Illustration: Manan Morshed

The martyred intellectuals of 1971 had their differences from one another, but they had one thing in common, and that was why they were killed—their patriotism. Patriotism is a virtue as well as a curse. It drives patriots to act in the interest of the people, and proves to be a curse for them when it makes them suffer. Patriotism can also be—and often is, as Samuel Johnson famously put it—the last refuge of a scoundrel. To be sure, the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators called themselves patriots and displayed what that virtue can turn into when handled by scoundrels. These men believed in the ideology of the Pakistan state, which was capitalistic in character, hidden under its Islamic garb. They perpetrated one of the worst genocides in modern history. But the patriotism of the martyred Bengali intellectuals was entirely different; it was pro-people. Their love was not for the state—not so much for the land they were born in as for the people they lived among. In contrast, the protectors of the Pakistan state wanted occupancy of the land, annihilating all its owners if necessary. The Bengali people fought for their liberty, and the intellectuals joined them—not as leaders, but as fellow sufferers. They knew the world and wanted to change it for the better, ensuring liberty for all.

These intellectuals were nationalists with socialist inclinations. However, it is not at all true that all intellectuals in East Bengal were pro-people; There were many who supported the Pakistan state for personal gain. Some were under the fond delusion that Pakistan was an ideological state of Islamic nature. And it was against the backdrop of the activities of the pro-Pakistanis that the martyred intellectuals looked very different. The list of martyrs in East Bengal right from the inception of the new state consisted mainly of the socialists, whom the state power preferred to call communists in the hope of inciting public hatred.

In 1971, the masters of the state machinery had promptly identified these progressive intellectuals as the driving force behind the people's uprising for liberation. At the beginning of the 1971 genocide, they killed people indiscriminately, and near the end of their unsuccessful operation, found it necessary to eliminate the intellectuals, selectively. They had at least two palpable motives for doing so. Firstly, there was the traditional hatred of the brawn for the brains. Secondly, they wanted to maim the new state that was emerging by removing as many intellectually advanced people as they could lay their hands on. Mixed in this was the motive of revenge.

Maybe the genocidal activities were accelerated by another political factor. This was the state power's apprehension that the idea of linguistic nationalism inculcated by the Bengalis might spread among the non-Punjabi nationalists in West Pakistan, leading to a total disintegration of Pakistan. They feared that the Sindhis, the Balochs and the Pathans, and even the Mohajirs might take their cue from the Bengalis and rise in revolt. The fear was not unfounded, for the oppressed.

Nationalists were becoming increasingly aware of the domination of the Punjabi military junta. Tikka Khan, who came to become the martial law administrator and governor, had the personal knowledge of the rebelliousness of the Balochs, on whom he had cast himself like a butcher. The local collaborators in East Pakistan—the al-Badrs and the al-Shams in particular—who had executed the job of killing the intellectuals, knew them personally. They acted in the Pakistan Army's stead, but had their own motive for action, which was their hatred for the socialists. In this respect, the field operators and their masters were kith and kin. And being what they were, both had their rationale for this hatred. After all, the socialists had been the principal force behind all the anti-state upsurges in East Bengal. The government as well as their foreign mentors had seen a communist conspiracy behind the flare-up of the Language Movement. Although their diagnosis in that case was wrong, they were right in thinking that the people's uprising in 1969 would not have occurred but for the militancy of the leftists led by Maulana Bhashani. It is also a matter of historical record that, because of their feeling that the nationalist movement for autonomy had been taken over by the "extremists," the Americans had declined to support it in 1971. By extremists, they meant the leftists. The American disapproval of an independent Bangladesh can be explained, quite easily, by their apprehension of its likely veering to the left.

As the war broke out, the supportive Indian authority, too, did not want leftist elements to be recruited in the Mukti Bahini. The guiding consideration was the same as that of the Americans. On Indira Gandhi's list of worries, the communist extremists figured quite prominently. With India as its host, the nationalist leadership of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh took particular care to keep the socialists away from the armed struggle for liberation. There were, among the ministers, men like Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad, who were not only non-communist but positively and self-proclaimed anti-communist.

Intellectually, the socialists were more advanced than the nationalists, and their participation in the Liberation Movement was in no way less significant than that of the nationalists. In the eyes of the Pakistani collaborators, Maulana Bhashani was a more dangerous enemy than even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. This, in fact, is what Ghulam Azam, the arch collaborator, had said to an audience he addressed in Lahore in mid-1971. Thus, the leftists were exposed to attacks from the reactionary nationalists as well as the fascist Pakistani rulers and their heinous Bengali collaborators.

Because of disunity among themselves, the socialists were not in the leadership of the Liberation Movement, which was taken over by the nationalists. Indeed, they were in a precarious situation throughout the period of the Liberation War and even after. This is illustrated by the animosity Tajuddin Ahmed, the head of the Provisional Government, had to encounter. Being a strong nationalist with socialist leaning, he was perilously vulnerable.

There is no reason to doubt that to the Pakistan Army, Tajuddin was the worst of the troublemakers, and they made no secret of this. Sardar Fazlul Karim, a leftist intellectual, was a witness to their outpouring. In mid-1971, he was picked up by the army and, in an unconscious act of their kindness that saved him from brutal murder in the hands of al-Badrs, was sent to prison. During his fearful interrogation, he was abused by an army officer who called him and the likes of him "the bastard sons of Tajuddin." Sardar Fazlul Karim recalls feeling that to those men, engaged in a dastardly mission of killing Tajuddin Ahmed, whom he had known to be a rather quiet and very sober political leader, Tajuddin was the most hateful of adversaries.

Tajuddin's rise in prestige was well-earned, but discomfiture did not leave him. After the August 15 mayhem, he found himself in prison and was, eventually, assassinated by gunmen sent to his prison cell by Mostaq. This was how the career of an intellectual-turned political leader came to an end, in the very land which he had so earnestly fought to liberate.

The martyred intellectuals had joined Tajuddin and the entire population in building up the collective dream of a social and political system, which was outlined in the four state principles written in the constitution of 1972. That dream, however, has not materialised, and the state principles themselves have been driven away. The tragic failure of the state to ensure the emancipation of the people was inevitable, given the fact that nationalist political leadership was committed to capitalism as distinguished from socialism. The capitalist ideology does not believe in You and I—its faith is in I or You. And as Thomas Carlyle, no lover of socialism himself, had put it in his 19th century observation, capitalism develops a system in which cash payment is the sole nexus of man to man. The system does not care for morality and, indeed, thrives on submission of all human considerations, including the moral ones, to the heartless autocracy of profit-making. The toiling masses, without whose productive labour the rich would have been obliged to eat their money instead of food, suffer and groan.

Capitalism has not been a stranger to this land of ours. But what post-independence Bangladesh witnessed was the violent liberation of its forces. The non-Bengali industrialists and businessmen had left, abandoning their properties. The ruling class grabbed those through means both legal and foul. Crafty men smuggled goods, committed fraud, occupied land and public properties, stole money from banks, and became fabulously rich. This was capitalism of trade and plunder, and not of investment and production. Compradors and touts flourished to the detriment of collective prosperity. Patriotism continued to decline. And all of this was made possible because in the post-independence Bangladesh, freedom fighters including the patriotic intellectuals were unable to play the role expected of them. Needless to say, the state has remained as anti-people as before, if not worse.

The martyred intellectuals have left us a legacy and an obligation. The obligation is to carry forward the struggle for liberation. The nationalists have done what they were supposed to, and capable of, doing. It is no use blaming them, because their commitment lay elsewhere. The failure has been of the socialists. As a whole, they have failed to provide leadership to the war of national liberation. Had they woken up to that responsibility, the result most certainly would have been different.

As a people, we are great survivors. We have gone through disasters—natural as well as man-made—and have stood up. We owe it to the martyrs and to ourselves to strive to establish a liberated state and society. They died so that we could live, and we must live fully to prove that they did not die in vain.

Dr Serajul Islam Choudhury is professor emeritus, Dhaka University. This is an edited version of an article that was first published in The Daily Star on December 14, 2013.