This is not the land we celebrated on the afternoon of December 16, 1971 when freedom came to our courtyards after a grueling nine months of terror and genocide.
This is not the country we cheered when the great men of the Mujibnagar government, having led us to liberty, came home at twilight on December 22, 1971.
This is not the republic we bowed in homage to on the day Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came back home in triumphant mode on January 10, 1972.
Today, as we observe the women of the Hindu community weep over the vandalization of their homes in Sahapara and Digholia in Narail’s Lohagara, we ask the question: Is this our instance of communal harmony before the world?
Years ago, when Ramu happened, we asked ourselves: Is this the secular state we built through our long political struggle for national liberty?
In this black moment in time, it is the respected, truth-upholding Humayun Azad we remember. Did we go to war more than a half century ago to construct the Bangladesh we inhabit today? Did we imagine this Bangladesh all those years ago?
For more than 50 years we have remembered and have made the world remember the tragedy visited upon us by the Pakistan occupation army, those tales of genocide, of rape, of the systematic persecution of the Hindu community. In these years since August 1975 we have deluded ourselves into believing that in this land of putative communal harmony, everything is fine and nothing could go wrong.
And yet things have been going wrong.
In the aftermath of the general elections of October 2001, Hindu homes and families came under organized brutal assault because Hindus were thought to be partisans of a particular political party. Hindu men and women were not safe; their property was up for grabs.
Conditions have not improved. We do not ask why the numbers are going haywire, those that point to a decline of the Hindu population in the country. And we do not respond, indeed cannot respond, when people abroad ask us where all our fellow Bengalis, Hindu by faith, have been vanishing.
We only lower our heads in unmitigated shame.
When mobs set themselves upon the Hindu community, indeed upon any citizen on the convenient premise of religious sentiments getting hurt, we do not ask about the religious sentiments of those falling prey to organized mob violence getting hurt. We are quick to take the young men allegedly responsible for all this assault on majoritarian religious sentiments into police custody.
We look the other way when hundreds of these so-called defenders of the faith beat up men whose faith is at variance with theirs, when they loot the valuables they find in the homes of these hapless people, when they leave the women of this community bereft of the meaning of life.
No, this is not the land for which all Bengalis -- Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists -- waged war in our year of existential crisis. The occupation forces burnt the homes of the religious minority, reduced their property to ashes because they needed to purify their “land of the pure” of “infidels.”
We beat them back, to inform the world that in sovereign Bangladesh there were no religious majorities and minorities, that communalistic impulses had been banished to the woods, that it was a land where Bengalis lived.
Today, as we observe the flames rising out of Hindu homes, as we see mobs baying for the blood of a community reduced to helplessness, we ask ourselves: Where has that dream state we forged through struggle, through the blood of millions, gone?
We ask, again: Where is the state that holds the constitutional responsibility to ensure the security of each and every citizen of the country? How much time does it take for the security forces to impede the march of mobs out on a ferocious mission of subjecting the weak and the cowering to more humiliation?
We the people are forever reminded of communal harmony prevailing all across this land. And even as this reminder is served, in the manner of a tired, worn-out cliché, puja mandaps are destroyed, machinations are afoot to stampede priests at temples into situations not of their making. One misguided young man posts a reprehensible status on social media and we have the ire of the mob raining down on an entire community?
We do not ask why our Christian community has been dwindling in numbers. We have no response to the hurt felt by that young man in Ramu who, despite the confidence-building measures taken to reassure the Buddhist community, tells us with a broken heart that this country has turned him into a stranger.
We have been witness for decades to the predatory assaults on the heritage of the various ethnic communities in the country and yet we have said not a word in their defence. Their lands are seized to build eco-parks. We pretend that nothing is wrong.
Communal harmony is not, cannot be, harmony brought on through fear. Social harmony rests on the principle of every citizen feeling confident about the equality he shares with all other citizens, about his confidence that when his security comes under assault, it will be the state that will come forth to reassure him that he is safe, that this country is as much his as it is of others in the larger framework of Bengali nationhood.
In a land of communal harmony, no one set of religious beliefs will upstage another. In this People’s Republic, mosques and temples and churches and monasteries have been part of heritage. Why must we let those dark elements of nefarious intent strike at this tradition?
Why must Buddhists and Christians and all our ethnic groups begin to feel -- because of those flame-throwing mobs with their blood-curdling cries of punishments to be meted out to so-called blasphemers hurting the religious sentiments of a particular community -- that the country they once called their own has run away from them?
Take a look at the figures, spanning the period 2013 until June 2022, as Ain-o-Salish Kendra spells it out for us. As many as 1,642 Hindu homes have come under attack, with 456 businesses ruined. And 13 people were left dead.
Go back to Ramu 2012. 12 monasteries were destroyed by rampaging mobs; 30 homes were burnt. In Ukhiya and Teknaf, seven monasteries and 11 homes were put to the torch.
Since 2013, no fewer than 4,000 incidents of violence against the Hindu community have been perpetrated, clearly through well-organized strategy by communalism-driven elements. And do not forget Nasirnagar.
These sordid images, reinforced by these ugly happenings in Narail, have tarnished the nation’s image before the global community. Nothing can be of greater shame than a society’s inability to protect its own.
Nothing can be a bigger sin than for a state born of secular ideals to be mute witness to that principle flagrantly violated by dark elements out on a mission to wipe out a significant segment of the Bengali nation.
Assertive political leadership is called for. We speak to the powers that be: Go into the historically necessary task of rolling back the grievous damage inflicted on our structure of secularism by the two military dictators that was our misfortune seeing arise in this land.
Give us back the land whose parameters were defined in the 1972 constitution.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.