A day of martyrs

February 21 has significance for Bangladesh that transcends its observance as the International Mother Language Day. Every year from 1953, it has been observed in that country as the Bengali Language Martyrs’ Day or Language Martyrs’ Day in memory of four students — Rafiq, Barkat, Jabbar and Salam — killed in police firing on a peaceful demonstration in Dhaka on the same day in 1952. The demonstration, in turn, was a part of the historic language movement that, more than anything else, contributed to the rise of the liberation struggle, which culminated in Bangladesh’s emergence into freedom in 1971.

The language movement owes its origin to the Pakistan Government’s decision to have Urdu alone as the country’s State language. Its incipient stirrings followed the announcement by Pakistan Government’s Central Education Minister in late 1947 that Urdu would be the country’s only State language. A resolution seeking to make Bengali a language of the Constituent Assembly along with Urdu and English, was defeated on the first day of Session on February 23, 1948, thanks to bitter opposition by former Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. A massive burst of anger exploded in what was then East Bengal, which was renamed East Pakistan in 1955 under former Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra’s one-unit scheme, which also merged the four western provinces into a single unit, West Pakistan.

The anger spread and intensified following Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s visit to East Bengal from March 15 to 28, 1948, during which he reiterated his stand of Urdu being Pakistan’s sole State language and warned Bengalis about the activities of “subversive elements” bent on destroying Pakistan. A lull followed, only to be shattered by the interim report of the Constitutional Basic Principles Committee on September 28, 1950, which stated that Urdu would be Pakistan’s State language. The movement peaked after Nazimuddin, who became the Prime Minister following the assassination of the preceding incumbent, Liaquat Ali Khan, on October 16, 1951, read out from Jinnah’s speech in Dhaka saying that Urdu would be Pakistan’s sole State language. More, he denounced those who wanted Bengali to be a State language as “provincialists” and, as such, enemies of the Pakistani State.

A series of strikes and demonstrations that followed culminated in a general strike throughout East Bengal on February 21, 1952, the day when the four students were killed. Dhaka and many parts of East Bengal remained paralysed on the 22nd when two persons were killed in police firing and 45 injured in lathicharges and tear gassing by the police. The movement intensified throughout Bangladesh in the next few days, with shops and offices closed and train and steamer services paralysed and Dhaka seething in anger. Savage repression by the Government foiled the general strike called for in Dhaka on March 5, 1952. By then, however, the movement had spread to even the most remote reaches of Bangladesh and it had become clear that it was a matter of time before the Central Government accepted Bengali as a State language. This it did on April 19, 1954, when Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly decided that both Bengali and Urdu would become the country’s two State languages.

The installation of Bengali in its rightful place in Pakistan’s governance and public life was a historic victory for the people of East Bengal. It was, however, the immediate and most visible outcome of the language movement. Far more important was the latter’s identity-defining and transformative role in the history of East Bengal, leading to the eventual rise of the sovereign nation of Bangladesh. A mass movement involving almost every part of Bangladesh and every section of its population, it shaped the self-perception of the overwhelming majority of the people as Bengalis as well as Muslims and not — as immediately after India’s Partition — as Muslims above everything else. It also prompted the province’s rising middle class to identify itself passionately with Bengal’s rich, eclectic and liberal-humanist culture, which acted as a powerful countervailing force against the spread of fundamentalist Islamist doctrines in its ranks.

In terms of historical causation, however, the most important consequence was the feeling of self-confidence that victory in the language movement imparted to large sections of people in East Bengal. The increasing feeling that they could confront and defeat the rulers entrenched in Karachi and Islamabad did much to sustain their long resistance to the western wing’s efforts to economically exploit and politically subjugate them, of which the language policy was a part and which owed much to the composition of the country’s armed forces and bureaucracy.