History being a set of realities strung together in a comprehensive narrative, it is important that it be handled with the commitment and intellectual assessment it calls for.
When earlier this month, a two-day conference arranged by the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA) had participants recommending that April 10, the day the Proclamation of Independence was formulated in 1971 -- a happening followed a week later by the inauguration of the wartime government of Bangladesh and the battle strategy shaped by the leadership -- be officially declared Republic Day, it is only proper that policymakers give serious thought to the idea.
Bangladesh's history brings together all the seminal occasions which went into adding increasingly newer substance during the War of Liberation. Over the years, a good segment of that history has been forgotten or, in the darkness prevailing for a period of altogether 26 years (1975-1996 and 2001-2006), rudely brushed out of the narrative. Most of the personalities involved with the movement for freedom have passed on, through assassination or death from natural causes.
Not many remain on the scene. And so it is incumbent upon scholars and researchers of history to elicit from these few survivors -- Dr Kamal Hossain, Barrister Amir-Ul-Islam, Professor Rehman Sobhan, Professor Anisur Rahman -- all the minutiae associated with the national movement for autonomy in the 1960s leading up to the War of Liberation in 1971.
Commemorating April 10 as Republic Day would be a credible new step in our collective understanding of history. More importantly, such a step will go a long and necessary way into imparting the history of Bangladesh to the young and to people abroad.
Our misfortune has been in experiencing the counter-revolution which went systematically into undermining our passage to the making of Bangladesh as a sovereign republic. The passage, strewn with detritus of anti-history, remains to be swept clean. It is here that the details of what happened in 1971 -- as also before and immediately after it -- require academic discussion.
A significant component of the narrative ought to be research on the negotiations, eventually abortive, the Awami League leadership conducted with the Yahya Khan junta in the period March 16-24 of 1971. The position adopted by Bangabandhu and his team needs to be spelt out through articles and in books dealing with the times.
Dr Kamal Hossain, the only surviving member of the Awami League negotiating team and one whose job it was to explain the legalities upon which the party presented its arguments during the negotiations, will be able to shed light on how the military regime engaged in chicanery and was eventually perceived to have had no intention of transferring power to the Awami League.
Why do we need such details to be spelt out now? The reasons are pure and simple. Books in comprehensive manner, in both Bengali and English, on the country's history, need to be authored for people both at home and abroad. There is a big paucity of historical works from Bangladesh at universities, libraries, and bookstores abroad.
A rich component in the framing of the historical narrative must focus on the Mujibnagar leadership, with particular emphasis on the political background of the men who constituted the wartime government.
We have not yet had comprehensive works on Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M Mansoor Ali and A H M Kamruzzaman. It is a huge gap which needs filling in. The generations born after the war have only been acquainted with the names of the four leaders but not much about their background as political figures.
The demand for April 10 to be formalized as Republic Day is therefore inclusive of all these components of history, for these factors added substance to the nature of the nation-state that was being shaped in the period of the war.
That the republic was or would be a fulfilment of the aspirations voiced by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman necessitates the inclusion of such details in the narrative as the circumstances in which the Six Point Plan for regional autonomy was formulated.
Moving further on, the declaration of independence by the Father of the Nation moments before his arrest by the Pakistan army in the early hours of March 26, where he was taken from his residence, when he was flown to erstwhile West Pakistan, the manner of his trial before a secret military tribunal headed by Brigadier Rahimuddin Khan, and his release from incarceration in January 1972 will be important chapters in the enumeration of history.
The formation of the Mukti Bahini, the role of the Mujib Bahini, the details relating to the sector commanders -- their background, their battlefield experience -- are chapters of history requiring dispassionate analysis.
In a broad sense, therefore, the BILIA conference was an emphatic call for national history to be placed in its proper perspective. On April 10, 1971, when Barrister Amir-Ul Islam drafted the Proclamation of Independence and had it approved by Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad, Bangladesh laid out the arguments in support of its being the newest republic in the world.
The republic worked extremely well in the nine months of the war and then moved on to post-war circumstances, a significant aspect of the early period of Bangladesh's sovereign nationhood being the critical task of constitution-making.
Kamal Hossain and Amir-Ul Islam, part of the constitution-making committee set up in April 1972, are resource persons to be consulted by historians and researchers on the subject.
The deliberations, the many points of view emerging from the committee and going all the way to the constitution taking effect on December 16, 1972 should be part of the written record.
Tofail Ahmed, having served as political secretary to Prime Minister Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the early years of Bengali statehood, is a key witness to the problems and prospects the fledgling republic faced in that crucial phase of history. He should be tapped for his insights and his recollections of the times, for it is the details he can come forth with that will enrich the narrative.
At another end, A S M Abdur Rab, whose role in history, together with that of his three deceased fellow student leaders, cannot be overlooked, is yet around and in a position to expand on the idea of the role of students in March 1971 and thereafter.
The call for April 10 to be formalized as Republic Day is fundamentally an argument for a thorough, full, and comprehensive enumeration of Bangladesh's national history.
The role of the political leadership, of each one of our great men; the impediments they overcame, beginning in the mid-1960s, in the march to independent statehood for Bangladesh; the qualities they embodied in providing that leadership -- from Bangabandhu to the Mujibnagar pioneers -- ought of necessity to be composed in clear black and white.
History is poorly served when tarred with grey or selectively presented or less than thoroughly examined.
The call for Republic Day is an urge for a discerning observation of national history. It is a renewal of the principle that Bangladesh was conceived as a republic resting, among other core principles, on the foundations of secular nationalism.
The Proclamation of Independence, formulated on April 10, 1971 and disseminated before the world a week later, set the nation on course toward liberal political republicanism.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune