Parts of the region was a part of the Sylhet district of Bangladesh prior to the partition and is mainly populated by Bengali speaking people who still trace their roots and relatives back to Bangladesh.

Developments in Bangladesh naturally evoke responses here and the Wednesday hanging of Motiur Rahman Nizami, the former Commander of Al-Badr, who unleashed a reign of terror during the Liberation War, was no exception.

Prominent members of the civil society hailed the hanging as a welcome step in bringing fundamentalist elements convicted of Liberation War crimes to book.

Speaking to bdnews24.com, senior advocate and author, Imad Uddin Bulbul said that Nizami’s hanging would bring solace to the souls of the martyrs of the war, many of whom were the victims of Nizami’s ruthlessness.

“I was happy, truly happy reading it in the newspapers today. We saw the liberation war very closely. We read and heard of the atrocities. We heard the tales of the killing of intellectuals in Mirpur.”

In an almost verbatim echo of liberation warrior Zahir Uddin Jalal’s reaction to the hanging, Bulbul who was in his youth at the time of the Liberation War recollected how they would hear of atrocities committed by the Al-Badr, Razakar and Jamaat’s the then student wing Chhatra Sangha on minority Hindus and the intellectuals.

“One must remember that the ranks, titles and positions that Nizami enjoyed were gifts of his later life. The Tribunal convicted him for the crimes committed in his youth”, he said, adding that if he had been allowed to go scot free it would have been unfair for people like ‘Shaheed Janani’ Jahanara Imam, whom he remembered as being instrumental in building up the momentum for the punishment of the war criminals.

Dr Rajib Kar, another prominent member of Silchar civil society and the man spearheading the campaign to rename the Silchar Railway Station as Bhasha Shaheed Railway Station after the (Bengali) language martyrs of May 19, 1961, hailed the Bangladesh government for taking a tough stand against the fundamentalists in the country over the recent past.

Observing that he personally cannot rejoice at a person being awarded capital punishment, he agreed that the hanging of Nizami brought justice to those he had wronged.

Prominent academician and commentator Joydeep Biswas, an Associate Professor of Economics at Silchar’s Cachar College however took a more expansive view of the issue. While maintaining that the hanging of Nizami had ensured justice, he said that the perception is gaining ground around the world that a politics of retribution is at play in Bangladesh and called on all sides to end it in order to ensure peace.

He said that on the one hand the fundamentalists were killing people in the streets while on the other the government was executing the fundamentalists.

Mincing no words, he doubted if the practice of awarding the death penalty in the “rarest of rare” cases was really at play in Bangladesh, and opined that the judiciary should exercise some restraint in this regard as far as possible.

Taking a slice from developments in Bangladesh, especially the country’s rolling back to a theocratic nature, he said that it is evident that there are people who would still sympathise with the kind of ideology that Nizami and the likes follow. Unless such people understand the dangers posed by such ideologies, defeating fundamentalism through hangings could breed counter-violence and more retribution, he cautioned.

“You cannot hang people one after the other and hope to establish peace.”

He laid stress on India curbing forces of fundamentalism in its own soil as well, observing that a rise in the fundamentalist nature tends to have an opposite backlash in the neighbouring country of Bangladesh.

“We have a larger geo-political connection. We find that the moment we have a BJP government in power in India…the party that represents Hindu fundamentalist ideas, there is a rise in aggressive Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh. The rise in fundamentalism in the world’s largest democracy and in the country that helped Bangladesh gain independence is bound to have impacts on its neighbours.”

He also blamed the media in India -- especially the Bengali media from the border areas of India’s North East and West Bengal -- for presenting only one side of the story.

“Whenever there are attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh there are also people who hit the streets in Bangladesh to protesting them. That side of the story is not represented.”

He, however, said that the tough stand that the government in Bangladesh has taken against the fundamentalists is something that cannot be expected from the current government in India.

“We saw when people protested against the killing of free thinkers in south India, there were people returning honours and laurels as protests…instead of congratulating such people for standing up against fundamentalists, the government here mocked them…”

He hoped that the people and the government in Bangladesh would devise for themselves ways to ensure an environment of peace and harmony in the region.