Manik Mia and Ittefaq : When history meets each other through media

I recently had the pleasure of discussing the role of Tofazzel Hossain Manik Mia, Editor of Ittefaq  and the historical process that led to 1971 /liberation of Bangladesh. It was at an online lecture organized by Banglar Pathashala Foundation.  The topic is full of pitfalls and intellectual black holes into which we regularly disappear and often don't appear at the surface for long, occasionally never.

While we have come to view the media's role in terms of political rather than news production, we need to have some Terms of Reference to establish the locus standi of this relationship.  How would one assess the role of media and politics in such a context ?.

The reason why this is important is because the historical pressures on both politics and media were extremely high, even overwhelming at times. Or to put it succinctly, neither politics nor media was "free' to decide their own course of action given the historical background.

 In analyzing the role of both we constantly assume free agency of such social forces. While they may try to create or dismantle a structure including the state in cases, the fact remains that the compulsions that push them to such actions are often beyond their own control. By not recognizing historical compulsion beyond that of contemporary politics, the chances of misunderstanding both are high.

Bangladesh States making: The first phase

The 1940s remain the critical state construction period of the region as two states emerged and two states failed to. On top of that, of the two states, both were carved up and one later was to be further decimated, losing its majority population.

India had wanted to be a single unit encompassing the entire sub-continental zone including the directly administered colonial zones and the princely states and autonomous zones. India's position was ahistorical but it had a strong colonial political presence and became the embodiment of the post-colonial imagination of "India." It wanted an uncut India but it didn't succeed.

Pakistan ate up large tracts of this monolithic India by mobilizing  "Muslim" causes. During the politics of that period, three state trends existed. The territorial and cultural-India- the faith and territorial - Pakistan- and language and territorial -Bengal- that campaigned for statehood but none were fully successful in the end.

India failed to have one united all-encompassing India,  Bengal failed to form the United Bengal state in 1947 and Pakistan initially appeared to have won but disastrously ended in 1971. These statehood experiments were only partially fulfilled. The concept of the monolithic state was weak or even absent in this history.

In the case of Bangladesh of today and East Pakistan then, the situation was different in the sense that an independent state of East Pakistan was adopted as a resolution by the leading party of the Indian Muslims, All India Muslim League in 1940, popularly known as the Lahore Resolution. It was however amended by Jinnah and his group in 1946 leading to first the rise of the United Bengal move and secondly the independent Bangladesh movement that began in the months before a single central Pakistan came into being in 1947.

The inevitable rise of Manik Mia

Tofazzal Hossain, was born in Barisal and after graduation did several government jobs at the local level. He moved to Kolkata in 1943 just as state politics was peaking.

His mentor was Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy , leader of the Bengal Muslim League and began working in the office of the Bengal Muslim League as a secretary. He joined the Daily Ittehad as secretary to the board of directors in Kolkata. That automatically meant proximity to Sk. Mujibur Rahman as well who was the leading student activist at that time.

Manik Mia was already a political media activist and his space was carved out long before 1947 and as the politics of East Pakistan moved , so did his journalism.   He moved to Dhaka in 1948 and joined the weekly Ittefaq. In 1951, he became the Editor formally as Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani became more involved in politics and media wasn't his space anyway. The paper became synonymous with the politics of AML and later AL , the wholesale transformed version of Bengal Muslim League of 1946.

Throughout the period of post 1947 politics, AL tried to rescue the Lahore Resolution from (West) Pakistani hands. Whether the 21 points of 1954- Ittefaq became a daily in 1953- or the 6 points of 1966, the basic principles of federalism, governance and political pattern remained the same from 1940 onwards. It was history and couldn't be denied either by politics or media as 1971 shows. 

Following the 1969 mass upsurge, the ban on Ittefaq was lifted and it continued to espouse AL politics till the night of 25th March 1971, when the army cracked down and burnt the office unaware Pakistan by then was already dead. In the end, the cards of history were dealt long before and each institution, space and individual played a role as designated. It couldn't be altered as Jinnah's  failed attempt to prevent the birth of East Pakistan as an independent state shows.

afsan.c@gmail.com