The spirit of Ekushey

 

February resonates in our souls. In the month of February, Bangladesh's people give their memories a jog. Or could it be that the memories make their way into the consciousness on their own? That is a thought. But when you go back to February, or when February comes to you, you remember some significant slices of your nation's history.
Among those slices you glimpse in the past is the story of February 1966, when the Six-Point programme, which Bangabandhu would define as our charter of survival, was first articulated in Lahore. There was, again, another February, this one in 1969, when the notorious Agartala Conspiracy Case, in which 35 five
Bangalees had been implicated by the Ayub Khan regime, was withdrawn unconditionally and all the accused were freed. In February 1969, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became Bangabandhu.
February 1974 had a different story to relate. A few days after Pahela Falgun, Pakistan -- the state we helped create in 1947 and then, for perfectly good reasons, liberated ourselves from in December 1971 -- recognised the independent People's Republic of Bangladesh. Bangabandhu, Pakistan's prisoner for 10 months between March 1971 and January 1972, was welcomed in Lahore as free Bangladesh's leader by men who had bitterly opposed his struggle.
But all these tales of February, straddling various points in historical time, were made possible by the patriotic zeal of the Bangalee people in February 1952. In that month, in that year, it dawned on the Bangalee nation that its cultural tradition and its political moorings needed to be restored in the face of an onslaught on its language by political classes ignorant of the movement of history.
In February 1952, the struggle in East Bengal was not against Urdu per se. It was against the sinister move by an increasingly entrenched ruling class in West Pakistan to impose Urdu as the language of the state on a people who formed a clear majority in Pakistan. The Bangla language and, by extension, the Bengali heritage, needed to be safeguarded.
February 1952 marked a near quantum leap by Bangalees toward a redefinition of themselves. It was one of the earliest signs of a gradual evolution out of the narrow confines of communal politics and towards a reassertion of the secular Bangalee spirit. Ekushey sowed the seeds of Bangalee nationalism in Pakistan.