Birth of Bangladesh : The Politics of History And The History of Politics

“If it is logical that the sections of a people rendering greater sacrifices for liberating a country will have higher claims on the independent country and its material resources, the poorer classes of the people, particularly the peasantry and the urban poor, have the highest claims on the resources of Bangladesh. The reason is simple: by all evidences, youths coming from the country’s peasantry and its urban poor constituted the largest part of the Mukti Bahini—the body of the freedom fighters that successfully fought the country’s liberation war. […] Bangladesh awaits the completion of the genesis of its struggle for independence by dismantling the autocratic state erected by the anti-poor rich, and creating on its debris an egalitarian ‘people’s republic’ for actualisation of ‘equality, social justice and human dignity’ for all its citizens, not only those of its poorer classes, and, thus, settling gloriously the claim of its history. […] The dream of a politically democratic state with an egalitarian socio-economic order that motivated thousands of youths to take up arms, and inspired millions of people to endure the ordeal of a war, to liberate the country does not appear to be dead. The dream, a little subdued in the face of autocratic political and economic governance by the rich ruling classes of the country, often flashes across society in times of crisis, clearly indicating that a resurgence of the submerged consciousness of the revolutionary past is possible.”