absurdity at its height
The first time was in 1957, when at Kagmari he uttered a loud, farewell-like “Assalamualaikum” to Pakistan; and the second was in December 1970 when four days before the general elections, he made it known that Bangladesh was henceforth a sovereign nation.
See how the flippant is being taken for the serious here? And that is not the end of the absurd. The followers of the war criminals Ghulam Azam and Nizami used to claim that, during the War of Liberation, it was their fear of Indian or Hindu domination that propelled them into waging war in favour of Pakistan.
Ask them why such fears led to the massacre of their fellow Bengalis by their goon squads al-Badr and al-Shams. They will not answer.
But there remains the far bigger historical absurdity for us here: The Muslim League claimed in the 1940s that Pakistan would be a homeland for all Indian Muslims.
In 1947, a bigger number of Muslims stayed back in India and a minority formed the state of Pakistan.
There was another absurdity: Jinnah decided, in the infinity of his wisdom, that India’s Muslims were a nation, not a community. That was quite a discovery.
Moments before Bangabandhu was gunned down by soldiers in 1975, he telephoned the army chief for help. To our lasting embarrassment, the general asked the Father of the Nation: “Can you come out of the house, sir?”
It was absurdity at its height. Did he think Bangabandhu would scale some wall and flee to safety even as the bullets whizzed all around and over his residence?
You reflect on such bad judgment and you ask yourself if we are not in such a terrible pass today because of such human inadequacies.
Foreign diplomats based in Dhaka have with regularity felt elated at Bangladesh being a “moderate Muslim” state. Why is their understanding of our history so poor? And who gave them the prerogative to decide that ours is a Muslim state, that it is not a secular republic? There, again, is absurdity for you.
There are people who speak gleefully of a “sepoy-janata biplob” in 1975. For all we know, there were the sepoys all around. But the janata, the people? They were nowhere to be seen. And a putsch was passed off as a revolution.
The theatre of the absurd?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist.