History as it was shaped fifty years ago

It is exhilarating to travel back to history. It is important for an individual to have a sense of history, for history defines our social and political attitudes to events around us. Not all of us have been around the many makings of history as they have happened through time, but what is of critical importance is that feel of history we need to have in order to understand the many ways in which the world shapes and reshapes itself.

History, one could argue, runs parallel with the movement of space and time. In this day and age, as we marvel at the explorations of space by such man-made objects as the James Webb Telescope --- with ever new vistas of the universe opening up before us --- we reflect too on how history continues to reconfigure our views of the transformations of politics around the globe.

We will take, for our present purposes, a rather short-term view of history as we have observed it happen in our lifetime. We will think back on the past fifty years; we will go back to the year 1974 to reflect on some of the incidents and events which underscore the significance of the year across the historical landscape. Many among us were teenagers or into our early twenties in 1974. A half century on, how do we look back at 1974?

The times were difficult. Only months into the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, 1974 was reshaping geopolitics in a manner we had never thought it would. India was into its nuclear era, with Indira Gandhi presiding over that graduation to global importance. It was a point when, three years after the Bangladesh war, Delhi was informing the world that it had come of age, that there would be no turning back for it.

For us, here in Bangladesh, the year 1974 was a time when we struggled to tide over a famine which had claimed the lives of innumerable citizens. Food was in scarce supply even as the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman struggled to keep its head above the water. But light there was too when Bangladesh entered the United Nations as its newest member-state. History was playing its multi-faceted role, in light and shadow. Fifty years ago, a month into our UN happiness, we witnessed in unmitigated sadness the departure of Tajuddin Ahmad from the government.

In 1974, it was an imperial presidency which was brought down through powerful journalism and dedicated politics in the United States. The departure of Richard Nixon from the White House served the necessary lesson that corruption of power threatened the structure of democracy unless it was checked in time. Watergate ruined Nixon, but Nixon's resignation revived the majesty of democratic politics in America. And democracy often being an epitome of grace exhibited by political leaders, we were witness to the resignation of Willy Brandt from the office of Chancellor of West Germany when a communist mole was discovered in his office.

History was working in its inexorable ways in 1974. Long-entrenched politics was being turned on its head. Rebellious officers of the Ethiopian army deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, the ruler who had spoken so powerfully before the League of Nations in 1936 against Italian aggression. The murder of the monarch was not followed by democracy but by a long, dark period of military-imposed socialism in the country. The instrument employed was the Dergue. But in Britain the democratic experiment went on uninterrupted. Harold Wilson led Labour back to power four years after it had lost to Edward Heath's Conservatives.

Pakistan, three years after losing its eastern province to Bengalis in 1971, was going through critical times. Agitation by the religious right compelled the Bhutto administration, which had already put an end to democratic government in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province (today's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) a year earlier, to decree a ban on the Islamic identity of the country's Ahmadiyya community. As time would show, it was not enough to save Bhutto, whose fall three years later would be caused more by right-wing agitation against his government than by the army coup against it.

For South Asia, though, 1974 was a time when history was recast in the interest of the future of its inhabitants. But was that recasting of any significance? Pakistan's diplomatic recognition of Bangladesh cleared the path to Bangabandhu's presence at the Islamic summit in Lahore, followed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's trip to Dhaka a few months later. The Dhaka negotiations yielded nothing, not even a joint communique between the two governments. And, yes, the April tripartite deal between Bangladesh, India and Pakistan formalised the beginning of a new era. And yet the question has persisted: shouldn't Bangladesh have insisted on placing 195 Pakistani military officers on trial for war crimes rather than letting them go free?

In 1974, Greece, the cradle of democratic governance, went back to popular government through the overthrow of the colonels who had commandeered it in 1967. Constantine Karamanlis returned home from exile to re-inaugurate the process of democracy. It was a glorious moment for Greece, with Karamanlis, a veteran politician and former prime minister, spearheading the move to a full restoration of democracy. If democracy was coming back to Greece, it was France which went through one more exercise of pluralism in the Fifth Republic inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s. De Gaulle was succeeded as President by Georges Pompidou in 1969, but Pompidou's death in 1974 prompted a fresh presidential election that had Valery Giscard d'Estaing defeat Francois Mitterrand and enter the Elysee.

Fifty years ago, China's Cultural Revolution was being pursued in the fullness of fury by Mao Zedong and his loyalists. The chaos generated by it would not abate till 1976, by which time Liu Shaoqi, once Mao's comrade, was already dead in prison. Both Mao and Zhou En-lai, the patrician scholar serving as Prime Minister, had two more years to live. Deng Xiao-ping went through, during the period of the revolution, a purge twice before he would emerge as China's top leader in the post-Mao era.

The events and incidents of a half century ago need to be remembered, for history is a requirement for all who would understand the ways in which politics and with it the world moves. In 1974, the Cold War raged in fury and yet détente between the Soviet Union and the United States kept tensions at a low level. Nixon's opening to China two years earlier had served as a harbinger to a new age free of mutual hostility.

Let one remind oneself, though, that the world has never been a tranquil place. Politics is not about tranquillity but about pragmatism which keeps relations between nations in a state of balance. In 1974, pragmatism kept the world in relative stability.

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