The Jamaat-e-Islami caused murder and mayhem when it went after the Ahmadiyya community in Lahore in 1953. Hundreds of Ahmadiyyas died in the violence; their homes were destroyed because the Jamaat said they were heretics, were no part of the Islamic faith.
Source/Credit: The Daily Star.
By Syed Badrul Ahsan | July 17, 2013
THE wheels of justice do not always turn. But when they turn, they do so with the clear message that the perpetrators of ancient crimes always get their comeuppance at a point in historical time. The judgement delivered in the matter of the crimes committed by Ghulam Azam during Bangladesh’s War of Liberation reinforces the old argument that sooner or later those who commit misdeeds must pay for their acts. Now a frail ninety-one year-old man, Azam is proof that criminality is never forgotten, some sins are never expiated. He joins the ranks of men who have killed or helped to kill and were therefore condemned by law and censured by history.
There are meanings to be drawn from the trials of old men for old crimes. And there are all the instances of justice meted out to remind the world that a point comes when the victims of crime and their families and the societies they are part of need to be satisfied that the law has prevailed, that morality has triumphed. Forty two years after 1971, the law and morality have taken centre stage through the verdict delivered on Ghulam Azam. No, he will not be around for ninety years more to go through the entirety of his punishment. Mortality will not allow him to live that long. He is ninety one. He may not have many more years to live.
The question of Ghulam Azam’s longevity of life is irrelevant here. What eventually matters is that his past has finally caught up with him, even if it took more than four decades to do so. The past, as they say, is always with us, in various forms. And Ghulam Azam’s past, like that of any other individual notorious in history, never quite left him or his party. In an incredible sort of way, Azam and the Jamaat-e-Islami have always played truant with history, have always remained outside the bounds of respectability owing to the darkness of their record and the venality of their deeds.
The Jamaat-e-Islami caused murder and mayhem when it went after the Ahmadiyya community in Lahore in 1953. Hundreds of Ahmadiyyas died in the violence; their homes were destroyed because the Jamaat said they were heretics, were no part of the Islamic faith. Syed Abul A’la Maududi’s version of Islam was one that stood at variance with that of the founders of the faith. Not until martial law was imposed on Lahore did the violence subside.
Ghulam Azam and his fellow Jamaatis in Bangladesh are not the first to be hauled up for murder and related crimes. Their mentor Maududi was placed on trial, in the aftermath of the Lahore riots, and sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently commuted and in the end Maududi was pardoned. Twenty one years after 1953, the Jamaat went after the Ahmadiyyas again, forcing the hand of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan’s prime minister formally declared that the Ahmadiyyas were not Muslims, that therefore they could not practice Islam. The Ahmadiyyas are a cowed lot in Pakistan these days.
Intolerance has been part of the Jamaat psyche. And it was hatred of others — Hindus, secular Muslim Bengalis, Awami Leaguers, liberals, intellectuals — Ghulam Azam and his cohorts preached in occupied Bangladesh in 1971. These men did what Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan wanted them to do. Beyond that, they did what they on their own wanted to do. The result was the murder of three million Bengalis and the rape of two hundred thousand Bengali women by the Pakistan army. Ghulam Azam’s fault was not that he believed in Pakistan. It was that he continued to be on Pakistan’s side even when the state resorted to genocide. Worse, Azam and other flunkeys of the Pakistani regime demonstrated a remarkable ability to misread their own people’s minds, to look upon every instance of opposition to the soldiers’ moral depravity as a threat to the state of Pakistan. Every freedom fighter for Azam was a miscreant or an Indian agent. Every instance of trouble in ‘East Pakistan’ was the doing of Hindus. The lust-driven soldiers of Pakistan were only saving Islam and Pakistan.
The trial of Ghulam Azam and the judgement delivered on him are therefore a reminder for us that bad men and their terrible crimes must never be forgotten. The verdict delivered on Monday deserves to be studied in other contexts as well. One simple context will suffice: the verdict on Azam’s criminality is a hard slap on the face for those who looked the other way when the visa on his Pakistani passport ran out in the late 1970s and yet he was allowed to stay in Bangladesh; for those who have had no shame in forging political alliances with Ghulam Azam or his party and helping them to enter government.
Bad men need shaming everywhere. Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea and their accomplices sent tens of thousands of Cambodians to death between the mid and late 1970s. In the end the law and global conscience caught them by the scruff of the neck, in the interest of justice. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic waged an enormous battle to save themselves from life in prison. Charles Taylor once ruled Liberia and then was hauled off to an international war crimes tribunal. The genocidaires of Rwanda 1994 are unable to escape the law. The message cannot be missed: criminals camouflaged as politicians can strut around on the stage for a while and then are forced to pay the wages of sin.
In 1971, Ghulam Azam ceased to be a politician and reinvented himself as an instrument of fanatical oppression, shaped and forged by a murderous military regime in Pakistan. On his watch, the goon squads called al-Badr and al-Shams picked up and picked off Bengal’s leading figures in the various professions and felt no contrition. Once Bangladesh emerged into a blood-drenched dawn, Azam continued to do Pakistan’s bidding — badmouth the new country abroad through bare-faced lies and go on an expedition in the Middle East for a restoration of ‘East Pakistan’ on geography that did not exist any more.
In 2013, let the message go out of this land, loud and clear: evil may live and thrive for decades on end, but it will have no place to hide forever and someday will be made accountable before the forces of civility and decency. Ghulam Azam may not hang. He will not live for the next ninety years. But he has been tried, found guilty of participation in genocide and sentenced. We the people are satisfied.
Justice has been done. Never again will any citizen of this land consort with a foreign power and conspire to murder his own people, along with their values and dreams and nationalistic convictions.
-- The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star. E-mail: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com
Read original post here: Bangladesh: Ghulam Azam and the wheels of justice
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