Veteran politician and freedom fighter Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan has passed away at age 67. With him, most of the old Left who had come into prominence when optimism was still possible about political solutions are gone. If his rise began under the umbrella of Maulana Bhashani's fiery rhetoric and determinism to find a peasant's solution the anathema of the modern state, his departure came when he was crushed by the cynicism of the politics in which he himself swam in post-Bangladesh era. He was daring, committed and flexible who in the end joined the very politics he had once condemned, which swallowed him like the proverbial python of self-contradiction and self-deceit.
The people will know him as the erstwhile general secretary of the BNP who turned it into some sort of a political body beyond petty autocracies was no match for the system that had placed him in power in the first place. But Mannan Bhuiyan's finest hours must have been as the legendary freedom fighter and leader of a successful group of urban and peasant lefties from the lower classes who fought down the Pakistan army in 1971 in Narsingdi. Arming themselves with stolen guns and weapons including from the Pakistan army, they fought a war which was linked to the Mujibnagar government but was on its own, loyal to its own ideas and ideology and not that of the leading party of 1971, Awami League.
Mannan Bhuiyan and his fellow Lefties were followers of Maulana Bhashani with whom Sk. Mujib shared the dream of an independent Bangladesh, but the content of their dream was different. Bhashani wanted a more socialist utopia than that of the Awami League and even if neither had very little idea of how that could be achieved, the Left vision had more space for the poor.
However, the Left could offer little leadership to the people, showed little ability to mobilize them and in the war to gain the heart of the people in the nationalist space, they came a poor second to the Awami League. In the end, Maulana Bhashani's decision to stay away from the fateful 1970 election allowing Awami League a free hand was a brilliant admission of defeat to a force which had the ability to mobilize the people but no skill to build a new state.
The (inevitable) descent of the Left?
If 1971 gave Mannan Bhuiyan a taste of people's power and freedom, the days after 1975 must have strengthened his belief that history had been handed to wrong hands and they had the right to have a whack at building Bangladesh after AL's failures. But just as before, the Left had no clout and was all dreams, slogans and polemics. Once Mujib fell, they found a chance to claim history through the handed down power of an army coup. In that moment, it became evident that political parties on both sides of the fence had lost their ability to gain power except through the barrel of official guns. One wonders, if Mannan Bhuiyan's great hero, China' leader Mao se Dong would have approved of this tactics.
Once the Left had largely joined Zia's bandwagon, a victim of the logic of Left opportunism Mannan Bhuiyan gained power and political resources but it was as far away from Maulana Bhashani's way of politics than what could be imagined. The more he climbed the ladder in BNP, the further he drifted away from the legend that he had become and perhaps represented as the hope of the Leftists. In the final years, there was little to distinguish him from the fellow politicians of BNP he swore by no other god that that of venality and power at all costs without morality.
It was another case of power corrupting an ideal because he had faded from the raging fields of Narsingdi, the ideal of peasant power many years ago and he was simply a conventional politician. That was when he died and that is when his obituary should be written. But could it be otherwise? For the Leftists, the only route to power has been through the road dug by very Rightist hands.
So we shall remember him as he was with all his promise and not what he in the end became. And we shall mourn not just a valiant freedom fighter but also a brave and committed politician who had finally with many of his kind succumbed to the call of power. In many ways, his death is also the call to remember that that the politics of ideological commitment has always died in Bangladesh. Farewell.
[Afsan Chowdhury, Research Associate, York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), York University, 416-551-9244] |