If the liberals win, their success will mark the fulfillment of the great hopes about the four-decade old nation’s emergence as a modern, secular state, which will act as a beacon to other countries in Asia and elsewhere, especially the Islamic ones. But, if the religious extremists win, it will be a step back into medieval darkness underlined by the confinement of women to their homes and the rejection of science and the arts.

It has to be noted that the battle is not only between a progressive section of people and obscurantists with a warped view of their religion, but for the restoration and preservation of a cultural ethos pervading the region, which transcends borders and unites the Bengalis of India and Bangladesh with memories of shared values. It is the commonality of language, culture and nomenclature which may have persuaded Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to tell the Pakistan constituent assembly in 1955: “We have demanded many times that you should use ‘Bengal’ instead of ‘East Pakistan’. The word ‘Bengal’, has a history and tradition of its own”.

However, notwithstanding the surging crowds in Shahbag and the sporadic resort to violence by the Jamaat’s followers, denoting an apprehension of defeat, it is too early to predict what will happen. The reason is that the present stand-off has been a long time in the making, dating back to one of the blackest chapters in Bangladesh’s history – the attack on its people by the Pakistan army and the bigoted fundamentalists before the liberation of 1971.

It is a matter of history that despite the liberation, Jamaat not only won the first round, but has survived for more than four decades since then – and may continue to do so if it does not suffer a decisive setback. As is known, the Jamaat owes its continued presence to its alliance with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the counter pole to Mujib’s Awami League, which led the freedom struggle.

And the explanation for this duo’s emergence lies in the unfortunate fact that the liberation movement was not an open-and-shut affair. Instead, it suffered huge reverses starting with Mujib’s assassination not long after he succeeded in freeing the country from Pakistani dominance. The result was that the collaborators of the Pakistan army escaped punishment for their crimes.

It is the belated meting out of this punishment by a judicial tribunal to the Jamaat’s Abdul Quader Mollah, also known as the “butcher” for the massacres, which took place in 1971, which has infuriated his outfit. The two war crimes tribunals have been trying seven Jamaat functionaries and two belonging to the BNP. As during the Arab spring uprisings in Cairo’s Tahrir square and elsewhere in West Asia and the Maghreb, it was the social network sites which energized the thousands of young men and women to gather at Shahbagh to protest against the sentence of life imprisonment given to the accused and demand the death penalty, not least because the “butcher” flashed the ‘V’ for victory sign after the conviction. The anger of the protesters was also fuelled by the murder of Ahmed Rajib Halder, one of the liberal bloggers, by the bigots.

To understand the fury of the anti-Jamaat crowd, it may be worthwhile to recall the kind of criminality in which the Pakistan army engaged. In his book, A Stranger in My Own Country, East Pakistan 1969-71, Major General (retd) Khadim Hussain Raja of the Pakistan army wrote that after Lt. Gen. A.A.K. Niazi took over as the martial law administrator in 1971, he said, “main is haramzadi quam ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this nation of bastards). He also threatened to let his soldiers loose on their women folk”.

Continuing, Raja writes that “there was pin-drop silence at these remarks. Officers looked at each other in silence, taken aback by his vulgarity. The meeting dispersed on this unhappy note with sullen faces. The next morning, we were given sad news. A Bengali officer, Major Mushtaq, who had served under me in Jessore, went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head. He died instantaneously.”

This wasn’t the end of Niazi’s vulgarity. According to Raja, Niazi put his hand on his shoulder after a meeting and said, “Yar, larai ki fikar nahin karo. Abhi to mujhey Bengali girl friends ke phone number de do (don’t worry about the war, my friend; just give me the phone numbers of your Bengali girl friends). I knew Niazi fairly well, but was by no means on intimate terms with him … I could not imagine that any sane Pakistani could think in such terms in the midst of a civil war inflicted on the nation by its present rulers”. (IPA Service)