Who's the daddy?

Originally published in Himal Southasian, July '09

Southasia clings to its father figures – Gandhi in India, Jinnah in Pakistan – but since the messy birth of Bangladesh in 1971, its fathership has remained a bone of contention. Split between two dads, the argument is highly politicised; the truth lost any relevance a long while ago.

But on 21 June, the matter was ‘settled’ by the Bangladeshi High Court, who ruled that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president, first proclaimed independence from West Pakistan in 1971, just as the civil-war began. Mujibur, in keeping with the Southasian dynastic principle, was the father of Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister. As with Congress’ political hegemony in India, a link, blood or otherwise, to a founding patriarch legitimises Hasina’s Avami League as the rightful inheritors of Bangladesh.

The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), coveting this quasi-divine sanction, has long advocated its own candidate for Father of the Nation: Ziaur Rahman, who called Independence first – so they claim. For the BNP, Ziaur’s chief merit is to be the late husband of their current leader and former prime minister, Khaleda Zia. As yet there has been no recorded reaction from the BNP to the court ruling, but you can bet your last taka that this ‘settlement’ will prove to be anything but.

The HC decision was a clear attempt to shut down the debate. All claims against Mujibur were condemned as lies, and the court ordered the Attorney-General's office to send a copy of the judgment to the Education Ministry, to ensure that text books took note of this ‘fact.’ Also demanded was the cancellation of the second edition of the third installment of a 15-volume set of war documents, which portrays Ziaur as the announcer of Independence.

Ever since birth, and especially after the shady assassination of Ziaur in 1981, Bangladesh has been bitterly divided between the two political clans. Both propagate their own, self-legitimising history of the nation, in which their respective ‘fathers’ play a starring role. The version that dominates public life at any one time depends on who happens to be in office; school history books are re-written with each shift in power. It is, of course, no coincidence that this HC ruling has happened under an Avami premiership, just six months after a sweeping election victory. Even less surprising it that the cancelled war documents were published under a BNP-Jamaat-led alliance government, by the Liberation War Affairs Ministry in June 2004. Should the BNP assume power in the near future, the High Court ruling over Mujibur might well be annulled – and ‘lies’ will undergo a new definition.

History is always written by the victors. But in a multi-party democracy in permanent flux, you can only cancel so many history books.