Student protests and encampments have become the foremost proponents of Palestinian liberation and calling out the complicity of US policy and American institutions in occupation and genocide, as well as demanding change in Bangladesh.
I’m a fiction writer with an obsession with history. Recently, thinking through one of my current writing projects, I tumbled down a mental rabbit hole, the best of its kind, that left me stoked with wonder and curiosity. It had to do with connecting the dots, or as it were, the dates, that pulled me across the history of Bangladesh and the Subcontinent through the lifetimes of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It was not my first time on this journey, but it was revealing, and enchanting, in a fresh new light.
My consciousness as a Bengali and a Bangladeshi was groomed, shaped, and set in place through stories of Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971. I didn’t see that war; I was born five years later. But every family story, every turn of events, every recollection that I heard from the time I had consciousness and memory, involved that nine-month conflict. So much so that the topic would go on to supply the backdrop to my first novel, and countless other writings, including my doctoral dissertation.
Unfinished Partition
The Bangladesh War of Independence was the final, belated act in the drama of the end of British rule in 1947. Long before Bangladesh was a word, much less an independent nation-state, even in conception, many Bengali Muslims had supported the creation of a separate homeland where they could live and thrive with dignity, which they believed they couldn’t do in Hindu-dominated India. Perhaps with good reason, as the inequities and inequalities they suffered were longstanding facts, the worst of it in the areas of education and employment.
It was all history. Foreign history. History I was happy to engage. Important, but not personal. That connection would come later.
There were other factors that decided who had access to what regardless of religion, class, social status, and family connections — but at its heart, the discontent had to do with equal opportunities and rights and personhood as citizens.
In 1948, the first Governor General of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was the commencement speaker at Dhaka University. His speech would become a catalyst for the movement that would grow from being about Bengali identity to an all-out bloody war for independent Bangladesh. Jinnah that day made the declaration that Urdu, and only Urdu, would be the official state language of all of Pakistan.
That Jinnah’s speech was to an audience of university students could be seen as a coincidence or accident in hindsight. Either way, his decision would have reached every Bengali ear in the city before long. And the events it sparked would, I don’t doubt, have happened nonetheless, as much as where they took root being the ideal grounds.
Four years later, in February 1952, the streets of Dhaka city were blanketed with peaceful protests. Students of Dhaka University broke curfews and gathered in thousands, calling for Bengali to remain the language of East Pakistan. Police fired on the marchers, killing several students. While the scenes unfolded and unraveled, the campus surrounded and barricaded by police, the university vice-chancellor and other officials quietly watched.
A decade later, as the Sixties ignited a new wave of protests in East Pakistan against the army regime of West Pakistan for equal rights, Dhaka University was once again the center of its heart. And as the decade came to a close and it became more evident that a complete break with Pakistan was the only solution, student protests became the relentless frontlines on the road to Bangladesh.
When the war broke out in March 1971, Dhaka University was one of the army’s bloodiest killing grounds.
The Home and the World
I knew about the language protests of 1952 through family stories, history classes, and the annual commemoration of the Language Martyrs’ Day. I also learned of one of my great-uncles, a student at Dhaka University at the time, receiving blows from police clubs.
That great-uncle’s mother, my great-grandmother, marched against British colonial rule. She was not a college or university student, but many of the allies with whom she marched were. She was born in 1901. The first nearly half-century of her life took place as a subject (unequal) of the British Empire.
She was a child when Bengal was first partitioned by Viceroy George Curzon in 1905, a teenager the year Gandhi returned to India, a young woman when he marched in defiance of the Salt Tax, and a full-blown activist, with time served in the Sylhet District Women’s Congress and as president of the Sylhet District Women’s Muslim League, as the sun began its long and weary descent on the Empire.
The next generation, of my grandparents, straddled the British and Pakistan eras. They were students during the 1930s and entered the world as civil servants and lawyers and spouses and parents during the twenty-four years of East Pakistan.
My trip through the ages they had seen and lived was made beguiling by the realization that having had the great good fortune of knowing them, great-grandparents included, despite being very young in the last years of their lives, being in their physical presence, I’d been within a degree of connection to those momentous points of history. When my great-grandparents were born, Britain was reaching the height of its colonial power. As their long lives neared their end well into the 1980s, they saw the nascent nation-state of Bangladesh go through its homemade political turmoil.
Within four years of independence, Bangladesh saw its first military coup. The founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family, all but two members, one of whom is the current Prime Minister, were assassinated by a group of junior army officers. His successor, Ziaur Rahman, a former army major, was also assassinated after a short, brutal, and murderous reign. In between came a civilian president, who didn’t last, unseated by yet another military coup.
Personal Awakenings
In my living memory, it’s the events of 1982 that link me to the tumultuous and vibrant tradition of student activism in Bangladesh. I was six years old, hence nowhere near participating, but my immediate memories following Lt. Gen. Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s coup are of hearing of protests at Dhaka University, seeing student processions on the streets, and, on one occasion, inhaling tear gas when the police and army bombed a march. Once again, a new crop of students were at the forefront.
The resistance began with them. A democratic republic had been taken over by an army whose chief author suspended the Constitution and declared himself president and Chief Martial Law Administrator. While Ershad would hold onto power for almost a decade, near the end of the 80s, his power had diminished significantly. It didn’t help his cause that in 1987, a young man by the name of Noor Hossain was shot dead by police in Dhaka during a peaceful protest, and his bullet-ridden corpse was dumped in a police cell because Noor went on to become a symbol of the uprising against Ershad and the final push that brought him down.
Looking back is easy and often pointless, but I wish I could have been a part of those processions, as I wish I’d been alive when my great-grandmother was marching against British rule, or during the War of Independence. What I would have done is all conjecture. I can only hope I would have the mettle to be “out there.”
At fifteen, when I moved to the US, it was 1991. America was movies and TV shows and superheroes we worshipped. It was glamour, wealth, and progress. It was the peak we wanted to reach. I had an understanding that after high school, I’d be sent to the US for higher studies. Higher education in Bangladesh was below par, and it was the going wisdom. The West was the training grounds for the brave new world ahead. Plans changed overnight, and instead of college age, I was a high school sophomore the year we made our hasty move.
Besides the abovementioned rose-tinted impressions, I knew nothing about America. The little knowledge I had of US history included a biographical chapter on Abraham Lincoln in our textbook, in standard V, Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing, and the Cold War — which, at the time, was still very much the present. I’d done my junior high years at the American School in Dhaka, which did nothing to enlighten me further. If anything, looking back, it was a primer to the alienation I would become accustomed to as I got to know America in the flesh.
One of my teachers, incidentally of history, was a champion of the “domino theory” when talking of Vietnam, American superiority in the standoff with the Soviets, and once as a classroom exercise — having to do with what exactly fails me now — had us list the qualities of the “All-American Boy” (he had blond hair, blue eyes, was captain of the football team, and dated the hottest girl in school. For a cliché, she wasn’t wrong.) It was also in her class that we spent part of the term studying the Bangladesh War of Independence, which she had lived through. She often made mistakes with names and events. One of my Bengali classmates corrected her on three separate occasions, as I recall.
From there, in one summer, I landed in a real American school on real American soil.
Unknown Histories
I hadn’t become aware of America’s direct connection to Bangladesh’s War of Independence until college. The US, aligned with Pakistan, as India conceivably leaned the Soviet way, kept to its policy by supplying the army regime with arms and ammunition. At one point near the end of the war, the Seventh Fleet was put on alert to be prepared to intervene and finish the job of crushing the Bangladesh movement by aiding the Pakistan army.
As my high school years passed and I grappled with the realities of America (directly in conflict with the rose-tinted dream), I learned about the truths that, to this day, factions of this country would rather deny than face. I learned about the Civil Rights Movement and the protests that forced the government’s hands to make equal rights for all the laws of the land. I learned about the American war in Vietnam — without the domino theory claptrap -and the students around the country who took a stand against it and were vilified, beaten, and killed.
It was all history. Foreign history. History I was happy to engage. Important, but not personal. That connection would come later.
As a Muslim, though non-practicing, I received the jolt that brought an American-made crisis as close to me as any other before on September 11, 2001. By the time Bush had perjured his way to invading and destroying Iraq, my (some would call it) politics (though no one single word encompasses the complexities) had no doubts about their compass and direction.
Past and Present Collide
More than two decades later, as US policy is once again standing determinedly on the wrong side of history, I have been heartened every day by the outrage, devotion, and commitment to justice of the Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”-inspired movement around the country protesting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
I went to the first pro-Palestine protest since the start of the war in Washington, DC, in November 2023. Not only did I witness firsthand a coalition of Americans from every background stand together, but I also met people that had traveled from other countries to attend the protest. I came home energized, furious, hopeful.
The hope receives a lash every time I see state-sanctioned violence against peaceful student protests and the encampments, and hear those feckless university administrators abandon every shred of moral courage, or courage, period, and criminalize the very people they’re supposed to protect, encourage, and educate. The instances of professors joining their students revive the hope, but the hope gets dashed again, poisoned almost immediately, as I watch appalled riot police fall on them in gangs.
As a professor at a small liberal arts institution, I am far removed from the larger university settings where the encampments have been growing, but I can take a guess at how things would unfold if an encampment were to crop up on my campus. There would be no acknowledgment from our president, the board would be silent as a graveyard, and the same fate of being handled by police would be imminent. With the exception of the police part, I have evidence to support my claim.
At the beginning of the spring 2024 semester, a group of students organized a protest. They demanded a formal acknowledgment by the college and the president of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They marched to the president’s office and peacefully and loudly made their demands known. In return, they received a toothless form letter from the college’s highest office (whose holder had conveniently scheduled another meeting in a different location at that very hour) read to them by a senior administrator.
An effort by some faculty, I among them, led by one of my wonderful colleagues in another department, the sole, unconditional voice in the lead in support of Palestinian rights and the safety of our Palestinian students, to compose a response standing with the protest and the need for awareness at the college, lasted one afternoon. After a few tense rounds of brainstorming via email, the idea was abandoned.
As I watched the encampments on the news day after day, taking defiant stands, refusing to budge no matter how much brutality the police visited upon the students and professors, I felt helpless, my anger mounting by the seconds that I wasn’t out there, as much as I trusted with all my heart were in good hands with those valiant protestors who refused to be defeated.
They carried the torch of a longstanding tradition. And the powers arrayed against them carried a legacy of their own as well — of shame, of cowardice, of gutless failure. Their regrets and apologies will be the stuff of regretful (or righteous) memoirs and documentaries. Nothing will undo their heartless actions when they could have chosen to do better.
A New Generation of Protests
In July of this year, protests erupted in Bangladesh ostensibly over a national quota system that reserves a certain number of government jobs for descendants of “freedom fighters” of 1971. As the world knows by now, outrage over the quota system was merely a new spark in the conflagration raging against Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic rule and the corruption and cronyism with which her party, the Awami League, is rife. The protests were about the quota system being used as a ploy to justify the government’s practices of rewarding those who kissed the proverbial ring of the Prime Minster and pledged unwavering fealty to her and her party, to keep the halls of power packed with Awami League members.
If matters weren’t already at a critical stage, the Prime Minister took it even further when she compared the protestors to “Razakars,” the name given to Bengali collaborators with the Pakistan army during the 1971 war. The term “Razakar” is a grave insult, implying a traitor who conspired with Pakistanis to prevent Bangladeshi independence. This description of these students couldn’t be further from the truth.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina asserted, “If not the grandchildren of the freedom fighters, then who will get quota benefits? The grandchildren of the ‘Razakars’? This is my question. I want to ask the people of the nation. If the protesters don’t comply, I can do nothing. They can continue their protest. If protesters damage properties or attack cops, the law will take its course. We can’t help” (NDTV World).
For over a week and half of tumult so far, the government unleashed violence on the protestors with all its might – their student wing, the police, the Rapid Action Battalion, and the army. It declared a nationwide curfew with “shoot on sight” orders and shut down all internet connections, effectively cutting Bangladesh off from the world for several days. It was a chilling throwback to the days of occupation under the Pakistan army in 1971, but this time with the Awami League engaging in violent repression.
But the protestors remain defiant, despite an estimated 200 deaths (and likely many more now that information is surfacing that the government has been concealing information about deaths) at the hands of the state. The government did its predictable blaming and maligning. It created false narratives of the protestors being “pawns” of the opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat, none of which is believed or given credence by anyone outside Awami League’s minions.
The quota protests have been the biggest jolt to Sheikh Hasina’s reign since she returned to power in 2009. In January of this year, she was “re-elected” for the fourth time in a farcical election, the results of which were, to put it mildly, predictable.
A new generation of Bangladeshis, led by the country’s students, has had enough. They want change. And they’re demanding it through a longstanding tradition in their history.
