Martyred Intellectuals Day comes every year with a demand, as media report around that time, for a comprehensive list of the intellectuals that the nation had lost in the fag end of the liberation war at the hands of the Pakistani occupation forces and their local auxiliary squads, including Razakar, Al Badr and Al Shams, that abducted members of the Bangladeshi intelligentsia, mostly blindfolded and with their hands tied, from their houses to camps or other places. The people thus abducted 鈥� who included writers, scientists, artistes, singers, teachers, researchers, journalists, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, sculptors, government and non-government employees, people engaged in film and theatre and social and cultural activists 鈥� did not return. But the problem that remains is that the nation knows many of the intellectuals who went missing but never returned. Yet, no entity or agency, within the government and without, has any comprehensively conclusive list of the number of intellectuals who were killed by the Pakistani occupation forces and their local collaborators and who all these intellectuals were. It has been 53 years since Bangladesh became independent from West Pakistan through a liberation war that spanned nine months and the nation is still in the dark about the number of its intellectuals who died towards the end of the war.
Successive governments since independence have failed to make a final list of the intellectuals martyred in the war. Families of the martyred intellectuals put the situation down to sheer negligence of successive governments. The previous Awami League government, toppled in a mass uprising on August 5, in November 2020 instituted a committee to make the final list of martyred intellectuals. The committee failed to do the job in four years. But based on the committee findings, the liberation war affairs ministry published 560 names in four lists 鈥� the first with 191 names on April 7, 2021, the second with 143 names on May 29, 2022, the third with 108 names on February 15, 2024 and the fourth with 118 names on March 24, 2024. Thirty cultural activists and individuals associated with films, theatre, music and other branches of arts are also named on the list. Whilst the liberation war affairs ministry has no complete list of martyred intellectuals, various government and private documents put the figure at 1,111. But researchers say that the figure could be 10 times higher. The fact-finding committee that the government set up in 1972 made a list of 20,000 of the finest minds of the nation killed then. 鈥楤angladesh鈥�, a government documentary publication in 1972 put the figure at 1,109. The national encyclopaedia of Bangladesh, Banglapedia, put an estimated figure of 1,111. The government also has yet to complete separate lists of the freedom fighters and the local collaborators of the Pakistani occupation forces.
Lists of martyred intellectuals and freedom fighters are important for the government and the people to know who to accord honour to. The list of local collaborators of the Pakistani occupation force is also important. But all this has not happened although the issues have been in discussion for long and some efforts have been made. It is already time the government did all this, with accuracy and rising above any prejudice, if any, political or otherwise.
