Tribute: We have seen in him the iconic Manik Mia and more

Editorial Desk :
When Bangladesh needed his strong and courageous voice in this critical period of history as people’s democratic and other human rights including the freedom of expression was severely compromised, Barrister Mainul Hosein departed from this world.

His death came as a shocking piece of news to the democracy loving people of Bangladesh on Saturday evening. We at the newsroom became speechless.

No word is enough to describe the loss of his pen that unrelentingly wrote for about five decades starting in the Pakistan period as the editor of the Bengali daily Ittefaq in 1969 after his father Manik Mia’s death.

Later he became the chairman of its Editorial Board.

On Saturday, his pen came to an unfortunate halt.

Barrister Mainul Hosein was detected with the fatal intestinal cancer about a year ago, and he had to be shifted to hospital off and on as the medical need arose.

During this period until his death, he used to live in home and hospital alternately. As he used to write from his home, from the hospital bed also, he wrote his fiery commentaries on the current explosive Bangladesh situation one after another for The New Nation and other Bengali newspapers, his central theme being the crucial need of ensuring people’s voting rights in the forthcoming general election on January 7.

He continuously spoke on how the caretaker system of Bangladesh was abolished manipulating the people’s Constitution to introduce in its place a vote-rigging election mechanism under an Election Commission that only acts as a rubber stamp.

Even when he was fatally ill, he guided us, the editorial staff of The New Nation, all the while editing commentaries and editorials produced by us as chairman of the paper’s Editorial Board.

We shall remain ever grateful to him for this valuable guidance.

All through his life, Barrister Mainul Hosein never wavered in his lifelong mission to create a democratic Bangladesh where rule of law would be supreme.

For that he both acted as a journalist, as a lawyer, and as a public intellectual. When many chose to remain silent, he was always in the scene as an outspoken critic of the government.

In life, though he loved to identify himself as a lawyer, he was indeed a veteran in all these fields.

He as a man of judiciary always fought for its independence and indeed he was instrumental in separating the judiciary from the executive in 2007.

However, describing him as only one in a particular field would be an injustice to his other identities in other fields. He had a versatile and dynamic personality.

For his personal integrity and vision, he was inducted as an adviser into the caretaker government led by Fakhruddin Ahmed in 2007 with the responsibility of several ministries.

The focus of all his attention as an individual and as a writer was the country’s politics.

Yes, he was an individual in its true sense of the term and he knew his stature could not be moulded along the narrow and selfish party lines and thoughts.

He remained away from party politics since 1975 when he resigned as a member of parliament in protest of Bangabandhu’s introduction of one-party BAKSAL rule in Bangladesh.

Though he went against Bangabandhu and criticized some of his steps, he always likened him as his father.

As a journalist, Barrister Mainul Hosein religiously traded on the footsteps of his father, the much respected journalist Tofazzal Hosein Manik Mia in the nation’s democratic struggle all through his life.

Mainul loved the independent Bangladesh and very dearly founded the weekly magazine named The New Nation in 1978. Three years later it was turned into a daily.

A staunch believer in a free society, he never compromised with the idea of freedom and democracy.

He was very dismayed by the way the last two general elections – in 2014 and 2018 – were conducted under the present Awami League regime.

As a sentinel of people’s voting rights, he described once, with the senior staffers of The New Nation, that these two elections were ‘two slaps’ on his two cheeks.

He knew that he could not take any more of this farcical election, and even from his deathbed he maintained his iconic struggle for democracy. For this, he shall remain as a beacon of inspiration for us and others.

He may be absent from us, but his writings and real life examples will show us the way and the generations to come.