There can be nothing as damning for a state than to limit existence to the present without a liberal dose of the past. Inability or reluctance to face up to the mistakes of the past, reluctance to acknowledge the contribution to statehood, however limited and a galling tendency to wash over happenings of yesteryear, till corrected will eat further into the vitals of our raisin d’etre. These are some of the critical elements that contribute to the sorry decline in morality and values.
This piece is an example of the malady. There is no other explanation for no broad observation of Martyred Intellectuals’ Day. Some of the finest minds that could have laid the foundations of a knowledge based society were cruelly and brutally taken away from us by those that sought to brain-blind the nascent state of Bangladesh.
I lived in the same building where Dr Abul Khair and Dr Faizul Mahi resided: Number 35 Dhaka University Staff Quarters. To this day my mother rues why she hadn’t insisted that Dr Khair didn’t stay on, after he and his family had floored it in our flat on December 9, 1971, as Indian Airforce jets continued their forays in the Dhaka skies. My father Mulkutur Rahman, a teacher of Political Science, had always been an early riser who would sit at his little desk to study after the Fajr prayers. Through the window he saw Dr Khair walking to the compound gates that wintry morning wrapped not in his more often used shawl but a bed-sheet, never to be seen again.
My recollections of him and Dr Mahi as a young boy were of two personalities defined by their composure. Dr Mahi, tall, slim and trim, always walked at a pace from the building to the gate, head inclined to one side as one deep in thought. He rarely spent much time on the verandah of his fourth floor flat. Dr Khair walked erect and at a more leisurely pace, eyes hidden in powerful thick-rimmed spectacles. Both epitomized the quintessential teachers of the time, devoted to their profession.
What they knew, why they were targeted, are questions that even their children, one of them a play-friend never got to know. Perhaps his choice of PhD topic “Foreign Policy of the United States as regards the Indian subcontinent from 1937 to 1947” had sparked some of his thinking. He had been picked up for questioning by the Pakistan army in August but was later released. More the surprise that he was picked up again.
The abduction, obvious torture and killing didn’t happen by chance. Nor that of the others. The tragedy lies in that fifty-two years later, there still has not been any major discourse on the man that studied at Berkeley, University of California, his views of a welfare state or indeed, what made him tick. Instead, the University of Dhaka’s student handbook for 2018-19 errs ironically in the history by stating he had been picked up in August 1971 and killed!
Dr Mahi was only thirty-three at the time he died , holding a doctorate degree in Education and working at the Institute of Education and Research. Here was a man young enough to have had the wherewithal and knowledge to help Bangladesh chart a course in education. The braveheart academicians didn’t stoop to lip-service making quiet but crucial contributions as did millions to the war of independence.
The list is a long one that makes for sad reading. Sadder still is not understanding them, their beliefs and their visions of the future. We can go on extolling them however briefly. We can use faded photographs for people to see and forget. In all of this we shall be given erroneous facts furthering the path of moral decline.
Mahmudur Rahman is a writer, columnist, broadcaster, and communications specialist.