E M Forster’s famous observation about hoping to “have the guts to betray (his) country” if he ever had to choose between his country and his friend emboldens me to write about a man whose name is anathema to many people in Bangladesh and India. History moves in cycles and Salauddin Quader Chowdhury’s plight is part of a continuum of violence that did not begin with him and will not end with him either.
There is a tendency in India to judge events in Bangladesh in terms of bilateral relations. Salauddin, a burly, blustering barrister who has been an MP for 32 years, is not regarded as a friend; therefore, his distress is welcomed. Such stupidity recalls the traditional American attitude towards smaller countries exemplified in Franklin D Roosevelt’s remark about Nicaragua’s ruthless Somoza being “a son of a bitch”, but “our son of a bitch”.
India’s best friend would be a Bangladesh that is not paying off old scores but has come to terms with the past and is at peace with itself.
The septuagenarian conspirators who were hanged for their part in the night of the long knives were not simple murderers: they represented a strand in their country’s psyche. So did Khandakar Mushtaque Ahmed’s Indemnity Ordinance, the absence of even a police report of the massacre of August 15, 1975 until October 2, 1996, Ziaur Rahman’s revocation of the Constitution clause banning communal parties and his erasure of the secular label, as well as Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s elevation of Islam.
At another level, were all the votes that Mrs Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Jamaat-i-Islami and Jatiya Party attracted fudged? The BNP-led alliance still has enough supporters to win 32 parliamentary seats. Jamaat was reduced to just two seats from 18. But Jamaat, which reportedly set up nearly 65,000 madrassas, is less a party than a way of thinking that also sometimes finds a resonance in some sections of the Awami League.
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Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s “Second Revolution” couldn’t have gladdened the hearts of idealists who dreamt of liberation ushering in a new civilisation. A one-party dictatorship, suppression of independent newspapers and a hamstrung judiciary turned dream into nightmare. Lawrence Lifschultz wrote in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1974 of the “unprecedented” corruption, malpractices “and plunder of national wealth” under Mujib.
This is the background to the agonising e-mails I have received from Saifuddin and Humam Quader Chowdhury, Salauddin’s brother and son respectively. Salauddin is convinced his father, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, Muslim League leader and Speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly was murdered in Dhaka jail for opposing liberation. It would be an understatement to say he was not ecstatic about it either.
That is remembered. I was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel once when his driver left a note for me at the reception desk. The young male receptionist told me afterwards that Salauddin had personally gunned down Mukti Bahinis in 1971. I have no idea if this is true. Dhaka thrives on gossip and rumour but the allegation should have been judicially examined long ago. The framework exists since Bangladesh is the first South Asian country to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court setting standards for prosecuting people accused of crimes against humanity.
But Salauddin is not accused of war crimes. He is accused of arson in a case that was filed nine months ago when his name wasn’t mentioned.
Humam’s letter makes painful reading. “In the early hours of the 16th December, 2010,” he writes, “a 12-member team of armed forces and intelligence officers broke into” his father’s apartment “and began to brutally torture him. They continued to abuse him and use torture equipment they had brought for nearly five hours … they had (also) brought a doctor whose sole job was to make sure that he does not lose consciousness and to revive him if needed.” Salauddin “lost consciousness three times and was brought back to his senses using injections of adrenaline”.
“After almost 10 hours of torture, he was taken to the magistrate court of Dhaka but the blood-soaked clothes he was wearing did not stop the judge from sending him for a further remand of five days.”
Salauddin claims that after his father’s death in 1973 he advised Tajuddin Ahmed and his Awami League colleagues to have air-conditioners and other comforts installed in the jail because their turn would come one day. It did, with barbaric brutality.
The dream of Sonar Bangla will never be realised unless this cycle of vengeful death is broken.