In the annals of the Bangladesh liberation war, let alone in a comprehensive history of the nation, a proper place of the intellectuals largely remains a desideratum. In the meantime, i.e., between 1971 and 2024, a variety of morbid phenomena have flourished, among them two histories of the liberation war. For the proclamation of independence (April 10, 1971), the cataclysmic events of the year stand all by themselves as a response to Pakistan's sudden and brutal military operation. The sudden and phenomenal election victories of Awami League in 1970-71, the founding event, erases all earlier national episodes.

A second narrative finds origins in the radical activities of the 1950s, and in the 1960s, when the country was led by the masses in an upsurge against the Pakistani regime and, a trifle later, when flags of freedom were seen flying in rallies giving a damn to the Awami League leadership. These two narratives, between themselves, define the political history of Bangladesh since 1971. 

What Hasan Hafizur Rahman, prominent intellectual and editor of the first collection of documents relating to the war, scribbled in 1982 is indicative of the primordial dissension: "The principal consideration was to secure exact documents for exact events. We do not have any comment, we point towards nothing, we offer no explanations, no analysis of our own." This stasis is apparently a metaphor, i.e., a symptom, of what the primordial dichotomy eventually morphed to: civilian and military views of the liberation war.

The military view, which tends to see events primarily as a military conflict with Pakistan, still prevails. This account drives home the point that the freedom movement was ultimately a military duel.  This argument's Achilles heel is plain enough: lacking comprehensiveness. A tree without roots rarely tempts you, subjects supposed to know.

The other narrative stresses the political nature of popular participation in myriad forms. In its absence, intellectuals appear rather as a frivolity, a missing link for that matter in the chain of events. With the supreme leader capitulating in the long night of 'Operation Searchlight,' almost all unprepared, inefficient, civilian cohorts catapulting into exile, who would deny the dismal nature of politics? Besides, many of these men were plain corrupt and, in the opinion of many, "the country won liberation not because of the civilian political leadership, but in spite of them."

Intellectual actors, however, claim a central place in the martyrology of national resistance, in the history of the struggle for cultural and political autonomy over two decades in old Pakistan, between 1952 and 1971. This narrative even endows intellectuals with a powerful founding myth: featuring student martyrs of 1952 and teacher, doctor, lawyer, journalist, and myriad professional victims of 1971 in the great drama that short-circuited the illusion that was old Pakistan.

Why Pakistan collapsed? For a simple (not simplistic) answer, we recall Antonio Gramsci's  take on the Russian revolution (1917), in terms of state and civil society. Czarist Russia was only a special case, thought Gramsci, where economic crisis proved necessary and sufficient for erupting a successful revolutionary crisis. State and the civil society there entangled in an unjust relationship; intellectuals remaining primordial and gelatinous, it was the state which was everything.

The Russians won a lightning 'war of maneuver' without even rehearsing for a 'war of position' (siege warfare) because the Czarist state lacked a cultural fortress, powerful enough to win over an irate and hungry populace. The post-Czar regime of Kerensky also fell for the same reason: it hardly had time to even lay foundations of a new fortress. In Western Europe, contrarily, prevailed an equilibrium between the state and civil society; when the state trembled a robust structure of civil society surfaced. In this perspective, Pakistan in 1971 looked more like Russia and less like the West.

It began, soon after a caesarean birth, to lose hegemony, effective control over the intellectuals, over culture, public opinion and in a word over the illusion of popular sovereignty. It faced, in other words, an 'organic crisis' risking the fabric of the 'historical block'—structure as well as superstructure—that in the first place brought the nation-state into being, with no civil society rearing head.

In Bangladesh, despite appearances, the social revolution in making is likely not repeating the Pakistan experience. For, thanks to the war of liberation, the 'war of maneuver' is going around ever more as a 'war of position.' It bears stressing that "a state wins a war to the extent to which it prepares itself in peacetime." Where is this 'war of position,' the struggle for hegemony, more readily fought? Mostly in the vast terrains of civil society, those massive superstructures of modern bureaucracies, the 'trenches' of civil society. A struggle for hegemony thus turns into a 'war of attrition.'  Antonio Gramsci wryly observes, "no social form is ever willing to confess that it has been superseded."

The struggle for class consciousness thus demands intellectuals. That infamous apathy of the masses, what the left used to dub 'false consciousness,' is not determined by structures (economic conditions) as by superstructures (cultural relations). It is more or less a product of traditional intellectual hegemony. On the other hand, winning over traditional intellectuals by workers marks a victory of organic intellectuals.

Awakening to class consciousness (becoming hegemonic) is the product of a struggle led by organic intellectuals of competing social classes.  Asserts Gramsci: "A human mass does not 'distinguish' itself and does not become independent  'by itself' without organizing itself (in a broad sense), and there is no organization without intellectuals,... without organizer and leaders..."

For Gramsci, political parties comprise three layers: a first layer of true believers, a second layer of political entrepreneurs (organic intellectuals) and a third layer of the ruling class or political leadership. "All three layers are necessary for a party but the organizational backbone is the second layer," a Gramsci scholar has put it. One function of intellectuals is achieving what the oft-cited, poorly taken, term hegemony signifies: the capacity to lead without coercion or with coercion plus legitimacy.

Successions of civilian to military, military-sponsored, and interim (not intermediate) regimes in Bangladesh are clearly a symptom of the failure to build on avowed premises of liberal hegemony: equity, human dignity and social justice. The latest autocracy, a manifestation of late fascism, in Bangladesh was no less than a direct result of this weak hegemony. The missing 'spontaneous' consent in civil society was responsible for obliging the fledgling state to resort to both plunder and murder.

Salimullah Khan is a professor of general education at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.