Bangladesh 1971: They were led to their death fifty two years ago. Hands and eyes bound, prodded by the guns and knives of their abductors, accomplices of the Pakistan occupation army, they walked to an end that the killers made sure would be as painful as their malevolence would allow, writes Bangladeshi author and journalist Syed Badrul Ahsan.

It was not merely in December 1971, on the eve of liberation, that such patriots were put to death. Indeed, throughout the nine months of an organised genocide beginning at the end of March of the year, our intellectuals — some of the best of minds in the land — were pushed to a brutal end.

The Sunday Times, June 13th 1971.

One recalls the poet who, in Dhaka’s Mohammadpur, became the earliest of the targets of the collaborators of the army on 26th March, hours into the launch of Operation Searchlight.

And the season of bloodletting continued, with millions perishing in the carnage. Yahya Khan, Tikka Khan, Rao Farman Ali, AAK Niazi demonstrated no sympathy at all for these hapless Bengalis in the towns and villages of this bloodied land.

The old and the young were all miscreants in the eyes of the regime, which through repudiating the results of an election won overwhelmingly by the Bengalis now sought to cleanse Bangladesh of the nationalist aspirations of its people.

It was such ethnic cleansing which was perpetrated on the eve of the collapse of the state of Pakistan in occupied Bangladesh in mid-December. For three days between 13-15th December, the final phase in the liquidation of the Bengali intellectual class went on.

The al-Badr and the Razakars did not have any more means at their disposal of saving their beloved Pakistan, but they had all the weapons that would leave the emerging state of Bangladesh bereft of the cream at the top of its social structure.

Today, more than a half century into freedom, it is proper to ask how many of our intellectuals were silenced by organised brutality in the nine months of the war.

The figures make for sad reading. Data available from the Bangladesh government would have us know that no fewer than 1,109 intellectuals were killed in 1971.

But, again, there is another estimate, this one in Banglapedia, noting that altogether 1,111 intellectuals perished in the course of the war. The breakdown of the ones murdered: 991 academics, 49 physicians, 42 lawyers, 13 journalists, nine litterateurs and artistes, five engineers, and others.

The monument at the mass killing field in Rayer Bazar, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Add to those figures the innumerable number of students killed, the freedom fighters seized by the military and tortured to death in the cantonments. The murder of Dhirendranath Dutta, a veteran parliamentarian who served as a minister in the 1950s, is a constant reminder of the brutality unleashed on the nation.

Moshiur Rahman, elected to the national assembly at the December 1970 election, was abducted and slowly, painfully put to death. Ferdousi Priyobhashini, a social activist in Khulna, was subjected to inhuman behaviour by the soldiers for the entire duration of the war and lived to tell the tale.

Two geologists, Mujibur Rahman and S.K.M. Abdullah earned the army’s wrath, were taken to the cantonment, subjected to relentless torture but did not die. The husband and son of Jahanara Imam, who in the 1990s led a spirited movement for the trial of the 1971 collaborators of the Pakistan army, were picked up by the soldiers, mercilessly tortured.

The husband came back home a broken man, to die shortly after. The son died in the cantonment. Altaf Mahmud, a renowned melody maker who set the lyrics of the nationalist song, ‘Amar Bhai-er Rokte Rangano Ekushey February’ (February Twenty One In The Colours Of My Brother’s Blood) suffered a medieval death.

On Martyred Intellectuals Day, therefore, it is the terror unleashed by an organised army that we remember. It is that horror-driven phase of Bengali collective life that we do not forget even as life passes into its twilight moments. It was a time when we looked to the future, under leadership that had triumphed at the voting booths, that promised us a new dawn through an inauguration of democracy in the land.

But outrage took over when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the elected leader of the majority party in the new national assembly, was seized by the junta and flown to prison a thousand miles away from home to stand trial on charges of treason.

In December, as we commemorate the sacrifices of our intellectuals, it is the gory end of every single Bengali killed in the war that we recall. It is the burnt homes, the devastated villages, the curfews imposed to search for the Mukti Bahini in the city, the random picking up of young women to be molested that we will not forget.

We will not forget either the reconfiguring of our land of poetry and song into a landscape of intense guerrilla war determined to wrest freedom from those who tormented us. We had the pen in hand to compose poetry, we hand the harmonium to make music. And then the war gave us the guns to free our country of the enemy.

This is the story we repeat to our children and to our grandchildren day after day. On Martyred Intellectuals Day, it is the old elegy we read and refashion across the country. It is the old epic struggle that beats in our hearts on the day, for that struggle is a reminder of the leadership which conceived and strategized in Mujibnagar the course of the war against the occupation army.

In the story of that struggle we recount the exploits of the tens of thousands of young men and women who left their villages and their towns to link up with the Mukti Bahini.

Many of these freedom fighters did not come back home, for they perished in defence of their country in the unknown fields of battle. Many others who came back did not seek any benefits from the state but simply went back to their humble living.

You know that these ageing freedom fighters and all those who died in the war were the best of Bengali men and women this land was privileged to call its own more than a half century ago.

On Martyred Intellectuals Day, we remember. In our prayers — in the mosque, in the temple, in the church, in the synagogue, in the gurdwara, in the heart — we feel the anguish they went through, the warm blood they were drained of, as the nation fought for an assertion of its dignity as a sovereign entity in the councils of the world.

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Read also: Disinformation campaign against Bangladesh: Setting the record straight – by Syed Badrul Ahsan

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