Forty-seven years is not a long time in the making of a nation-state. The birth pangs of Bangladesh as a new nation seem to be going on even now. Come December and the nation is plunged into memory, celebration and much sadness. It will be no different this time. This is so, even though it is called the Victory Month in Bangladesh.

The 16th of December – the day the Pakistani army surrendered to its Indian counterpart – is the big day. Tributes will be paid to the national martyrs’ memorial at Savar near Dhaka. But two days before that – on the 14th – the country remembered one of the blackest days in the new nation’s history. On that day, the people gathered at Rayer Bazar and near the Jagannath Hall of Dhaka University, where hundreds of the country’s best intellectuals were slaughtered by the Pakistani army on 14th December, 1971, in an attempt to snuff out the minds and hearts of the liberation warriors. As in other years, the sombre occasion provided an opportunity to remember the painful past of the country, its birth-pangs.

But then, the intellectuals were only a part of nearly three million people brutally killed in perhaps the biggest genocide in world history since the Second World War. The way the big powers such as the United States and China stood by Pakistan, even after the scale of the genocide came to be known to the outside world, is one of the abiding shames of modern diplomacy and statecraft.

But, there is a shameful side to the legacy of the Liberation War inside Bangladesh. The country’s society and politics even today bear bitter marks of the division in the polity over the nation’s blood-drenched birth. That is why every December 16 lays bare the polarisation between the so-called pro-liberation and anti-liberation forces.

The seeds of this division were there in the Liberation War itself. The forces such as the Al-Shams and Al-Badr and the pro-Pakistan elements in the Bangladesh army had never been enamoured of either Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or of a new nation called Bangladesh. The 16th of December, 1971 marked their defeat, but not their destruction.

These forces avenged their defeat in battle on 15th August, 1975 by killing “Bangabandhu” and most of his family members at his home in Dhaka. Thus, began the second part of the story of the liberation’s legacy. The new regimes could not take the country back into Pakistan, but they tried everything to undermine or downright dismantle the liberation’s history and achievements.

To the writers of the new narrative, the father figure of the new nation was not Sheikh Mujib, but Ziaur Rahman, who usurped power after Mujib’s assassination and became the chief martial law administrator and then President until he was also killed in an army coup in 1981. In came another usurper from the army – HM Ershad – who headed the military rule from 1982 till 1991, when combined forces of Opposition parties forced him to resign. The elections of that year brought Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, to power and ushered in electoral democracy in Bangladesh.

But, between them, Ziaur Rahman and Ershad demolished much of the social and political structure that Sheikh Mujib and the Liberation War envisaged. Instead of the “secular” character of the country that its 1972 constitution promised, the military regimes turned it into an “Islamic” republic. The Liberation War itself was portrayed in a distorted way. And, the openly anti-liberation leaders such as Gholam Azam and his Islamist radicals were allowed to return to Bangladesh and rehabilitated in politics and society. Islamisation of the society began in earnest with women having to bear the brunt of it more than others.