Source/Credit: The Daily Star

By Syed Badrul Ahsan

A son of the detained Jamaat leader Ghulam Azam complains, in an article published in a London-based journal, that the people of Bangladesh have forgotten the role his father played in the language movement between 1948 and 1952. He makes it a point to remind people that Azam, who was general secretary of the Dhaka University Students Union in the late 1940s, has been airbrushed out of the history of the university and his name does not appear on any list of those noted for their contributions to causes once promoted by the university.

There can only be a simple response to the complaint. And it is that history must not be tampered with and the positive contributions made by individuals at a particular phase in time must not be overlooked because of the negative role they play or have played at a later stage in their lives. It may be that Ghulam Azam did not have a front row seat during the rising Bengali agitation in defence of Bangla, but it is true that in 1948 he was general secretary of the students union. The vice president of the union was Aurobindo Basu.

In November 1948, when Pakistan’s prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan travelled down to Dhaka on a ten-day visit to a pretty restive East Bengal, the students felt that in view of the hostility of the authorities to the language question, it would be proper for a Muslim rather than a Hindu to read out a memorandum before the prime minister. And thus it was that Ghulam Azam and not Aurobindo Basu presented the memorandum listing the students’ demands for Bangla to the prime minister.

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