Looking Forward, Looking Back

It is perhaps true that Bangladesh spends too much time looking back, and not enough time looking forward.

If we wish to create a Bangladesh that is worthy of the sacrifices of 1971 then the best way to do so is to concentrate on building a country where every Bangladeshi can live in peace and freedom and with the opportunity to make the most of his or her life and for his or her family.

That is how we best honour our martyrs and the spirit of the Liberation War. A nation mired in inequality and injustice does a disservice to the countless men and women who laid down their lives so that Bangladeshis could live as a free people.

Today, even 54 years after Victory Day, Bangladesh remains a work in progress.

We have an enormous amount to be proud of and grateful for. The fact that we have risen up from the ashes of our war-ruined birth and have emerged as a country that can provide for its people is no small feat.

We have only to look at our erstwhile compatriots in what was once the western wing to see how far we have come.

Today, despite having one-third less the population, Bangladesh’s economy is now bigger than that of Pakistan.

The divergence of our fortunes since Liberation provides the best justification and validation for our independence, if any were needed.

Indeed, we need not look so far afield for evidence of what we have achieved. India is projected as a great world power, but its per capita economy is not much higher than ours, with ours better than many of the states, including that of West Bengal.

And that is before we come to measures of human development such as health and life expectancy, where Bangladesh punches well above its weight, and outstrips our larger neighbours on many fronts.

If Bangladesh is doing better than the entities that we were yoked to prior to 1971 and 1947, we must be doing something right.

But there is still so much to do.

With elections slated for early next year and the chance to start afresh, we must now come together as a nation and redouble our efforts to create a Bangladesh that can be an exemplar for the region and the world.

Bangladesh is not a small country and we are not a small people. The time has come for us to take our place on the global stage as befits the eighth largest population in the world.

But the sine qua non of doing so is to provide development and opportunity to our people, to ensure that no Bangladeshi goes to bed at night hungry, that no Bangladeshi remains without access to health and education, and that every Bangladeshi has what he or she needs to live a live of dignity, decency, and opportunity.

Above all, we need to ensure that every Bangladeshi can live in full safety and security, with access to justice and their full human and civil rights. If we provide this bare minimum, the Bangladeshi people will take care of the rest for themselves.

But of course, while we need to keep our eyes firmly trained on the future that we hope to build together, the future needs to be built on a common foundation.

For too long we have lived within a single and singular version of history that did not leave space for the nuances and contradictions and ambiguities that are part and parcel of who we are as a people.

We must never go back to the days of one official history and a packaged and commodified narrative of our Liberation War that was used as both political tool and cudgel.

We should welcome debate and discourse and discussion surrounding our history, with all its messiness, in all its glory, but also never shying away from the more difficult or contentious parts of our history.

We need to face up to them all, because they are all part of our story.

But we must be honest in doing so. We cannot rewrite history or try to pretend that things that happened did not happen, or that things that didn't happen did.

Debate is one thing. Disinformation is quite another. Let us have an open, honest, nuanced conversation about the Liberation War, but let us always be guided by the truth.

Furthermore, let us reaffirm that the Liberation War remains the centrepoint and moral lodestar of Bangladesh as an independent nation.

To denigrate it or to try to downplay its importance and centrality to who we are is to fundamentally misunderstand and misread history.

To do so is no crime. In a free Bangladesh people are free to believe as they choose, to honour who they choose, to interpret history as they choose.

But let them, let us, do so openly and honestly. Let us not hide. Let us not trade in falsehoods and fairy tales.

And come Election Day, let the Bangladeshi people choose which vision of 1971 and which vision of the future they subscribe to.