Untold Facts

Daily New Age Editorial: Time to genuinely work towards establishing rule of law, ending politics of murder and vengeance

THE completion of trial of the accused in the murder case of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder president of Bangladesh, and the execution of the five detained convicts at the early hours of Thursday are expected to heal, to a great extent, the emotional wounds of the surviving members of Mujib’s family and thousands of his followers, caused by the extrajudicial killing of the man who had politically led the final phase of the country’s struggle for national independence. But it would still take time to heal the wounds the extrajudicial murder had caused to the country’s political process. The murder, after all, decisively distorted the country’s democratic process, the growth of which had already been deterred by the government of Mujib that abruptly introduced one-party rule and imposed ban on oppositional political exercises – activities and expression of dissents included.

The murder of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not a criminal offence of ordinary nature; it was rather an act of political misadventure, said to be supported by local and foreign forces, having serious implications for the nation for the years to come. The murderers and the politicians that they had chosen to govern the country after the dethronement of Mujib, most of whom were freedom fighters and very close to Mujib and his family, also explained the incident to the people, home and abroad, as a political action, arguing that it was politically important to remove Mujib from power for the sake of multi-party democracy, for pluralism, et cetera, and that there was no way left to politically oust him from power as he had banned all oppositional political activism. The murderous political changeover had received passive political support of the people.

True, the one-party autocratic rule was not the objective that the country’s people had fought the liberation war for, but the extrajudicial murder of Mujib and the extra-constitutional takeover of power by Mujib’s old political comrade Khandaker Mushtaque Ahmed did not facilitate democracy in the country. Rather, it paved the way for a series of martial law regimes that ruled the country with the fundamental rights of the citizens remaining suspended for years, regimes that distorted the country’s political process in many ways, introduction of the process of lateral entry of the businessmen, civil and military bureaucrats into different rungs of the hierarchy of the political leadership being a crucial one. The experience proves, once again, that democratic resistance, with people’s active political participation in it, remains the only constructive solution to autocratic governance of any ideological orientation.

However, the political backgrounds and the perspectives of the murder did not surface in the court of law at any point of the long process of the trial, nor did the issue of alleged involvement of foreign quarters in the murder come up, thanks to the silence kept about these from both the sides – the plaintiff and the defendant. So, it was an ordinary trial of an extraordinary offence committed in an extraordinary political circumstance. It can, therefore, be argued that the trial and punishment of the murderers may heal the emotional wounds of Mujib’s followers, but it would not automatically heal the distortions that the murderous incident had caused to the country’s political process. For it to happen, society would require threadbare discussions and informed debates on the political events leading to the murderous political misadventure, its political and cultural consequences and the ways of freeing our history from the political hangover that the misadventure had caused 34 years ago. The political debates over the murderous ouster of Mujib regime, after all, would not be buried with the burial of the bodies of the convicts.

Meanwhile, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the slain Mujib, has a political obligation to meet. Hasina has claimed in the past, over and over again, that the extrajudicial murder of Mujibur Rahman has initiated the politics of murder and vengeance in this country, and non-holding of the trial of the murderers has been standing in the way of the establishment of the rule of law. Now that the trial has been ended and the murderers executed, it is Hasina’s turn to take political moves that would effectively help put an end to the politics of murders and vengeance and establish the rule of law in the genuine sense of the democratic ideal.

Source: Daily New Age