Bangladesh: Who was Ghulam Azam?

Dhaka Tribune, November 12, 2014

The masses with memories of Jamaat-assisted butchery watched incredulously as Ghulam Azam was rebranded into a wise old Islamic scholar

Convicted war criminal Ghulam Azam is dead. He died last month. He was 91, living far, far past the average life expectancy anywhere in the world. That is an age where white hair and a flowing beard can make anyone look like a wise old grandfather.

However, every grandfather was not always a grandfather. Every grandfather has a past. Not all grandfathers have a future. In South Asia, many political figures enjoy interesting lives after death. There is a peculiar way in which death accords respectability even to those whose crimes have been recorded in detail for posterity.

To say that public memory is short is to do a disservice to the victims of those crimes. It is not only a question of crying aloud about one’s victimhood. It is also about reach, and how the powerful gate and filter what they want to hear, whom they want to hear, and when.

On the death of well-known criminals with a big enough political halo, important people declare sombre condolences. Concrete memorials show up overnight in the middle of the streets. The number of such memorials corresponds to the perceived political stature of the deceased and the extent to which the person is encashable after death.

In certain cases, the enthusiasm in memorial-building is a signal to the still-living honchos in political organisations as a signal of one’s devotion and loyalty – a crucial thing for a healthy mainstream cushy political future.

It is important that more people in South Asia know about this man called Ghulam Azam, especially at a time when butchers of humanity are being elevated to respectability and greatness in the larger subcontinental republics by a one-two combo of slick PR and cold hard cash.

As a Hindu Bengali, I have watched with sadness and disbelief the planned worldwide effort to refurbish the image of Ghulam Azam and other war criminals of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. A concerted effort by transnational Islamic circles in cultivating international human rights organisations have also created “victims†out of mass murderers.

The former ameer (chief) of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, Ghulam Azam was the prime leader of the pro-Pakistan Islamist forces during Bangladesh struggle for liberation. In Bengal, Mir Jafar, who collaborated with the British against the then ruler of Bengal, is synonymous with treachery – someone who would collaborate with foreign oppressors against his own people. That was 1757. Only in 1971 could Bengal produce another one who would be looked upon with as much abhorrence by so many.

Ghulam Azam and his Jamaati gangs collaborated and assisted the Pakistani occupation forces in killing hundreds of thousands of people (including the mass-targeted killings of secular Bengali intellectuals, both Hindu and Muslim), burning hundreds of villages, raping countless mothers and sisters of Bengal, forcibly converting many Hindus – all in the name of protecting the eastern flank of his land of pure faith from the polluting influence of Bengal’s culture in general, and non-Islamic influence in particular.

Though Hindu Bengalis suffered disproportionately during the 1971 reign of terror in East Bengal, millions of Muslim Bengalis suffered as well. He let loose rape-arson-torture-conversion-death squads (the notorious Razakars, al-Badr, and al-Shams, among others) on millions of Bengalis. He fled to Pakistan before the liberation of Bangladesh and for years continued to tour and lobby Islamic nations for funds and support for destabilising the secular republic of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is that unfortunate nation that saw this executor of genocide return in 1978 on a Pakistani passport. Bangladesh was then being ruled by General Zia-ur-Rahman’s military junta, which was busy replacing the secular edifice of the liberation war by Islamist ideology, brick by brick.

His 1981 attempt at testing the waters by making a public appearance at the Baitul Mukarram (the central mosque of Dhaka) resulted in shoes being thrown at him by the assembled namazis. Pious Muslims of Bangladesh could not countenance the defilement of their mosque by the presence of someone like Ghulam Azam. That was then.

The insidious Islamisation of politics resulted in his slow but sure political rehabilitation. In 1991, Ghulam formally reassumed the leadership of the Jamaat in Bangladesh. It was the struggle led by Shaheed Janani (1971 martyr’s mother) Jahanara Imam that led to the historic Gono Adalat (people’s court) passing a death sentence on Ghulam.

This people’s court had no government sanction, but was attended by huge numbers, mostly Muslims. In 2013, the International Crimes Tribunal, set up by the government of Bangladesh, convicted Ghulam of “conspiring, planning, incitement to, and complicity in committing genocide, crimes against humanity†among others.

In the years between Gono Adalat and Shahbagh, the masses with memories of Jamaat-assisted butchery watched incredulously as Ghulam Azam was rebranded into a wise old Islamic scholar. For some, he was unbracketed from Mir Jafar – some again started naming their son Ghulam Azam. He may well be reinvented as a ghazi or a shaheed. This is not a full circle but an unmistakable downward spiral.

It is a matter of deep personal shame that I share my mother tongue with the likes of Ghulam Azam, though one cannot, and should not, judge a mother by the conduct of her children. The extent of the deep-seated popular hate against this man was apparent from a now legendary cartoon I had seen in a poster at the Dhaka University campus.

It showed Ghulam Azam in front of a mike about to give a speech. The mike itself had gained life and puckered its mouth to spit back at Ghulam’s face. During his funeral procession, like a repeat of the Baitul Mukarram incident, a shoe was thrown at the hearse carrying his body.

In the name of all that is just and sacred in this world and other worlds, I sincerely hope that he will not be missed in either of the two Bengals. The Jamaat has called for the realisation of Ghulam Azam’s ideals. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, wrote the Czech writer Milan Kundera.

The unholy powers that Ghulam Azam represented are still strong in Bengal. Just as I hope he will not be missed, I also hope that his misdeeds, and those of his ilk, are never forgotten. That is the weapon in resisting the formation of Ghulam Azam’s ideal society.

It is up to the Hindus and Muslims of Bangladesh, and all those who stand against politics of hatred perpetrated by those who share Ghulam Azam’s idea of an idea society, in this world or anywhere else.

Garga Chatterjee is a freelance contributor. He can be followed on twitter @gargac - See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2014/nov/12/who-was-ghulam-azam#sthash.pfxBYIhA.dpuf