Let’s acknowledge things have changed

For the first time I saw a female managing traffic movement on the roads in Bangladesh. Actually, not just one female, rather scores of them, many just teenage college students, were carrying out the job otherwise designated for trained police members, when those officials left the streets following the July-August student-people movement to depose the Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina.

There was some more astonishment awaiting me the day I watched this on the Dhaka roads. Students from schools, colleges and madrasahs were working together with the smoothness of a well oiled machine, many of us thought, or at least were led to think, this would be not possible due to their ideological differences.

It was the worst of times because hundreds of people and students had been killed in the previous weeks during their movement against the fascist government while hundreds were languishing at the hospitals for treatment of their critical injuries, including bullet wounds in body and eyes; in fact that was the largest number. People were still unsure in those weeks whether embracing deaths and injuries would ultimately become successful, whether the tyrannical government would fall. Some of them would subsequently die while undergoing treatment.

At the same time, it was the best of times as people from across the spectrum have learned to work together keeping aside their ideological and gender differences and braving many other oddities, which in the first place should not at all be obstacles for peaceful coexistence in a nation state. Finally, after 53 years of achieving independence we were turning into citizens, many of us thought except the agnostics who cannot help themselves.

But all that goodwill, intentions and benevolent acts are facing questions now. It is not that everything we achieved during the July-August movement and in the subsequent weeks are crumbling. But surely the signs of cracks are becoming visible.

During the movement and the following days after achieving the victory as the autocrat fled, female students with t-shirts and madrasah students with their traditional long attire and skull cap worked together on the streets. No one questioned about the dress pattern that time. But now, after the victory of the student-people movement, such questions are being raised. Professor Anu Muhammad during a book launching programme at Pathak Shamabesh Centre in Dhaka on Saturday warned many types of fascism are peeping from their holes. Women are coming under attacks at different places, violent phrases are being uttered about their dress and the minorities are being attacked.

Everyone irrespective of his or her caste, creed and belief in various issues has an inalienable equal rights in a nation state. Anu Muhammad at the event said there could be theoretical discussions and criticisms on the issues, not bigotry and prejudice.

The situation is even more painful because we don’t even know how many people actually laid down their lives, though the central sub-committee on health on Saturday published a list of 1,581 martyrs during the movement of Students Against Discrimination, and many people, who embraced injuries for the cause, are still undergoing treatments at the hospitals. Everyday we are reading reports about people being released from hospitals with amputations, permanent blindness or other critical conditions and the families of the martyred are facing risks of starvation.

Take the example of Md. Sujon, 24, an assistant of a truck driver. He would live with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old child at a rented house in Mohammadpur, Dhaka. Sujon sustained a bullet injury while returning home from work on 20 June and passed away at Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital that day. Alongside the other losses, deceased Sujon’s wife Tania Begum, 21, does not know how she would raise the child.

Take another example of 15-year-old Tahsin Hossain Nahian, a ninth grader at Mohammadpur Government High School. He sustained bullet injuries to his spinal cord at Science Lab intersection in the city on 4 August, the previous day the fascist government was deposed. Currently this adolescent boy is undergoing treatment at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in Savar. Physicians have said there is no guarantee that Tahsin would be able to walk after the treatment. Even the team of physicians from China could not assure he would walk.

The indomitable teenager, who took part in demonstrations against the Awami League government at different places including Mirpur-10 roundabout, National Press Club, Central Shaheed Minar and Dhanmondi-27 as he could not bear the reports of so many people being hit with bullets, does not believe the physicians. He hopes things will be normal once he returns home.

When people unanimously should have thought about the persons like Tania Begum and Tahsin Hossain Nahian, some of them are issuing notes of warning that this and that person from the Textbook Correction and Revision Committee has to be dropped, this and that custom will be upheld in future Bangladesh, at the cost of marginalising others, and on so many other issues. Surely those were not the “spirit” of the July-August movement, which has been described as the largest mass uprising in the history of this region from the Pakistan period. We should especially remember that the movement was against any form of discrimination.

Despite all the reports of incidents that might demoralise one, we want to recall the words of former caretaker government advisor Hossain Zillur Rahman. Addressing the same book launching event, he said, “We are in the midst of a crisis of solidifying post-dictatorship democracy. We are receiving many allegations and those are very important as well. All the allegations are true, but new opportunities have arrived.”

True, we are hearing many people, young and old, talking about those new opportunities to turn our country into that land where a person can grow up to his or her full height. Let’s not impose our ideas on the other people and thus create divisions among them and turn the country into a trough of despair once again.