21st February 1952: A prelude to the creation

of Bangladesh

The course of our movements explores the history, sociology, and politics of
Bangladesh’s struggles for freedom and social justice. The organising class puts
more emphasis on how to aspects of fighting for social change.

by Anwar A. Khan-Feb 21, 2018

( February 21, 2018, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) The 20th century is a remarkable
story of progressive accomplishments against overwhelming odds everywhere in
the world including Bangladesh. The events of 21st February 1952 in Dhaka, and
elsewhere in the country, provided a basis for an understanding of the direction
our struggles against the Pakistani colonial rule. The intense emotion and
mobilisation that accompanied the brutal murders of revered Salam, Barkat,
Jabbar and some other mortals opened another significant chapter in resistance
politics against the Pakistani tyrannous rule. For most of the students, joining the
fermentation to fight against an unjust political system became the ultimate goal
for our people then.
This signalled some other significant features of the post-1952 phase of intense
struggle to generate defiance and stimulate the development of more mass
movements in future. In early 1971, our people’s central task was to deploy mass
scale of people against the Pakistani military government in a credible
revolutionary offensive. Each people reiterated and refined the demands for
rights and freedom and built support for the cause of establishing Bangladesh.
The Language Movement of 1952 is the fledgling mass movement of people of all
classes and religions that could herald a people’s movement truly independent of
nationalism and Bengali, being our state language. Each generation of us faces a
different set of economic, political, and social conditions. There are no easy
formulas for challenging injustice and promoting democracy. But unless we know
this history, we will have little understanding of how far we have come, how we
got here, and what still needs to change to make Bangladesh more livable,
humane, and democratic.
The course of our movements explores the history, sociology, and politics of
Bangladesh’s struggles for freedom and social justice. The organising class puts
more emphasis on how to aspects of fighting for social change. The bottom line
for course is to encourage students to see themselves as potential history-
makers, by learning from the past and learning the skills and analytic tools to help
mobilise people for action now and in the future.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet
made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has
been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other
tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is
no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation
are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without
thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many
waters. But we can be prideful and joyful especially because of our triumph or
success in our just cause. 21st February, 1952 is a milestone in our history of
struggles to establish Bangladesh and Bengali language as our state language.
21st February has taught us that this struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a
physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out
just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact
measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will
continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits
of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

21st February has taught us that this struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a
physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

In everyday parlance, that sometimes the time was ripe for movements to
emerge, to grow, and to bring about change. Ultimately, movements are about
real people making choices about how to use their time, talents, and resources.
Our great leaders and patriotic people did the right thing at the right time to
throw away the yoke of the roughshod Pakistani rule which persecuted us for
more than two decades. Howard Zinncompetently said, “Freedom and democracy
does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting
together and struggling for justice.”
Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform societies.
Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag
the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive and even partially
successful mass movements can alter the political calculus for decades to come,
thus improving the lives of millions. All our struggles were hard-won outcomes of
protracted struggle by progressive mass movements, every one of them are
epoch-making.
A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail
behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through
appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people
they aim to mobilise, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular
civil disobedience. All our mass movements are politically aggressive. And that’s
why, we achieved success every time.
Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of outraged
public opinion in the movement’s core values, political opportunity and
aggressive leadership. The absence of any of these can prevent a mass movement
from materialising, but in our movement of 21st February in 1952, the seeds of
something may have been sown to eventually emerge Bangladesh as a new
independent and sovereign state in 1971.
Mass movements are based on widely held beliefs, reinforced by dense
communications between peoples. Mass movements are nurtured and sustained
not just by vertical communication, between leaders and various places of a
boundary line, but by lots of horizontal communication among the movement’s
wider acceptance by mass people. This horizontal communication serves to
reinforce the common people’s support and the movement’s core values. It
emboldens both political people and ordinarily non-political people to engage in
personally risky behaviour in support of the movement’s core demands, and
builds support for this kind of risk-taking on the part of those who may not be
ready to do it themselves.

Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of

outraged public opinion in the movement’s core values, political opportunity
and aggressive leadership.

Those progressive mass movements were built in that era of sprawl and locked
down media monopolies and the organisers developed and deployed alternative
communications strategies to get and keep the movement’s message into a
sufficient number of ears to sustain its influence and momentum. No mass
without masses and no movement without youth. Mass movements don’t happen
without masses. A mass movement whose organisers cannot fill rooms and
streets, and sometimes jails on short notice with ordinarily non-political people in
support of political demands is no mass movement at all. Organisers and those
who judge the work of organisers must learn to count.
A progressive mass movement is inconceivable without a prominent place for the
energy and creativity of youth. The movements in 1952, 1962, 1966 and 1969 for
the upright causes of our people were spearheaded, and often led by young
people. Any mass movement aiming at social transformation must capture the
enthusiasm and energy of youth, including the willingness of young people to
engage in personally risky behaviour. A mass movement consciously aims to lead
politicians, not to be led by them. Mass movements are civilly disobedient, and
continually maintain the credible threat of civil disobedience. Bangladesh’s people
remain in remarkable, consistent agreement on political issues, a shared
commonality of views that holds strongly across lines of gender and age. A mass
movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. It
makes politicians into followers. It truly happened in our country.
Sadly, the born of Pakistan consisting two Provinces – East Pakistan and West
Pakistan in 1947 appears to have been a false dawn. Because we, people of
Eastern Province, constituting 54% of Pakistan’s total population who continued
to be considered as second-class citizens for more than two decades by the West
Pakistani rulers. Because the government machinery including banking and
financing were generally controlled by West Pakistanis and discriminatory
practices very often resulted. Bengalis found them excluded from playing the
significant role despite we were Pakistan’s majority population.
One of the most divisive issues confronting Pakistan in its infancy was the
question of what the official language of the new state was to be. Pakistan’s first
Governor-General Jinnah yielded to the demands of refugees from the Indian
states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh migrated to Pakistan, who insisted that Urdu be
Pakistan’s official language. Speakers of the languages of West Pakistan–Punjabi,
Sindhi, Pushtu, and Baluchi–were upset that their languages were given second-
class status. In the-then East Pakistan, the dissatisfaction quickly turned to
violence. The Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority (54 percent) of
Pakistan’s entire population. Our language, Bangla (then commonly known as
Bengali) has different script and literary tradition.
Jinnah visited East Pakistan on only one occasion after independence of Pakistan.
He willy-nilly announced in Dhaka that “Urdu shall be the state language of
Pakistan” which was not accepted by our people and it encountered serious
resistance from us. On 21st February, 1952, a strong-boned demonstration was
carried out in Dhaka in which students demanded equal status for Bangla. The
police reacted by firing on the crowd and killing two students. A memorial, the
Shaheed Minar, was built later to commemorate the martyrs of the language
movement.
Awami League headed by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had always been
an ardent Bengali nationalist. He began to attract popular support from Bengalis
in the-then East Pakistan. He put forward his Six Points that demanded more
autonomy for the Provinces in general and East Pakistan in particular. He was
arrested in April 1966, and soon released, only to be rearrested and imprisoned in
June the same year. He languished in prison until February 1969 as the main
accused of the Agartala Conspiracy Case.
Pakistan’s Punjabi dominated army in search of the elusive purity and to
perpetuate its hold on power structures encourages the majority Punjabi
population in its misadventures. In pursuit of power, the bogey of threat from
India was conjured. In schools children were indoctrinated to hate Bengalis.
Therefore, the genesis of the Pakistan’s Fault Line lies in the diabolically
engineered mindset that created multiple fault lines and conflated into one deep
and divisive nature of politics and abominable demeanor toward the Bengali
people. They always artfully used our Religion-Islam to affright us. The February
1952 movement by our people aimed to establish Bengali Language as one of the
state language in Pakistan and very soon it transformed into a mass movement
and it rose to its peak on 21st February of the same year.
It will not be exaggerated to articulate that Ekushey February (21st February)
role-played as one of preludes to the creation of macrocosm for establishing
Bangladesh. The first major setback to Pakistan occurred 24 years after inception
when it lost 54% of its population in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and almost
half of its territory in 1971. Their foxy use of religion could not act as effective
glue due to the insatiable avarice the Pakistan’s Punjabi Army displayed in its
refusal to share legitimate power with the eastern wing.
With millions of refugees pouring into India in 1971, Pakistan made its position in
East Pakistan untenable, and India was compelled to initiate positive action at our
call and in support of our just cause.

With millions of refugees pouring into India in 1971, Pakistan made its position in
East Pakistan untenable, and India was compelled to initiate positive action at our
call and in support of our just cause. Indian Army promptly withdrew from the soil
of Bangladesh from the miseries and atrocities being perpetrated by the western
wing of Pakistan on its own people. Thus Bangladesh was born in bloodshed and
came into existence on 16th December, 1971. In 1950s, Hans J. Morgenthau, the
then Director of Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at University of
Chicago, in his book ‘The New Republic’ had observed, “Pakistan is not a nation
and hardly a state. It has no justification, ethnic origin, language, civilisation or the
consciousness of those who make up its population. They have no interest in
common except one: dissembling fear of Bengali domination. Pakistan’s
establishment, therefore, must realise that its possible vivisection, due to its
flawed policies, dealt a fatal blow to the very so-called Islamic cause, that it
purports to countenance and guide.
In 1966 the Bengali leadership of Awami League (AL) headed by Maulana Bhasani
and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were treated badly by the Pakistani leadership and
the Agartala conspiracy was unearthed flighty where India helped AL leadership
to conspire to break Pakistan. However, no Bengali speaking people were found
who could credibly stand as witness against the AL leaders held in prison in this
matter. Therefore, Pakistani military rulers were forced to release Sheikh Mujib
from confinement and Mujib declared 6-points for the equal treatment of East
Pakistanis and the famous 6-points were incorporated in the Election Manifesto
of AL for all-Pakistan based Nation Election held in 1970 and these 6-points
formula became the focal point and MAGNA CARTA for the emancipation of the
Bengali people.
AL could mobilise whole of the Bengali people to stand behind it and then the
General Election of 1970 came where AL got absolute majority by winning 297
seats out of 300 seats and Pakistan People’s party headed by Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto
got majority in West Pakistan, but not enough seat to become the Prime Minister
since the population of West Pakistan was 55 Million and East Pakistan was 75
Million. Bhutto then started conspiring in collusion with the-then military
president General Yahya Khan to make sure that Bangabandhu Mujib couldn’t
form the government in the Centre and become the PM of Pakistan. This
foolhardy decision of Bhutto and Yahya nexus was the last nail in the coffin of
One-Pakistan with two wings (East & West). On the evening of 26th March 1971,
Pakistani military arrested Bangabandhu Mujib and then started with their
infamous genocide on un-armed civilians of the-then East Pakistan.
India was all along helping our Freedom Fighters (Mukti Bahini) with all types of
help, but covertly. When on 4th December 1971 Pakistan declared war on India
and the people of Bangladesh, then only the Indian soldiers with their tanks and
heavy equipments came to the help of our Mukti Bahini who were fighting by
their own till that date. After 12-days of fighting the Pakistani Army surrendered
to the Joint forces of India-Bangladesh command.
21st February is a memorable day for people of Bangladesh. This is the day when,
66 years ago today, in 1952, the seeds of Bengali Nationalism and building of
Bangladesh were sown. As a matter of fact, the majuscule 21st February Language
Movement of 1952 acted as a prelude to the creation of Bangladesh. This is a
solitary event in the world history that a sovereign and independent country was
born in 1971 based on a nation’s mother tongue. Ekushey February (21st
February) has taught us not to bow down to any sort of oppression. Let us pay our
tribute to the fallen heroes of our Language Movement and the able leaders who
did their best to the sacred cause of our people and mass people who actively
participated in this august movement.
Posted by Thavam