Tuesday it was one year since Bangladesh President Sheikh Hasina was ousted in a bloody rebellion which spilled to the streets in our neighbouring country. In such situations there are always a group of people who don’t participate actively but are stuck in the middle of the conflict. Often the common man or woman, who just want to go about their daily lives and livelihoods. They may have an opinion and be supporters of either side of the divide but they feel rattled by the sudden changes which uproots the reality as they knew it. The office goer who likes to wake up to the morning coffee. The school children who look forward to the afternoon when they return home and rush to the dining table in the kitchen to see what their mother has cooked for them today. The farmer who tills the land come sunshine, come rain and takes a break for a tea at a roadside stall. Ordinary lives turn topsy turvy.
Those whose blood boils with revolutionary zeal, as did with our freedom fighters in the pre-Independence days….they inspire the common individual and the latter dives headlong into the fire of this zeal….as happened during India’s Independence movement when hundreds and thousands of common people relinquished the comfort of their ordinary day to day lives to jump into the fire of freedom.
The cause was worthy. It was FREEDOM, no less. We would do it a hundred times over.
Are all rebellions of the common individual worthy? What about when in that rebellion the common individual is pitted against the common individual?
I tried to understand how worthy to the common individual was the cause of last year’s rebellion. I headed to different borders between India and Bangladesh, when reports trickled in about persecutions and persecuted people fleeing in desperation. Almost everyone was tight-lipped. However, I got to speak to a few people. They talked about witch-hunts of political rivals. “This is not a fight for freedom,” said a man who was Indian but did business in Bangladesh. “Common people don’t support the turn of events by and large. They want to go back to normal lives.” An elderly Bangladeshi woman whose daughter lives in India said, “We already fought for freedom. We got it. Now we are supposed to live harmoniously with each other. I don’t know why we are fighting.”
The writer is Editor, Features