Three reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan
Calming passions in deceptive rural serenity . . .
THE partition of India, you can be sure of it, will forever remain a scar on men's historical consciousness in this part of the world. Of course, the generation that witnessed the searing division, with all its massacres and rape and pillage and the lot, has by now nearly passed on. But those that succeeded it have held on to the tragic tale, through oral tradition or through the ubiquity of writing that has been expended on the theme of India's vivisection over the years.
It is within the ambience of historical writing related to India that you must observe Syed Abul Maksud's Gandhi, Nehru and Noakhali. In terms of historicity, the place of Noakhali in any assessment of Indian history is insignificant, certainly. And yet it resonates, in that tragic sense of the meaning, with the lugubrious story that has consistently been a comment on Indian freedom. Surely the most menacing part of that story remains linked to what has come to be known as the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946, when the Direct Action Day announced by the Muslim League to press its demand for the creation of Pakistan swiftly dwindled into unimaginable mayhem and murder. For four days beginning August 16, Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs went at one another with ferocity that would leave more than 5,000 people dead on the streets of Calcutta. A helpless Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, prime minister of Bengal and the man many have blamed for causing the tragedy through declaring a holiday on August 16 in support of the Muslim League plan, watched as the city rapidly mutated into a ghost town.
A semblance of order was restored by August 20. But if there was any illusion that the lull in the killings would last, it was soon to be proved otherwise. And it was Noakhali which demonstrated, in mid October, that the embers of Calcutta were yet hot enough to cause new trouble. It was, in predominantly Muslim Noakhali, the turn of the Hindu community to be butchered. That again had repercussions in nearby Bihar, where Hindus swooped on Muslims, thousands of whom were brutalized to death. Nothing, not in the administrative machinery, not in the political organizations, was there, in that moral sense of the meaning, to stanch that flow of inter-religious blood. Only Gandhi, his stature yet far above everyone else's in that fractured country, remained --- perhaps the last hope of all Indians where restoring sanity was concerned. On 7 November 1946, Gandhi arrived in Noakhali with a clear, unambiguous objective: to stay in Noakhali until communal harmony had been restored. It was to be a long stay, until 3 March 1947; and the great Indian nationalist would move from house to house, from family to family, calming passions among a people who had co-existed for generations together.
Gandhi's long stay in Noakhali inevitably gave the place a measure of historical importance, for Congress leaders, by then quite exercised by a probable division of India, came all the way from Delhi seeking his advice on the critical issues before the country. After all, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League were adamant about Pakistan, with Jinnah even going to the absurd extent of suggesting that the central and provincial governments should mull 'an exchange of populations' as a way of resolving the communal strife. It was such incendiary politics that Gandhi dealt with at a riot-ravaged house in Srirampur village under Ramganj police station in Noakhali. And then came the stream of visitors: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Sarat Chandra Bose, Rammanohar Lohia, C. Rajagopalachari, JB Kripalani, Asaf Ali and Jagjivan Ram. Sarat Chandra Bose of the Bengal Congress left Noakhali on 26 December after trying to convince Gandhi that Bengal needed to stay united and untouched by any partition.
The next day, Nehru arrived in Srirampur. Prior to that, however, he had kept in contact with the Mahatma through Satish Chandra Das and the poet Amiya Chakravarty. Indeed, the future prime minister of independent India, during his stay in Calcutta in the earlier part of December 1946, had suggested that Chakravarty proceed to Noakhali and seek Gandhi's views on the demand for a partition of Bengal then being raised by a section of Hindu political leaders in Calcutta. When Nehru himself reached Srirampur, politics in distant Delhi was in a fraught state. Syed Abul Maksud quotes Krishna Kripalani on this score:
'The political atmosphere in Delhi bristled with misunderstanding and suspicion, and Gandhi's advice was being constantly sought. In the last week of December Jawaharlal Nehru arrived (at Srirampur) for personal consultation, accompanied by Acharya Kripalani, then Congress President.'
It appears Gandhi spent an eventful December 1946 in Noakhali. As he waited for Nehru to arrive, he received on Christmas Day (from a Christian admirer) a soldier's hamper that contained, among other things, a few cartons of cigarettes. Those cigarettes were to be given to Nehru. On 27 December, Nehru, accompanied by Kripalani and Mridula Sarabhai arrived in Calcutta from Delhi at 1.30 pm. At 3.45 pm, the party left Calcutta for Feni, where it arrived at 4.30 pm. As Maksud notes, Nehru alighted from the plane a bit depressed and sorrowful. As many as 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, waited at Feni aerodrome to greet Nehru, who was hosted in Choumuhoni by a rice merchant named Jogendra Chandra Majumdar. The writer does not forget to hint at the unsavoury methods Majumdar may have employed during the Bengal famine of 1943 by trading --- and profiteering --- in rice.
Nehru spoke to the assembled gathering at the aerodrome for about eight minutes. What he and other Congress leaders were up against became pretty clear as soon as he began to speak. A few stones were thrown at Nehru and one of them landed on him, leaving him stunned for a while. Suspicion fell, not on the Muslim League or its supporters but on the pro-Sarat Bose faction of the Congress or/and the Hindu Mahasabha.
For the next four days, in Srirampur, Nehru engaged in a dialogue with Gandhi even as he remained isolated from the rest of the world. The post and telegraph office lay a few kilometers away, at Ramganj bazaar. It was a world outside the world. Nehru took a stroll around the village, gazed at the paddy stretching for what seemed miles. The poet in him must have stirred.
Serving through emergency times . . .
MAINUL Hosein has, in a manner of speaking, had an eventful life. Thrust into managing the daily Ittefaq at a rather young age following the death of his father in 1969, he, a barrister-at-law, along with his brother Anwar Hossain Manju handled things pretty well. And then came 1973, when Hosein was nominated for a parliamentary seat by the ruling Awami League. He won and took his place in the Jatiyo Sangsad at a time when giants like Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmed dominated the national political scene. But that stint in parliament was to be short-lived. With the Fourth Amendment to the constitution coming in and one-party Baksal rule foisting itself on Bangladesh, Hosein saw little reason to remain in the JS and particularly with a party in whose democratic credentials he had always believed in. He walked away from parliament and so did General Mohammad Ataul Gani Osmany.
In the years since January 1975, Mainul Hosein and the country have come a long, though not necessarily a happy way. In the Ershad years, even as his brother linked up with the military ruler to become part of the regime, Hosein went vocal against dictatorship and to his credit played a fearless role in arguing the case for a swift return to democracy. By then he had travelled a good distance away from the Awami League and was indeed seen as getting closer to the right of centre. But he made little effort to align himself, after 1976, with any political party. Towards the end of the beleaguered Ershad regime, the idea took root, at least for a while, that Hosein could well become either head of an incoming interim administration or be an important cog in it. In the event, Hosein remained outside the Shahabuddin caretaker dispensation. His day in the sun was to come in January 2007, when the military took decisive action in ejecting the Iajuddin caretaker government and replacing it with one led by Fakhruddin Ahmed. For a year, Hosein was clearly the most visible face of the government. He held sway over the ministries of law and information; and his comments on politics and parties generated intense debate across the spectrum, much of which was severely critical of him.
Mainul Hosein now seeks to present his case in Gonotontrer Shafolyo Chahiyachhi through a series of essays covering various aspects of governmental activities while he was part of the power structure. He begins, though, with an assessment of the long struggle for democracy in Bangladesh, bringing into the process his reflections on the rise to prominence of Ittefaq under his father Tofazzal Hossain Manik Mia's leadership and the ire it earned of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1960s. The story of the Ittefaq will appear incomplete to readers of this work, for a palpable reason: the writer does not mention the fundamental role played by Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani and Yar Mohammad in the emergence of the newspaper. It would have helped if a comprehensive analysis of Ittefaq's pre-eminent role in the growth of Bengali nationalism had come forth. But that inadequacy does not of course detract from Hosein's focus on the caretaker government he served for a year. His emphases at nearly every point of the book reinforce the feeling that his understanding of democracy has been conditioned by his deep attachment to Westminster politics.
But try linking that with Hosein's reflections on the agitation by the students of Dhaka and Rajshahi universities in mid 2007. You will come away disappointed. The writer, to our regret, appears to think that the teachers of the universities did not play their due role in containing the agitation that originally erupted over the presence of an army camp at the Dhaka University sports stadium. The arrest and detention of a number of DU and RU teachers and the sordid, almost medieval treatment they were subjected to in detention remains one of the more shameful episodes in the history of Bangladesh. And yet Mainul Hosein ignores this dark episode. The bare truth remains: what happened at the universities was unfortunate, but was the harsh action against the students and teachers by the caretaker government at all necessary? One only needs to go into the accounts of at least a couple of the teachers, Dr. Anwar Hossain and Professor Harun-or-Rashid, to feel the agony the nation went through as some of the most respected of academics were hauled to court, to prison and then to remand in the manner of common criminals.
Mainul Hosein's views on the demolition of Rangs Bhaban comes through clearly. In similar fashion, but somewhat in a more intense manner, his opinion on the controversy generated by the publication of a cartoon in the daily Prothom Alo makes interesting reading. The writer explains the measures taken by the government, with of course himself right in the centre, to defuse the crisis and so prevent it from taking a wider dimension. Hosein clearly remains grateful to Moulana Obaidul Haq, the late khatib of Baitul Mukarram mosque, for the flexibility and wisdom the latter demonstrated in his handling of the incident, to a point where eventually Prothom Alo could breathe a sigh of relief. The writer does not mention, though, reports circulating at the time of overt attempts to have the newspaper close down for a few days in order for extremist passions generated by the cartoon issue to cool down.
It is an interesting work. In more ways than one, it is an intriguing one as well. To be sure, it is one man's story; but it does open a small aperture into the world that was the Fakhruddin Ahmed caretaker administration.
Falling off a horse and rising in life ...
CIVIL servants of the old school have quite a lot to say, once they walk away into the sunset, on their experience of life in the bureaucracy. The old school is of course the Civil Service of Pakistan, within the ambit of which a goodly number of Bengalis distinguished themselves and then brought that experience to bear on their administrative performance in independent Bangladesh. M. Nurunnabi Chowdhury happens to be a distinguished Bengali whose insights into life and government serve fundamentally as a journey back into time.
Begin with the beginning. Begin with a horse, for horse riding was an essential part of the training that fresh recruits to the CSP were exposed to in West Pakistan. There was something of an attempt to hold on to the tradition set in place by the colonial British ruling class in pre-partition India. Whether it was in the army, where notions of a pucca sahib culture continued to dominate training and service in both India and Pakistan, or in the civil service, where a conscious emulation of British elitism went on well into the freedom-dappled days of the subcontinent, the emphasis on values was never let go of. Hence that training with horses. Chowdhury has particular reasons to remember this phase of his life as a young civil servant: he fell from his horse, or his horse forced him off its back. Whatever. The young man spent quite some time recovering from the shock.
After that, of course, it was all smooth sailing for Chowdhury as it was for his peers. One of the qualities that underline this work is the detailed picture the writer provides of his experience as a civil servant in various regions of what was then East Pakistan. It is essentially an enumeration of tradition that the writer goes through or throws at the reader. Within that swathe of experience he dwells on some larger than life figures in Bangladesh's history. Obviously, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman comes into the story, the story of course taking shape sometime after his release from imprisonment in the Agartala conspiracy case and the abortive round table talks with a steadily weakening Ayub Khan. For perhaps the first time we hear from Nurunnabi Chowdhury, who as part of the National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA) in Dhaka went to see the future father of the Bengali nation at the latter's Dhanmondi residence. Bangabandhu's narration of the many effusive ways in which Pakistan's politicians, including those opposed to Ayub Khan, competed to congratulate the dictator once he had announced his decision to restore parliamentary democracy in Pakistan, makes eerie reading. It was a scene that left Mujib in a state of amazement. As the president turned to leave the room, the Awami League chief loudly told him, "Mr. President, please sit down and listen to me. You have not heard me." A flustered Ayub asked, "What is it?" Mujib was blunt. He told the military ruler that he was ready to accept Ayub's declaration on condition that the majority of elected parliamentarians would be able to change the president's 1962 constitution by a simple majority.
Life being a bagful of incidents and episodes, Chowdhury relates them in plenty. There is the story of the arrogant police officer eventually brought to heel by the writer. There is the account of the communalism that threatened to raise its head, thanks to the minions of Governor Abdul Monem Khan. The homes of the Hindu community burned in Narsingdi and yet Education Minister Mafizuddin Ahmed was not concerned that his remarks at a meeting in Bancharampur (he was sad that in Muslim Pakistan the officer in charge of the local police station, in this case an individual named Bhattacharjee) was an Indian national!
Nurunnabi Chowdhury was to rise in life, in free Bangladesh. Like millions of others, he was to be caught in occupied Bangladesh and remain part of the Pakistani military administration even as many of his peers and colleagues fled across the border to link up with the Mujibnagar government. Nothing can perhaps beat the agony that defines internal exile. It was the regularity with which Pakistan was trying to crush Bengali aspirations --- the images of the dead and the raped and the injured and the disappeared --- that was depressing. And yet, like all Bengalis, he waited in anticipation of freedom. With freedom came the opportunity of working with men of history. Captain M. Mansur Ali, recalls the writer, was 'one of the most capable ministers working in harmony with all his clientele . . .' And then there were the moments when the powerful turned quixotic. General Osmany, appointed minister for civil aviation, decided to visit the British high commission in Dhaka to record the fact that he had once served in the British India army!
It is old values, indeed old-fashioned values, those with that certain civilizing effect on people, that Nurunnabi Chowdhury reminds you of. Something of those values you might be able to retrace through a reading of this work.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star .
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