Message of 54th Victory Day

The 54th Victory Day of Bangladesh will go down in history as one that followed yet another unique revolution, the student-led mass uprising of August 5 that has changed the course of the nation's history. The Victory Day of Bangladesh is itself unique in that there is no other nation in the world whose declaration of independence from the shackles of occupying power and the day when it celebrated its deliverance from the forces of occupation is separated by about nine months. Indeed, Bangladesh has a chequered history when it comes to its revolutions. But why has Bangladesh experienced so many revolutions? Because, just freeing the nation from the clutches of colonial powers did not bring the complete freedom from exploitation and oppression that the people fought and made supreme sacrifices for. In fact, the nation's independence proved to be as good as changing hands from the foreign colonisers to the domestic exploiters and oppressors of the common people. The party politics that represented the social elites hijacked the people's victory in achieving national liberation and claimed it to be their own. Small wonder that the heroic war the people from all sections of the population fought in the battle field and the all-out support that the masses extended to them found no place, except in lip service, in the history of the liberation war. As expected, that history, too, was written by the official historians representing the political elite. So, what can the nation expect from those so-called historians who reduced the independence war to a mere family history of the elitist nationalists and their imagined exploits in the movements that led to the independence war? Evidently, the common people were disillusioned with the political leadership of the post-liberation Bangladesh. The popular movements the official historians narrate as the work of their chosen heroes are actually the struggles of the masses. But stories of their achievements, again, are attributed in the same way to the demagogy of some rabble-rousers serving the interests of elite class. To be frank, the nationalistic narrative of the liberation war so proudly described in the literary works, arts, songs and dramas is purely about the supremacy of one ethnic group of people over another to justify the domination of the majority ethnic or religious group over the rest of the people, who are the minorities, in a country. Needless to say, nationalism is a powerful divisive force that champions of the nationalistic narratives in power use to divide people and brand popular struggles as anti-national. Since independence, the ruling class of Bangladesh under different party names claiming that they were the real standard-bearers of nationhood born of the nationalism the war of indendepence stood for. During the last fifty-three years that the country has been celebrating its victory from foreign oppressors, the ruling class has been telling the story of how the non-Bengali foreigners had exploited them and how cruel they were. But the truth is the post-independence rulers were no angels either given their records of own records of cruelty in crushing popular dissent by brute force and looting whatever the common people could achieve through their hard work. Why is that history drenched in blood of the common people has no place in literature and works of art of the post-independence champions of nationalism, secularism, etc.? The truth is they have already become the apologists of the domestic colonisers of the common people. The new generation of young people who are free from any hangover from the pre-and-early post-independence days are not ready to be impressed by the hackneyed stories of 'glorious past'. They want a radical change of the existing order. So, they stood up unarmed against the power of the ruthless, fascistic state run by the exponents of the old order.
Some intellectuals belonging to the so-called progressive class often express their unhappiness, frustration and fear over the fact that the new generation might be losing its connection with what they believe to be the nation's glorious history. But there is no reason to think that the members of new generation are unaware of that history. On the contrary, they are better informed. The only difference is that unlike the older generation, the new generation sees the past as it was in an unbiased manner and not through the prism of idealism that basically rests on a false premise. The failure of the past governments to be true to whatever idealisms they professed has opened the new generation's eyes to the truth. So, there is hardly any point lecturing the modern-day youths about any imagined history to take inspiration from.
This is not only in Bangladesh. Wherever across the globe the new generation is standing up against the old order, they are proving to be iconoclastic. They were so when the Soviet Russia collapsed in December 1991. They were equally heretical during the so-called colour revolutions in the Middle East. Though most of those revolutions failed in that the old order in most cases remained in place, it does not mean that the new generation's appetite for change has no point. In fact, the struggles for breaking the old order are mostly experimental in nature. Since the present time is pregnant with the potential for radical change, similar revolutions will continue to take place until the real change occurs somewhere. In that case, there should be no room for complacency on the part of the old guard. Seeing that everywhere, the flagbearers of the status quo are behaving desperately to protect or even further advance their revivalist agenda, the new generation is not going to surrender their dream to the forces of reaction. Rather it is only further cementing their resolve to overthrow the bastion of reaction and build a new society. This is the message of the 54th Victory Day of Bangladesh.

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