Beneath the pitiful flicker of mobile phone flashlights, a daughter and two sisters dug into the earth at an ungodly hour past midnight in Pirojpur’s Chitalia village. In this unprecedented incident, their hands gripped spades, eyes strained against the darkness, and tears shed without being seen. Their hearts carried a grief no family should ever have to endure. They were digging a grave for their own beloved father and brother, 87-year-old Manik Poshari, a gazetted Freedom Fighter who had fought for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971.
Earlier that afternoon, a grave had already been dug for him. But local anti-liberation zealots allegedly filled it back in, refusing to let the Freedom Fighter be buried in peace.
Read that again. Let the obscenity of it sink in.
A man who had risked his life for the birth of Bangladesh could not be granted a rightful burial in the country he had helped liberate. Even in death, he was not spared the hatred of those who disputed his identity as a Freedom Fighter. His family was forced to fight for something as fundamental as the right to lay their loved one in the ground.
What kind of country allows a Freedom Fighter to be humiliated in death by those who should hang their heads in shame before the very history he helped create?
Manik Poshari was not merely a name on an official list. He was a key complainant in the landmark 2009 case against Jamaat-e-Islami leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, accused of wartime crimes against humanity, murder, arson and looting. He later testified as Witness No. 6 before the International Crimes Tribunal. His testimony placed him on the record of a painful national struggle to confront the atrocities of 1971.
For those who revere the Liberation War, his final ordeal is an outrage. For those who understand the cost of Bangladesh’s independence, it is a wound. And for anyone who believes that a nation owes its Freedom Fighters even the most basic measure of dignity, it is an indictment of our collective failure.
The sequence of events that culminated in his midnight burial is nothing short of appalling.
Manik Poshari died on Saturday morning at his daughter’s home in Tungipara, Gopalganj. His grieving family brought his body to Pirojpur, expecting the state to honour his service and his community to let him rest in peace. Instead, they encountered intimidation and obstruction. For nearly five hours, his body reportedly lay stranded in an ordinary ambulance, without ice or preservation, as local Jamaat leaders surrounded the administrative grounds and obstructed his funeral and state tribute.
Think about those five hours. A family had lost its elderly patriarch. A daughter had lost her father. Yet, instead of being allowed to mourn, they were made to endure a degrading struggle over his final rites. While his body lay in an ambulance, those determined to deny him recognition were still contesting his right to be honoured.
The state, too, appeared to retreat in the face of intimidation. His Guard of Honour was reportedly conducted inside the police lines, under armed protection, rather than through an open public tribute. Meanwhile, Jamaat officials allegedly branded him a “fake freedom fighter” and declared that he would not be allowed to be buried on Pirojpur soil.
Does Jamaat even qualify to certify who a Freedom Fighter is?
Who appointed them the arbiters of Bangladesh’s Liberation War? By what right does any political organisation presume to decide which Freedom Fighter deserves honour and which one should be denied even a grave? Since when did the sacrifices of 1971 become subject to the approval of those whose political tradition stands in bitter conflict with the spirit of that liberation struggle?
A Freedom Fighter’s credentials are not a political party’s gift to grant or revoke. Nor can a crowd, however intimidating, erase a person’s documented service to the country. The audacity of such a challenge is staggering. It is not merely an insult to Manik Poshari. It is an insult to every Freedom Fighter who fought, bled and endured so that Bangladesh could exist as an independent nation.
But the worst was still to come.
When the family finally brought Manik Poshari’s body to his ancestral homestead in Chitalia, the ordeal followed them home. According to accounts of the incident, local fanatics filled the freshly dug grave with earth, preventing his burial there. Fear silenced the village. Not a single neighbour or villager dared to step forward to help the bereaved family or join the funeral prayers.
Imagine the desolation of that scene. A dead man, unable to rest. A family, unable to mourn in peace. A village, paralysed by fear. And a handful of women left to confront the darkness because the people around them were too frightened to stand beside them.
This is what intimidation does to a community. It does not merely obstruct a funeral; it teaches neighbours to look away from injustice. It turns silence into a survival strategy and leaves the vulnerable to bear the burden of collective cowardice. The people who created that atmosphere of fear must answer for it. So must every authority that failed to protect a grieving family from such indignity.
Yet, in this darkest hour, the family’s women displayed a courage that shames everyone who stood aside.
Manik Poshari’s daughter, Sumi Begum, and his sisters had already lost someone they loved. They should have been holding one another, receiving condolences and preparing to say their final goodbyes. Instead, they found themselves gripping shovels in the dead of night, struggling to secure the resting place denied to their father and brother in broad daylight.
Imagine Sumi Begum’s anguish. Imagine the questions tearing through her heart as she dug into the soil: Why must I do this? Why must my father’s final journey be marked by humiliation? Why must the man who fought for his country be buried under the cover of darkness? Where are the people who should be standing beside us? Where is the state that should be protecting us?
There are no adequate words for the cruelty of forcing a bereaved daughter into such a moment. No political justification can excuse it. No slogan can sanitise it. No invocation of religion, morality or patriotism can make it anything other than an act of profound human callousness.
Accompanied by only a few village police officers, the women dug the earth with their own hands, working under the glow of mobile phone flashlights to give Manik Poshari the final resting place he deserved.
Their courage deserves to be remembered. But let us not turn their suffering into a convenient story of resilience and move on. They should never have been placed in that position. Their determination does not absolve those who threatened the family, those who obstructed the burial or those who failed to ensure that a Freedom Fighter could be laid to rest with dignity.
The women of Manik Poshari’s family did what the rest of society should never have forced them to do: they stood their ground when intimidation drove others into silence.
There is a particular depravity in carrying hatred beyond the grave. Political disagreements do not die with the people who hold them, but a civilised society draws a line between contesting a person’s views and desecrating the final rites owed to the dead. To obstruct a burial is to weaponise grief. To fill a grave with earth to prevent an interment is to turn a family’s most vulnerable moment into an instrument of intimidation.
And when the target is a Freedom Fighter whose role in the Liberation War is officially recognised, the act acquires an even more disturbing significance. It raises questions about how anti-liberation hostility is allowed to manifest in public life, how political intimidation can overwhelm ordinary decency, and whether the country’s institutions are prepared to defend the historical and moral foundations on which Bangladesh was established.
The answer cannot be another expression of regret. There must be accountability. The reported obstruction of the funeral, the alleged destruction of the grave and any threats against the family must be investigated impartially. Those responsible must face the consequences established by law. The family must be protected, and public authorities must explain why the funeral could not proceed without intimidation and secrecy.
Anything less would send a terrible message: that a Freedom Fighter may be honoured in official records but abandoned when those honours become politically inconvenient; that the dead can be denied dignity if the living are sufficiently frightened; and that the loudest intimidators can dictate who belongs on the soil of Bangladesh.
Manik Poshari has now been laid to rest in the land of his ancestors. But the circumstances of his burial will remain a stain on the conscience of a nation born from resistance to oppression.
He fought for a Bangladesh where its people would not have to bow to the arbitrary will of powerful men. Decades later, his family found itself confronting precisely that kind of coercion at the most painful moment of their lives. He fought for a country that would belong to its people. Yet his own daughter had to fight, in the darkness, for the right to bury her father.
There is no honour in a nation that celebrates its Freedom Fighters on ceremonial occasions but cannot protect one of them from humiliation at the end of his life. There is no patriotism in invoking Bangladesh while denying dignity to a man who fought for its birth. And there is no moral authority in those who claim the right to judge a Freedom Fighter while behaving with such disregard for his family’s grief.
The image that must endure is not of the men who tried to prevent Manik Poshari’s burial. It is of his daughter and sisters, their hands on their shovels, their faces illuminated by mobile phone flashlights, their grief swallowed by the darkness of a village that had fallen silent.
They were digging a grave. But they were also exposing something far more disturbing: the depth to which hatred can sink when it is emboldened by intimidation and met with silence.
Manik Poshari deserved a dignified farewell in broad daylight, with his country’s flag, the honours of the state and the prayers of his community. Instead, his family had to reclaim that dignity in the dead of night.
Let the shame of that night follow those responsible. Let it haunt every institution that failed to protect his family. And let no one who claims to love Bangladesh forget what happened in Chitalia: a Freedom Fighter was denied peace in death, and the women who loved him had to dig his grave by the light of their mobile phones.
A nation that forgets its Freedom Fighters betrays its history. A nation that allows them to be humiliated in death betrays something even more fundamental: the very promise on which it was born.
