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THE HORROR! THE HORROR!
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Horrors of Bangladesh
by
Iftekhar Sayeed
To the Memory of Meem
June 2023
Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1961, p 14)
On the night of June 4, 2004, two-year-old Meem and her parents boarded a double-decker bus in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The bus caught fire in front of Sheraton Hotel, burning alive nine passengers, including Meem. The following day had been announced as hartal by the opposition, then led by Sheikh Hasina, now the prime minister. Bomb attacks on public transport occurred elsewhere. It was all par for the course. Of the 721 hartals recorded by the Banglapedia since the country came into being as East Pakistan in 1947, 591 occurred after the democratic transition of 1990 – that is, 82% in 21 years (1990 – 2011). Private armies, our local Storm Troopers, re-emerged in 1980-90 when students from both the political parties (as well as young Islamists and communists) banded together to topple the General by means of our national instrument, the hartal - variously defined as “violently enforced political strike” (the Guardian) and “strikes-cum-blockades enforced by partisan thugs” (The Economist). Tiday, the government resorts to disappearing dissidents, torture, or both. In December 2021, on allegations by NGOs that the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a death squad, and law enforcement agencies have been responsible for more than 600 disappearances since 2009, nearly 600 extrajudicial killings since 2018, and torture, the United States declared former Rapid Action Battalion director general Benazir Ahmed, subsequently the inspector general of police, ineligible for entry to the country and sanctioned the battalion’s five other serving and former officials In 2021, Reporters Without Borders awarded the prime minister the distinction of press freedom predator. The tell-all Al Jazeera documentary, All the Prime Minister’s Men, chronicles the career of five brothers - four thugs, and the army chief - who become enforcers for the prime minister. (The Daily Star, the most widely circulated English daily, and the Pravda of Bangladesh, in its front-page editorial, trivialised the revelations: “All the President's Men thrived on the strength of evidence and All the Prime Minister's Men on sensationalising of evidence…We must commend the government for not trying to block the viewing of Al Jazeera report in Bangladesh.” On the reflex of silence and denial, there’s much more to follow.)
In 2021, Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, filed documents in an Israeli court to persuade the Defence Ministry to halt the sale of spyware by Celebrite to the death squad of this country, the Rapid Action Battalion (an earlier filing followed the Al Jazeera investigation). In the article “Israeli Celebrite Sold Spy-tech to Bangladesh ‘Death Squad’, the newspaper quotes: “Between January 2009 [when the Awami League came to power] and until 2018, human rights groups in Bangladesh collected evidence indicating that 1,920 people were executed without trial and 129 died while being tortured,” Mack wrote….According to reports by Odhikar and OMCT, human rights groups in Bangladesh, the latter which represents over 200 anti-torture groups across the world, from July 2019, in recent years the Bangladesh security forces have been accused of drilling drills to torture their victims, beatings, long detentions in subhuman conditions and even hanging people upside down,” Mack wrote, noting that there were also reports of victims being shot in their knees; having their testicles beaten; their fingernails pulled out; their heads held underwater; alongside sexual violence, threats of rape and rape itself. “Mock and real executions,” the document also noted.”
And when Stanley J. Tambiah identifies democracy as the cause of violence in South Asia, we should not be surprised. “The general theme of whether democracy as a political process and the democratic state as a system intensify the occurrence of violence is an old one in the history of political theory. From the Greeks onwards, even up to the nineteenth century, many theorists, perhaps most, associated democracy with civil strife, and it is only subsequently that this became a minority view (Levelling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997), p 262).”
Democratic violence crescendoed such that when Khaleda Zia, prime minister in 2001-6, initiated the Rapid Action Battalion in the infamous “Operation Clean Heart” - with 40 deaths in custody - to restore order, the force proved popular enough for her successor and rival Sheikh Hasina to retain the RAB, widely-criticised, according to the BBC, as a death squad - including by Hasina’s party.
The term ‘democracy’ has historically had a pejorative connotation, starting with the father of western political philosophy himself, Plato (see, for instance, the Republic 496 c-e). Polybius, probably the last thinker to pronounce on the subject in antiquity, rechristened democracy into the unholy ‘ochlocracy’ (John Dunn, Setting The People Free: The Story of Democracy (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), p 57), which connotation stuck to it like a barnacle well into the eighteenth century, and which accurately describes its practice today in Bangladesh. “As it entered the eighteenth century, democracy was still very much a pariah word (p 71).”
“Furthermore,” concludes S. E. Finer, “most of them [republics, democracies] for most of the time exhibited the worst pathological features of this kind of polity.” Demagogy, corruption, pressure, intimidation, falsification of the vote, tumult, riot….
“These features were the ones characteristically associated with the Forum polity in Europe down to very recent times. They were what gave the term ‘Republic’ a bad name, but made ‘Democracy’ an object of sheer horror (The History of Government from the Earliest Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp 46-47).”
“...it requires formidable historical effort to recall the fear of democracy that pervaded polite society after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire,” writes Charles S. Maier. “Even on the eve of the French Revolution the term had ambivalent connotations; afterwards it was associated with Jacobin dictatorship, Terror, and continuous French military aggression. ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats’, Wordsworth wrote in 1794 (“Democracy Since the French Revolution”, ed. John Dunn, Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p 125).”
It should come as no shock, therefore, if we in Bangladesh subscribe to Jacob Zuma’s definition of democracy: “You have more rights because you’re a majority; you have less rights because you’re a minority. That’s how democracy works.” In Huxley’s formulation, “Agree with the majority, or clear out (Aldous Huxley, A Few Well-chosen Words, Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Volume II, 1926-1929, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp 59 - 60).” For most of us, Sheikh Mujib, demagogue, prime minister and president, had the licence to do as he pleased for he had been democratically elected, not only in 1970, but also in 1973, after the independence of Bangladesh, albeit in the latter case his thumping 97 percent win owed a great deal to the efforts of his Storm Troopers, the Rakhi Bahni who ensured the happy outcome with the unhappy means of “kidnapping, coercion, vote rigging and the stealing of ballot” (Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2009), p 206; Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p 88). By 1974, several thousand politicians had paid for their lives, both those for and those against Mujib, the former in retaliation by hired bands recruited by opposition forces (Schendel, p 99). His democratic credentials compounded with his jailbird charisma meant he was Mr. Bangladesh. (Jailbird charisma is the author’s local spin on Weberian charismatic authority: Mujib was jailed repeatedly by the government of West Pakistan (nine years and eight months) from which East Pakistan broke away in 1971. "Mujib believed he was Bangladesh, more so that he was good for the country and that it could not manage without him. Those who reinforced Mujib's impression of himself and his role did so because it benefited them politically or materially, not because they truly believed in his leadership (Lawrence Ziring, Bangladesh: From Sheikh Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study (Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press Limited, 1994) p 93)”.
But many did, and continue to do so in the incarnation of his daughter. An unqualified personality cult rules over us, subjects not citizens.
A note on jailbird charisma follows, necessary to understand the following. I take the reader on a digression, a clip from a movie called Guns at Batasi (1964). Locale: a remote colonial African army caught in a local coup d'etat.
JAILBIRD CHARISMA
Spare a thought for Colonel Deal (Jack Hawkins), flabbergasted at being told by Sir William Fletcher (Cecil Parker) that a former jailbird was headed for the presidency.
Col. Deal: [Referring to the new revolutionary leader of the country] It doesn’t make sense. Five years in jail, and within six months of coming out, he's on his way to the President's Palace!
Fletcher: He spent that six months here as a gardener. Got to know him pretty well. Lousy gardener! I hope he'll make a better president. Anyhow, going to jail is considered a shortcut to power these days!
Col. Deal: I hope it never happens in the army!
It makes no sense to a Western outsider that a stint as jailbird should catapult a person to the level of a religious leader, if not a prophet; still less does it make sense that the jailbird charisma should be bequeathed to an heir. I doubt if even Weber could have made sense of that bequest. But we know from the cases of Nehru, Mujib and Bhutto that the jailbird-to-president phenomenon is real, and that the charisma descends to the heir - Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina, respectively. Dynasties do no wrong.
To make a short story long, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lost the six weeks’ war with China in October–November, 1962, he didn’t resign. In the opinion of Nehru’s (English) biographer, Michael Edwards: “It is a tribute to Nehru’s towering position both in the Congress and the country that he neither suggested that he should resign nor was his resignation ever called for – even by the opposition. It is difficult to believe that in any other democratic state he and his cabinet could have survived (Nehru: A Political Biography (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973), p 314)”.
Jailbird charismatics, like the Weberian kind, “Typically, can demand and receive complete devotion from his or her followers. The foundation of charismatic authority is emotional, not rational: it rests on trust and faith, both of which can be blind and uncritical. Unrestrained by custom, rules, or precedent, the charismatic leader can demand and receive unlimited power.”
Still more mystifying to Colonel Deal would have been squaring the failures of these ex-jailbrids with their deification, let alone the exaltation of their children. Nehru shrugged off the debacle. And so did Bhutto.
But first, as we shall see later, so did Nehru’s daughter. Indira and her unelected son, Sanjay, orchestrated the sterilisation of nearly eleven million people (Percival Spear, A History of India, Volume 2 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1990), pp 267 – 268). She paid a political price for her and her son’s actions, but only briefly: a short internment by the hapless Morarji Desai in 1979 brought a surge of sympathy from millions of Indians who, the previous year, had regarded her as a tyrant. Desai stood egg-faced. Her career only ended when she was gunned down by her Sikh guards. Nehru’s jailbird charisma descended to his daughter, a jailbird in her own country.
Lewis M. Simons of the Washington Post, writing at the time in Indira Gandhi Arrested in India, wisely opined, “If recent events in neighbouring Pakistan are any indicator, her arrest could earn Gandhi a badge of courage. With her popularity already on the rise, the case against her could be just what she needed to change her tarnished image.” He continues: “In Pakistan when former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was arrested also on corruption chances (sic) by the military regime last month, his reputation was at its nadir. But as a result of his jailing, Bhutto's image has improved enormously during the past few weeks.”
Bhutto had been jailed by Ayub Khan in the years 1968 - 69. The Oxford-educated lawyer is widely credited with the dismemberment of Pakistan (Jalal, p 62). Notwithstanding this failure to keep the country together, the cult of “Bhuttoism” ensured his popularity in the truncated Pakistan. Again, on his death, his jailbird charisma extended to his daughter, who was assassinated.
NATIONALIST AMNESIA
In his blog How Nations Remember, James V. Wertsch recounts the changing perceptions of The Great Patriotic War (1941-5) on Russian Victory Day, May 9. “In 2021, the performance in Moscow included 12,000 Russian troops marching through Red Square, followed by tanks and missile launchers, and it concluded with an aerial show of 76 jets and helicopters—one for every year since the victory over Nazi Germany.”
But the piece could equally have been entitled, How Nations Don’t Remember.
For Victory Day is not just about the past, but about national identity. Post-war, May 9 suffered a sort of national amnesia: it received scant attention. The work of reconstruction busied the nation and there was the simultaneous global ideological mission to be pursued. However, by the 1980s, the decline in Communist Party legitimacy required alternative means to galvanise the people, and, thus, the authorities turned more and more to nationalism. “Among other things, this required a new usable past, giving new meaning to the aphorism: “nothing is so unpredictable as Russia’s past.”
In Bangladesh, the glorious past is more predictable: it is a perennial lie. On our last Victory Day on 16 December, the Daily Star, the elite megaphone and, not coincidentally, the most widely circulated daily, announced, as it does ad nauseum: “On this day in 1971, Bangladesh was liberated from the Pakistan occupation forces following a bloody nine-month war.”
Fact check. “[T]he Indian army invaded both the western and eastern wings of Pakistan on December 3 1971. The Pakistani defences surrendered on December 16, ensuring Bangladesh’s independence,” according to the Britannica article on Bangladesh.
A 14-day skirmish has morphed into a nine-month bloody war.
And the victory was Indian, not ours. Yet, the preamble to the constitution insists on “a historic struggle for national liberation”, with high ideals inspiring “our heroic people to dedicate themselves to, and our brave martyrs to sacrifice their lives in, the national liberation struggle”. Fine backslapping. Shame about the facts.
As for the little pitchers, lest they overhear, the government plays Pied Piper to rugrats (see figure 5 below).
This is the Orwellian elephant, after the pachyderm shot by the Englishman, very reluctantly for its dimensions and dangers had been blown out of proportion by the natives (more on the celebrated tusker below; he fairly tramps and trumpets through these pages - in close tandem with the proverbial mammoth less common in jungles than in living rooms).
In Right-wing nationalists are marching into the future by rewriting the past - The Washington Post, by Ishaan Tharoor, he chronicles the denial and amnesia of nationalists writing/rewriting their history.
In Russia, the regime of President Vladimir Putin recently forced the shuttering of Memorial, a pioneering human rights group that, among other achievements, built a database of millions of files documenting the injustices of the Soviet Union’s system of gulag prisons. “But for Putin, surfacing the depth of Stalinist atrocities from decades past threatens the unvarnished Russian patriotism he’s trying to cultivate around his autocratic rule.”
In India, the rewriting has been more physical. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocated Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”), an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values, and it was highly critical of the secular policies and practices of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party).
The BJP’s electoral success began in 1989, when it capitalized on anti-Muslim feeling by calling for the erection of a Hindu temple in an area in Ayodhya considered sacred by Hindus but at that time occupied by the Babri Masjid (Mosque of Bābur). By 1991 the BJP had considerably increased its political appeal, capturing 117 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) and taking power in four states.
Although the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 by organisations seen to be associated with the BJP caused a major backlash against the party, in elections in 1996 the BJP emerged as the largest single party in the Lok Sabha and was invited by India’s president to form a government. One of the architects of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December, 1992 was L K Advani, according to huffpost’s rogue’s gallery. The breaking of the mosque triggered riots in which an estimated 1,000 people died. He became home minister (twice) and then deputy prime minister.
Altogether, the BJP won 126 seats in the 182-member assembly (The Daily Star, December 19, 2002). The Bush administration refused Narendra Modi a visa, blaming him for the pogrom in which 2,000 Muslims were killed, according to The Economist. “He may be a mass murderer,” opined Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times, the newspaper he edits, “but he's our mass murderer.” This was a common reaction among Indians to the Bush administration’s decision. We will explore the role of intergroup bias, in which we are forgiving of our own group’s shortcomings and scathing about the outgroup’s misdeeds. Today, Narendra Modi is India’s prime minister.
Since elections in 2014, Hindu nationalists have gone about narrowing the pluralistic society defined by vast linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity. “For Hindu nationalists, India’s past consists of a glorious Hindu civilization followed by centuries of Muslim rule that Modi has described as a thousand years of “slavery.”
Nationalist amnesia constitutes a social defence mechanism. “Furthermore, moving from two- to three-person, let alone wider conspiracies of silence, involves a significant shift from a strictly interpersonal kind of social pressure to the collective kind we call group pressure, whereby breaking the silence actually violates not only some individual’s personal sense of comfort, but a collectively sacred social taboo, thereby evoking a heightened sense of fear,” observes Eviator Zerubavel in The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p 57, emphases added). Thereby, in Bangladesh, holding a mirror up to the Caliban of student thuggery would have discomfited the high priests of the religion of nationalism as well as the high priests of the religion of democracy: the subject was taboo.
“‘Silence,’ notes Paul Simon, ‘like a cancer grows’,” quotes Zerubavel (p 58), “which is indeed how an entire society may come to collectively deny its leaders’ incompetence, glaring atrocities, and impending environmental disasters.” Silence is intensified not only by the number of participants but also by the length of its duration. “Indeed, despite the likelihood that a silence would be interrupted the longer it lasts, it instead tends to become more prohibitive as time goes on.” Breaking our national silence would entail having to say, “We were wrong. We made a mistake.” An elite ensconced in power, with international support, would be loth to question its own legitimacy.
“Not only can breaking a conspiracy of silence hurt a group’s public image, it can destroy its very fabric. As the rather suggestive common expression “don’t rock the boat” seems to imply, it may disrupt the group’s current political status quo thereby generating social instability (p 77).” This explains why seemingly innocent and candid Facebook posts can not only land you in jail, but can cost you your life in Bangladesh: the group feels threatened by the public washing of dirty laundry.
Today, we remember Chernobyl as a nuclear apocalypse: it was, in fact, the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In Chernobyl Thirty Years On, The Economist recalls: “At 1.23am on April 26th [1986], during a test of the system, a power surge caused a steam explosion that blew off the roof of the reactor and set off a graphite fire. The explosion led to the release of 400 times as much radioactive material as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It also blew the lid from the Soviet propaganda.”
Sweden detected a rise in radioactivity. “A Poisoned Cloud of Anti-Sovietism” thundered a headline in Moscow News, a propaganda sheet, published in several languages. Foreign journalists were denied entry to Ukraine. It was not just the communist utopia that was shattered; so was the system of lies and deceit. Chernobyl was a catalyst for glasnost, the opening up of the media. In a transcript of a Politburo meeting, a furious Mikhail Gorbachev lashes out: “Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. The whole system was penetrated by the spirit of boot-licking, persecution of dissidents, window-dressing and nepotism.”
Years later, the last Soviet leader reflected that the meltdown, “even more than my launch of perestroika [restructuring], was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union”. He opened up the information channels, and within weeks glasnost began. The silence was broken.
And it is not only Putin who learned the value of denialism. The author refers to the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping. After Mao’s death, under Deng Xiao Ping, an airing of the tragic foibles of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was possible. “New party guidelines limit from view discussion of the epochal disasters….” Xi’s muscular nationalism offers carte blanche to authorities to victimise those allegedly involved in “historical nihilism” that are “distorting the history of the party” and “attacking the party leadership”.
Our nationalists similarly engage in silence and denial, curtaining the elephant in the room.
By way of reflection and anticipation, recall Eric Hoffer’s predicted demise in 1951 of the Soviet Union: “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt. A popular upheaval in Soviet Russia is hardly likely before the people get a real taste of the good life. The most dangerous moment for the regime of the Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in the economic conditions of the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat relaxed…..When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), pp 29, 43).” David Reynolds today vindicates the stevedore’s crystal-gazing: “Looser political controls allowed elements of a civil society to emerge outside the state, particularly student and intellectual groups. Their growing audacity was encouraged by evident splits within the party leadership over the nature and limits of reform. In China, as in the Soviet Block, in short, pressure from below could erupt because of rifts at the top (One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: W.W.Norton and Co., 2000), p 576).”
In which case, the prospects for a liberal society - with separation of powers - must appear chimerical for Bangladesh, their being no visible chink in the ruling carapace of steely unity: wiser heads look back, not in anger, but hope at the happy military periods in our tragic history when checks and balances had not been a fantasy.
“IT WAS OUR TURN TO EAT.”
Bangladesh was conceived in hatred. The first nationwide elections were held in 1970, more than two decades after the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Two demagogues, one from the east, Sheikh Mujib, and one from the west, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, contested the election. They were both orators of the first calibre, and could rouse the rabble (Ayesha Jalal, in her book, uses the term ‘populist’ (p 66), but the author prefers the classical, Aristotelian term) - for ‘the orators lead the people’ (Aristotle, Politics, 1305 a1 12).
They appealed to the poor, with the added twist here that the ‘rich’ were located in West Pakistan, when, in fact, they were mostly a coterie of Punjabis (Jalal, p 50). A succinct “centre-cannot-hold” theory occurs in the Britannica article on Pakistan’s government and society: “ Punjab, being the largest and most significant province, has always been perceived as imposing its will on the others, and even attempts at establishing quotas for governmental and nongovernmental opportunities and resources have not satisfied the discontented.” Pakistan, like many countries even today, was an oligarchy (another Aristotelism oddly not favoured by Jalal, who prefers the nebulous “coterie”). And Bangladesh boasts not mere garden-variety oligarchy, but kleptocratic oligarchy. (For the combined charges of kleptocracy and oligarchy, see “Orwellian Elephant” below.)
“Brothers," Mujib would say to his Bengali followers, "do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that gold? Then raise your hands and join me." (Dog whistle: “It’s our turn to eat”.)
Karachi’s fortune’s had indeed grown - under the Raj, during the first globalisation by means of the railway, the telegraph and the Suez Canal. In 1947, however, Karachi received imports of people, the Urdu-speaking mohajirs. The rumour that the streets of Karachi were paved with gold proved wildly exaggerated. Editor of the Indian Statesman, Ian Stephens’ personal account of the horror of the refugee life must be related first-hand despite the prolixity added to this piece: He writes of “…the huge influx of mostly destitute Muslim refugees from India after partition in 1947. However, until president Ayub’s military regime took drastic action in 1959, Karachi during the preceding years of Pakistan’s existence, when serving as her federal capital, was certainly no credit to her, and misled foreigners about the kind of country they were arriving in; for the conditions in which the refugees lived, huddled without sanitation in shacks along the sidewalks remained appalling. The problem seemed beyond the politicians’ capacity to cope with; and it was in truth formidable, for statistics indicated that, over the thirteen years since 1946, the city's population had more than quadrupled.
“That during the first few years after Partition in 1947 Pakistan should have felt almost overwhelmed by the refugee problem could be well understood; in scale alone, as indicated in chapter 3, it was vast enough to daunt even any long-established Government. But equally, in later years, it was not understood why the country’s capital should enter into its second decade since Independence, with the pitiable condition of the scores of thousands of indigent fugitives there still, in broad terms, no whit better, and in some ways, such as sanitation, certainly worse than at the start. Swarms of destitutes lived homeless on the sidewalks, under improvised shelters, of rusty tin and sacking; estimates showed that, in 1958, Karachi had no fewer than 120,000 families of such people. The multitudinous continuous filth, and stench, and wretchedness were indescribable. And one of the worst clusters of grossly overcrowded shacks and hovels, unfit for animals to live in, lay beside the main route from one of the airports to the rich centre of the city. Visiting foreigners were appalled, not merely by what they saw and smelt, but by the apparent helpless apathy of successive political Cabinets towards this mass of human misery unmitigated on their doorstep. Probably nothing so discredited Pakistan internationally, during the confused years before the military coup, as the persisting shameful squalor along the pavements of her capital (Ian Stephens, Pakistan: Old Country/New Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp 51-52, 308-9).
That a demagogue could scream, in the age of the refugee, ““Brothers! Do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold?” merely because of lack of mass newspaper circulation and the absence of the electronic media, and convince his audience, must be a staggering blow to any defence of democracy. West Pakistan was a polyglot nation, but, with 1,000 miles separating the two wings of the country, the voters in the east felt they were a homogeneous lot, ‘the enemy’ who did not speak our language: we’ve just seen the face of the demonised Urdu-speaking muhajir painted by Stephens. (Pervez Musharraf, former military strongman and president of Pakistan, a muhajir, faced considerable resistance from within the army, for his Urdu-speaking outsider status.)
The poor majority in East Pakistan spoke Bengali, so linguistic nationalism was also stirred up. Mujib received his first handcuffs in 1948 when he demonstrated against Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah for proclaiming Urdu the new nation's lingua franca. Yet the oligarchic Punjabis were resented even in the West, as noted. A civil war followed, and East Pakistan broke away to form Bangladesh.
Grievance is not a fact. It has to be articulated, stimulated and directed by a leader. We have seen the role that leaders play in fomenting hatred. We also know, from Henri Tajfel’s studies (among others), how ‘ingroup-outgroup’ hostility can exist purely on the basis of division, with the two groups identical in every respect. This is not rational. “Politics makes us hate each other, even when it shouldn’t” concludes Jason Brennan (Against Democracy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p 231). He observes that voters are ‘ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists’ (p 23).
Tajfel divided individuals randomly into two groups based on such frivolous criterion as their opinion of indistinguishable abstract artists they had never heard of: those favouring ‘the Paul Klee style’ and those favouring ‘the Kandinsky style’. To his surprise, the individuals displayed extra-rational loyalty to the ingroup and hostility to the outgroup. When sharing financial resources, they chose to penalise the outgroup rather than receive more money themselves (David Houghton, Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals And Cases (New York: Routledge, 2009), p 171). The very act of becoming a group member sufficed to generate discrimination against members of an outgroup. “Thus, intergroup conflict is the result of social categorization rather than competition for tangible rewards.”
“What voters don’t know would fill a library” notes Bryan Caplan in The Myth of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p 5). Ilya Somin, author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, found, upon empirical research, that at least 35% of voters are know-nothings (quoted, Brennan, p 25). In 1964, only a minority of citizens knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO. This was two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis when America nearly went to - nuclear - war against the Soviet Union. 73% of Americans do not understand what the Cold War was about (p 26).
We have seen at great length that people are ignorant, misinformed and irrational. “In general, the lower the epistemic and moral quality of an electorate, the worse governmental policies will tend to be. Whom the voters select as a leader does make a significant difference (Brennan, p 161)”. This seems to be true of all of South Asia, but our concern here is Bangladesh.
ORWELLIAN REPUBLIC
That Democracy is a religion follows from the definition of religion given by Ninian Smart in terms of a seven-dimensional (experiential, mythic, doctrinal, ethical, ritual, social, and material) worldview analysis for cross-cultural comparison that can be applied to different belief systems, and this author has argued from his premises in the essay The Seven Dimensions. But, above all, confer with Joseph Schumpetter on his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1950): “...though the classical doctrine of collective action may not be supported-by the results of empirical analysis, it is powerfully supported by that association with religious belief to which I have adverted already.…Or take Equality. Its very meaning is in doubt, and there is hardly any rational warrant for exalting it into a postulate, so long as we move in the sphere of empirical analysis. But Christianity harbours a strong equalitarian element. The Redeemer died for all…. (p 265)”. Indeed, we can conclude from the foregoing that Democracy is a political religion (below).
Moreover, Democracy provides the justification for the overthrow of governments: between 1982 and 1990, according to the Banglapedia, 72 hartals, organised by the two political parties and their allies, took place to “restore democracy” by overthrowing General Ershad (r. 1982 - 1990). Since then, that has been the war cry by either party to dethrone the other. The author has personally lived through these years, and has always been struck by the general acceptability of violence for this noble cause. But Huxley - whose views on democracy as religion follows later - discerned the destructive power of the mantra a hundred years ago: “The word [democracy] conjures up ideas of universal liberty and happiness. The hearer feels an expansive emotion, a pleasing enlargement of his personality, following on the idea of the loosening of restraints. He can be moved by repetition of the word to take violent action (pp 59 - 60).”
The second, closely-linked ideal, after Democracy, for which student leaders, the hartal-wallahs above, engage in violence is that of the Nation.
The Bengali nation was conceived in violence, in the killing by police of protesters for the language, which is known - and venerated on the fateful 21 February (with wreaths and solemn processions at the temples) - as the Language Movement: children ardent for some desperate glory.
We would do well to recall Saint-Just: “There is something terrible in the sacred love of the fatherland; it is so exclusive as to sacrifice everything to the public interest, without pity, without fear, without respect for humanity …. What produces the general good is always terrible (quoted, Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1969), p 18).”
Given such strength of emotion, a countermajoritarian institution must surely be for wimps. Mujib amended the constitution on 25th January 1975 (the reviled “fourth amendment''). According to the Banglapedia article on constitutional amendments: “...the Judiciary lost much of its independence; the Supreme Court was deprived of its jurisdiction over the protection and enforcement of fundamental rights.” Counterintuitively, the military general Ziaur Rahman, in the fifth amendment of 1977, created the Supreme Judicial Council, thereby giving the judges greater autonomy. Subsequently, General Ershad maintained the separation of powers. According to the late Justice B. B. Roy Cowdhury of the Appellate Division, a close family friend of this author, “He [Ershad] never interfered with the judiciary.” On the contrary, Ershad tried repeatedly to make the lower judiciary independent of the executive. And repeatedly, he was thwarted by the bureaucracy which had a vested interest in keeping the lower judiciary part of the executive (again, B. B. Roy Chowdhury detailed these events in conversations with the author, but also see the Banglapedia article on the separation of the judiciary). Finally, the military government of General Moeen U. Ahmed in 2007-8 put the separation into effect after a coup.
That Ershad never interfered with the judiciary became abundantly clear when he lost his most important case: the decentralisation of the administration of justice by running High Court benches outside Dhaka. He did not send the soldiery to take tea with the Chief Justice, as the current prime minister did when she lost the case that would have annulled the Supreme Judicial Council. Surendra Kumar Sinha says in his tell-all book published in self-exile in America, A Broken Dream: Rule of Law, Democracy and Human Rights, that he was forced to resign. “The Prime Minister and other members of her party and ministers blasted me for going against the Parliament,” he observes (p 2). “Finally,” he concludes, “in the face of intimidation and threats to my family and friends by the country’s military intelligence agency called the Directorate General of the Defense Forces Intelligence (DGDFI), I submitted [my] resignation from abroad.” According to Al Jazeera, Justice Sinha writes that he feared DGDFI might not only "kill" a businessman named Aniruddha Roy, someone he knew well, but also "members of my family"”. Unsurprisingly, the episode received scant attention from the media in Bangladesh - and not for the obvious muzzling of the news. The reason goes deeper, as we will see below.
According to Odhikar, a human rights NGO, “The incumbent government has maintained considerable influence over the Judiciary since it assumed power in 2009, resulting in a justice administration that lacks independence and impartiality. As a result, opposition political activists and dissidents are at risk of grave human rights abuses due to the existence of a dysfunctional justice system. In this case the government, through the court, can impose severe punishments or long-term imprisonment to a person who they feel is a threat to them. In order to complete an investigation, the police often coerce the accused to give a confessional statement through torture in remand and on the basis of this confession, the court often passes the maximum punishment to the accused.”
In 2007, Chief Justice M. Ruhul Amin claimed that it would take twenty years to deliver the judiciary from the effects of appointing judges on the basis of “political considerations” (The Bangladesh Observer, May 1, 2007).
But the undoing of the judiciary occurred in 1996. Sheikh Mujib, we will recall, was killed by army officers. A grateful nation heaped honours on the tyrannicides, and conferred immunity against future persecution. This immunity was lifted in 1996 when Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, became prime minister. The lower judiciary sentenced the men to death by hanging or by firing squad – there is no provision for execution by firing squad in the laws, according to the Code of Criminal Procedure – hoping no doubt to ingratiate itself to the prime minister.
The higher judiciary proved less pliable.
High Court judges and then the Supreme Court refused to hear the lower court's verdict: they declared themselves 'embarrassed' without explaining why. A sycophant to the dynasty observed: “It was amazing to see how the virus of ‘embarrassment’ spread within the echelons of the judicial hierarchy.” The “virus” invisible to this brownnoser constituted the independence of that august body: Clearly, the justices recoiled from presiding over a kangaroo court. On January 28, 2010, five of the convicts were hanged – after Sheikh Hasina came to power again. How the judiciary was finally brought around must remain an open-and-shut case of executive railroading.
Leaning on the judiciary reached new heights when, as we saw, for the first time in the country’s history, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court ran and resigned, in that order. What follows tells self-evidently that judiciary-bashing, far from being an elite, let alone a government sport, actually constitutes a sort of public amusement of the calibre of those enthusiasts at the Coliseum.
First, the newspapers, and the popular Daily Star, the elite public address system, for most of us recoil from a hanging; in Orwell’s story:
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. ‘Pulling at his legs!’ exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” screamed the respected newspaper. The published photos are minutely described:
1. The file photo shows Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman having lunch with his family. 2. Hangmen arrive at Dhaka Central Jail late in the night yesterday. 3. Mother of death row inmate Syed Farooq Rahman visits her son yesterday afternoon. 4. Tight security in place at the jail gate around midnight. 5. People show the victory sign as the news of execution spreads. 6. Ambulances carrying the bodies of the executed five leave for their village homes. Photo: File, Anisur Rahman and Shafiqul Alam
The Daily Star’s necrophilia reminds the reader-viewer of the terminal scenes in the veridical film noir by Cy Endfield, The Sound of Fury/Try and Get Me! (1950).
And The Daily Star in its editorial dutifully observed on the 46th anniversary of the tyrannicide, “What the assassins wanted to achieve—a total collapse of the newly born state—has most forcefully been negated by the success that Bangladesh has achieved in the economic field, which is due largely to the leadership of Sheikh Hasina over the last decade….Bangabandhu's humanity, his concern for the poor and the downtrodden, and especially his respect for freedom of speech and fundamental rights, are also his legacy. The time has come for us to put stronger focus on these areas.” The editor, Mahfuz Anam, seems innocent of any knowledge of Adam Smith, but one wishes that he’d at least swotted up on the history of his own country.
Saadi, the great Persian poet (c 1213 - 1291), would surely have tut-tutted the foregoing denigration of tyrannicides and eulogy for a despot. In his classic Gulistan (1269) he comes down hard on tyrants and tyranny (Shaykh Mushrifuddin Sa’di of Shiraz, The Gulistan (Rose Garden) of Sa’di, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Bethesda: Ibex Publishers, 2008), pp 19, 22-3, 32, 149, 172; the penultimate translation is partly this author’s).
A cruel person cannot be a sultan, as a wolf cannot be a shepherd.
A king who lays a foundation of cruelty knocks the footting out from under the wall of his own kingdom.
If a king allows oppression of the weak, on the day of difficulty his supporters will become pressing enemies.
Make peace with your subjects and be secure from battle with opponents, for a just king's subjects are his army.
A dervish whose prayers were answered appeared in Baghdad. Hajjaj ibn Yusuf was informed. He summoned the dervish and said, “Pray for my welfare”.
“Oh God,” the dervish said, “take his life.”
“For God’s sake,” he said, “what kind of prayer is this?”
“It is a prayer for your good and that of all people,” he replied.
“You with your upper hand torment your underlings, how long do you think this market will be brisk?
Of what use to you is world rule? It would better for you to die than to torment people.”
An unjust king asked a hermit, “What act of devotion is the best?”
“For you,” he replied, “it would be to sleep at noon so that during that one moment you won’t vex the people.”
I saw a tyrant sleeping at midday. I said, “He is trouble, and he is better asleep.”
A person whose life is so evil that he is better asleep than awake would be better off dead.
No evil oppressor lives forever, but curses upon him last eternally.
To have pity upon the bad is to injure the good; to pardon tyrants is to do violence to dervishes.
Kings are for warding off oppressors, policemen are for curbing the bloodthirsty, and judges seek to reconcile the irreconcilable. Two litigants who agree on the truth do not go before a judge.
Saadi penned his prose and verse over seven hundred years ago, yet we in Bangladesh would do well to learn them by rote today.
Now, for the hoi polloi - the ring-side gladiatorial enthusiasts.
The famine of 1974, with starvelings in the millions, had been silenced for an entire generation while the Orwellian elephant of the victims, the civil war and the collaborators have been kept simmering by nationalists - the ingroup exonerated, the outgroup demonised. Before winning the election of 2008 with Indian cash and advice, as reported by the Economist, Sheikh Hasina promised to try the collaborators, or “war criminals”, as they were known even before conviction.
The legitimate state monopoly of violence had offered security to an unlikely group - criminals like muggers and robbers. The routine, when members of the public caught them red-handed, was to give them a good beating (gono dholai/pitani in the vernacular), and hand them over to the police. That changed.
Again, examples would help. On January 6 2003, an alleged mugger had kerosene poured over his body and set aflame. On September 7 2005, pedestrians poured kerosene over a mugger and set him alight (The Bangladesh Observer, September 9 2005). This was not new. Perceived criminals were routinely beaten to death or incinerated. An editorial reflected on the event: “[The] Catching [of] an alleged mugger and setting him on fire by pouring kerosene all over his body at Mirpur last Monday night raked up a nightmarish memory. We can't forget that not so long ago lynching became a regular occurrence just about anywhere (sic) in the country. But mostly alleged muggers would either be burnt to death or set on fire by angry crowds in broad daylight in the capital city.....(The Daily Star, January 12, 2003).” Between 2006 and 2018, newspapers reported 677 incidents of lynching; that is, 52 per year and around 4 every month, with the highest total recorded in 2011, 98. The author has rechristened our democratic culture - given the incinerations in hartals and lynchings - kerosene culture.
Nor were the victims always small-time criminals: In August 2002, a mob beat two brothers belonging to the political parties to death (Dhaka Courier, August 23 2002). Again: "A number of remote villages in Fatikchari have made screaming headlines. Enraged by crimes ranging from dacoity to rape by a gang, simple villagers were bold enough to ignore bullets and other lethal weapons and beat 10 members of the gang to death. For years, a notorious gang of 20-30, allegedly with links to the Chatra Shibir and Chatra Dal [ruling coalition student and youth wings respectively at the time] has unleashed a reign of terror in the area. On the day of the incident the criminals raped three women, collected illegal tolls from about 50 traders and also tortured some (The Bangladesh Observer, February 19, 2004).” We see here, not only the state losing its monopoly of legitimate violence, but metamorphosing into an illegitimate mafia, from the highest echelons as shown in the Al Jazeera documentary, to the lowest tier. Citizens live in “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.
One notices the similarity with the incinerated victims of hartals, as well as the lack of outrage. The headlines have become quotidian: “Two beaten to death” in the daily New Age last December, on mob justice for alleged cattle thieves, is fairly representative.
Lynching has become a way of life - in low and in high places, as we shall see.
The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), a domestic affair despite the grandiose title, duly dispensed justice. Abdul Quader Mollah, a leading member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s biggest Islamic party, received what nationalists felt was a slap on the wrist - a life sentence, and not the wished-for death penalty. “It triggered mass demonstrations calling for the death sentence to be handed down to all war-crimes defendants and, for good measure, that the Jamaat be banned as a political party,” observes The Economist. The demonstrations became known as the Shahbagh Movement, after the square where the lynch mob congregated. But the mob had its way with the Supreme Court.
“Three of the charges against Mr Mollah relied on hearsay evidence. The charge for which Mr Mollah will hang was based on the testimony of a single witness, who was an 13-year-old at the time, and no corroborating evidence whatsoever. Mr Mollah was convicted nonetheless, but his guilt proved far harder to establish than his nickname, the “Butcher of Mirpur”, would have suggested.”
An opinion poll by AC Nielsen in April 2013 showed that though nearly 67% of respondents said the trials were “unfair” or “very unfair”, a whopping 86% wanted them to proceed regardless.
Max Weber identified three inner justifications, or sources of legitimacy, for the exercise of authority: (1) traditional norms sanctified by long-standing convention, (2) charisma, which attracts the personal confidence and devotion of followers, and (3) rational-legal considerations supported by belief in the validity of legal statutes and functional competence. Clearly, Bangladesh, since its democratic transition - with two dynasties, private armies, lynchings, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture - has reverted to a premodern society.
“Bangladesh’s war-crimes tribunal is sullying its judicial and political systems” warned a foreign newspaper while ours congratulated the participants on gutting the judiciary and ruining our institutions. The journal titled its conclusion “The poisoned well”: “Sadly, most Bangladeshis are cheering on the tribunal’s flawed proceedings. When the court passed a life sentence (rather than a death sentence), the crowds that gathered to protest against this leniency were the biggest that had been seen in Dhaka for 20 years. Now the government wants to rewrite the law to allow death sentences to be applied retrospectively. Few seem to care a jot for due process; rather, everybody thinks that the defendants are getting their just deserts.
“The Economist has no sympathy for the views of Jamaat or its backers. But justice does not exist solely for those with a particular approved outlook. As the Eichmann trial demonstrated, due process is essential to provide true justice to the victims of genocide. Eventually Bangladeshis will also come to recognise this and demand a proper accounting. But by then it will be too late. The war-crimes tribunal is poisoning the well from which Bangladesh will one day want to drink.” But the well had already been poisoned, as we saw at the “trial” of the tyrannicides.
On November 22nd 2015, the trapdoor opened beneath the feet of Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, the scion of a political family whose father served as president of Pakistan when Ayub Khan would be absent. He was close to Khaleda Zia, chief of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the opposition, and twice prime minister, and served as an intermediary between Bangladesh and Pakistan. “The tribunal found him guilty of charges that included, in 1971, wiping out Hindus in cahoots with the Pakistani army. Yet the trial was not fair. The prosecution was allowed to summon 41 witnesses, the defence only four. The court barred testimony from a former American ambassador, among other notables. Their affidavits claimed Mr Chowdhury was in Pakistan at the time of the alleged crimes….But nearly everywhere the Awami League’s dominance grows. The cost to Bangladesh’s democratic and legal institutions—which the country’s founding was supposed to entrench—is another matter.”
The events unfolded like the penultimate scene in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where the underground puts the alleged murderer on trial, gives him a defence, and then proceeds to lynch him.
To anticipate a political philosopher, “The quality of the electorate determines the quality of the candidate pool, and ultimately the quality of governments and the rulers”. Blaming the government of either party misses the point. Morally challenged voters choose morally challenged leaders. Aldous Huxley fulminated along these lines (four years before Hitler’s electoral success): “Only the most mystically fervent democrats, who regard voting as a kind of religious act, and who hear the voice of God in that of the People, can have any reason to desire to perpetuate a system whereby confidence tricksters, rich men, and quacks may be given power by the votes of an electorate composed in a great part of mental Peter Pans, whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men’s newspapers (Political Democracy, p 228).” Rich men’s newspapers like The Daily Star are read by rich men and women, who are also the creme de la creme of our society: they are not merely mental Peter Pans, but moral Peter Pans.
Given all this, it is not surprising that when, in 2017, the Chief Justice of Bangladesh showed a clean pair of heels to the authorities, not a susurrus of protest issued from any quarter of the populace, who are inimical to the judiciary at best, and indifferent at worst.
As Derek Brown observes in the Guardian obituary of Ershad: “Bangladesh, under his rule, was not a land of mass terror, imprisonment and execution.” Today, it is.
Further, The Economist observed in 2016: “Despite considerable turbulence since breaking from Pakistan following a bloody war in 1971, Bangladesh has a tradition of respect for dissent. This has eroded in recent years as the Awami League, which itself had been a victim of previous purges, has turned on its rivals with a vengeance.” Thus, state repression was never as severe as it has become: the military did not, in all fairness, crush dissent. The democrats have. “The media are controlled, the judiciary is controlled, and the police are even more enthusiastic than their masters,” says Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, the secretary-general of the Bangladesh National Party, the largest opposition group. “Aside from extra-judicial killings and disappearances targeting Islamists and other dissidents, the ruling party has instigated a crippling barrage of lawsuits—some 37,000 against the BNP alone. “I spend four days a week attending court hearings, and two hours stuck in traffic for every one,” grumbles Mr Alamgir.””
The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.
Not around here, guv’nor, we might be tempted to say to D. H. Lawrence.
To one individual, all this would not have been a surprise: Finer. We have noted the pathologies of democracy he adumbrated in his encyclopaedic History. But further nuggets await.
His schema on page 1568 appears thus:
This is the post-1800 picture, drawing on previous periods. Crucially, a Forum (democratic) government, like that of the Jacobins, admits of a monistic, single worldview. Later, the election of the Nazi Party revealed the similar combination of forum-monism, enough to prompt a historian to complain: “Hitler’s democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government: in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933-4, it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters (Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 969).”
This view is shared by Jason Brennan, as we saw above. To recall: “The quality of the electorate determines the quality of the candidate pool, and ultimately the quality of governments and the rulers”. The military rulers of Bangladesh never had to appeal to morally challenged voters. “In general, the lower the epistemic and moral quality of an electorate, the worse governmental policies will tend to be. Whom the voters select as a leader does make a significant difference”. Along with the National Socialists, he excoriates the Venzuelans and Greeks for their execrable choices.
Today, in India, we see again the seemingly unlikely dovetailing of democracy and totalitarianism. The Economist article Orange evolution: Narendra Modi and the struggle for India’s soul, with the suggestive subtitle How India’s prime minister uses Hindu nationalism, notes that in return for throwing its full weight behind Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign, Modi has inserted RSS men, or like-minded ones, into every part of Indian politics - including the judiciary and bureaucracy. The accompanying chart shows the level of infiltration as of February 2019.
To return to Bangladesh, prior to our democratic transition, Bangladesh continued (1975 - 90) a pluralistic Palace/Forum authoritarian state. Under civilian rule (1972 - 5, 1990 - 2023), an Orwellian republic spread its tentacles: a monistic Forum polity, Jacobinite, indistinguishable from totalitarianism.
The Britannica article on authoritarianism fleshes the bones: “Authoritarianism thus stands firmly in contrast to democracy. It also differs from totalitarianism, however, since authoritarian governments usually have no highly developed guiding ideology, tolerate some pluralism in social organisation, lack the power to mobilise the entire population in pursuit of national goals, and exercise power within relatively predictable limits.” Our military rulers were authoritarian; our civilian rulers totalitarian. Our choices in Bangladesh are clear: authoritarianism or totalitarianism. There is no third way, given our hierarchic culture and the history of our vertical civilisation.
“A social and cultural anthropologist of my sort,” intones Tambiah, “will necessarily advocate that a collectivity’s cultural practices are historically rooted, that they are interrelated and cannot easily be atomised or fragmented, that their meaningfulness is context-bound and instantiated in action, and that translation from one culture to another requires much care (p 327, emphases added).” The attempt to transform a vertical into a horizontal society resulted in two maharanis, two dynasties, their power struggle played out on the streets with private armies incinerating innocent bystanders, and one coming out triumphant, with an ideology to legitimise any crime.
In this video from Channel 4, Violence, Abuse and Disappearances in Bangladesh, ruling party thugs, the Chatra League boys, run amok, beating protesters wanting safe roads and civil service reform - while the police stand by, mute. The equal silence of university teachers goaded Anu Muhammad, a professor at Jahangirnagar University, to compare the authoritarianism of Ayub Khan with the status quo:
“Ayub Khan had the autocratic power but what he did not have was public support, and that was why he could not sustain (sic). But the present government has these all. The biggest crisis of our current society is that the teachers have surrendered."
No ivory tower fantasy, nor professorial conspiracy theory, spawned the public support alleged by the irate don: Despite these videos of violence, despite these incidents fresh in the memory, despite the extrajudicial killings, despite the disappearances, despite the publication of former Chief Justice Sinha’s regurgitations in A Broken Dream, a staggering 64 percent of the people felt that the country was headed in the right direction and 68 per cent expressed satisfaction with security, according to a survey by the International Republican Institute; and CallReady polled 1,186 young people and found that more than 51 percent wanted the current government to stay in power in the election year of 2018.
The contrarian academic’s obvious comparison underscores the essential disparity between pluralistic authoritarianism and monistic totalitarianism. Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship appears milquetoast by contrast. Spare a thought for the strongman of Pakistan. That was one bourgeois citadel - the Oxford of the East - he couldn't take with a howitzer, but now those Oxonians celebrate a country run at gunpoint.
The nation has a Platonic reality that individuals simply do not, and can not, possess; they share in the reality, but, finally and always, the nation has greater reality than the individual. Therefore, it is little wonder that Islamists deny this (secular) ultimate reality - dissent that earns them government-sponsored torture by student thugs and enforced disappearances by death squads (see the Economist report of 2016 below).
“Nothing to report,” the lieutenant said with contempt.
“The Governor was at me again today,” the chief complained.
“Liquor?”
“No, a priest.”
“The last was shot weeks ago.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory,” muses a reviewer, “it’s a bad time to be a Catholic.” In the 2020s Bangladesh, it’s a bad time to be an Islamist, or even quasi-Islamist. Reset in contemporary Bangladesh, an adaptation could easily be retitled Allahu Akbar. (The quoted lines are from Vintage Books, London, 2002, p 32).
In 2017, Hafez (an Islamic scholar, not his real name) was, along with other religious students at Dhaka University dorms, beaten within an inch of their lives for being alleged Islamists. This routine torture of perceived “traitors” finally resulted two years later in the murder of Abrar Fahad, a straight-A student at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) by his classmates who beat him for hours for his Facebook post criticising the prime minister: automatically, this made him an enemy, an Islamist (the BBC report leaves something to be desired: the murderous students belonged to the student wing of the ruling Awami League, the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), not the youth wing as reported; this is significant.). The second event caused a firestorm, the first, that of Hafez, went ignored: it’s open season on Islamists. A highly abridged interview of Hafez conducted by this author several weeks ago appears below (this sort of news, being par for the course, hardly travels; hence, my delay in interviewing Hafez. Indeed, had Abrar Fahad not been an engineering student of elite stock, his murder, like that of the tailor, Biswajit Das, though highly publicised on TV channels and newspapers in his blood-stained shirt, vainly warding blows from the ruling party student thugs, might as well have been invisible. For the author’s observations on this selective attention, please click on What George Floyd's Death Means - Or Should Mean - In Bangladesh ).
2017 August 13 11:30 pm
[Hafez is not the victim’s real name.]
Interrogations begin – he’s forced to talk. It’s all pre-planned: the hall president and sidekicks are present
“Got him, Bhai [brother].”
Hafeez kneeled, salaamed.
The president is on the bed. The president’s room is on the 2nd floor; Hafez’s on the 5th floor
“Do you do Shibir [Islamist student wing of the main Islamist party]?”
Hafez is astounded. “No, Bhaiya [brother], I don’t.”
(Louder) “Do you do Shibir? Why do you do Shibir?”
“Bhaiya, I don’t.”
Slapping begins.
A friend who was an Islamic scholar, and similarly attired, is later brought in.
Heavier beating, kicking, ensue. A wooden stick is produced: they start hitting him on the back. Rods and water pipes are brought out from inside the president’s room. The hall secretary hits him on the thigh, right above the knee with pipes. The slaps are mostly on the eyes, ears and front face.
“Confess; we can burst your nose. Hey, who’s good at bursting noses?”
At the end of the “secular Inquisition”, Hafez and the other prisoners were more dead than alive. Even the superintendent of police didn’t want to take them to jail, lest they die in his vehicle.
The ancient sport of Shibir-hunting, much like fox-hunting, evokes in the participants an evolutionary frenzy.
Twenty-eight years prior to these maulings, on September 7 1989, thirty-three--year-old AS (his initials) was picked up from in front of the High Court at 10 am. He belonged to the Chatra Shibir,the student wing of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami. His captors were from the Jatiyatabadi Chatra Dal (JCD), the student wing of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The current leader of the opposition, Khaleda Zia, played Bandit Queen to the armed ruffians.
They took him to Science Bhavan (Science Building) where he was tortured till 1:45. Additional thugs joined the sport.
Next, AS was escorted to Jagannath Hall, where they paraded the prize amid celebrations. The thugs proceeded to Mohsin Hall. Needless to add, these triumphal proceedings, like the exhibition of Vercingetorix, occurred in full view of the august “Oxford of the East”.
Golam Farouk Ovi, a student of International Relations and Central Committee Member of JCD, acted as emcee at the Mohsin Hall guest room, scanting on traditional Islamic hospitality.
(Ovi’s subsequent career may be illuminating: elected MP, sentenced in an arms case, accused in the murder of a popular model, now a fugitive in Canada.)
Ovi inquired why his guest took part in Shibir: Dhaka University, the boys dreaded, would be a Razakar outpost, a mullah bastion. (Razakar was the label for collaborators in the 1971 Indo-Pak War.)
A monsoon of GI pipes and hockey sticks rained: But the coup de grace was the dismemberment of the nerves on his right ankle, and on his left knee. He would be paralysed seven years later.
A torrent of chapatti, bricks, blades, blood, broken fingers, amputated earlobe, mouth stoppered with sand, head covered with his Punjabi….testified to the modus operandi of this, and, as we have seen twenty-eight years later in Hafez’s case, to the secular Inquisition. 10,000 hours of practice have predictably produced prodigies.
AS, as Central Convenor to Madrasa Chatro Andolon Parishad (a campaign outfit for Madrasas), Unit 17, catapulted 4,000 madrasa students into university in one year, where the beardos had numbered only 4,000 until 1987: in only 1987-8, the enrollees achieved that number, giving the secularists considerable collywobbles.
“The madrasah students were backwards,” opined AS. Denying a tertiary degree hogtied their prospects.
General Ershad facilitated the changes, but the moment of his defenestration proved the undoing: the secularists, with strappados and thumbscrews, renewed their amateur surgical operations - aided, according to AS, by university professors and intellectuals, certainly not a first in human history.
From Mohsin Hall, the cortège proceeded to the venerable TSC (the hallowed Teacher-Student Centre). Suitably enough - with X marks the spot, no doubt - an overgrown vegetable structure prepared him for his quietus. Leaving him for dead, they celebrated their gladiatorial barbarity at Aparajeyo Bangla.
FIGURE 3 Aparajeyo Bangla (Invincible Bengali) commemorates the ersatz war of independence in 1971, which was actually the third Indo-PakWar. A piece of secular jingoism to carry on the martial values.
Bleeding heavily, consciousness came and left. A police car moseyed down to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) - the fuzz knew he had been beaten, dilly dallying to allow the great escape. At DMCH, he wasn’t treated until a journalist gave 50 takas for the first bandages; he was at DMCH for two to three hours; from there he was taken to Ibn Sina in Dhanmandi.
He was there for two months; for nine months he had no bowel movement; he had to be operated on. Catheter was removed after nine months; doctors celebrated when he was able to sit after sixty days; then they celebrated his first urination.
From Ibn Sina he was moved to Rabeta where he stayed from November to mid-April. He could walk with a limp.
He went to Bangkok at Samitivej, after Bumrungrad gave up hope. There was improvement. He went to KSA for treatment of the leg at King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital; he was there for six months; he functioned for 16 years. Doctors predicted rapid deterioration after the age of forty.
From ‘89 to ‘94, he was under treatment. From ‘94 to 2010, he was functional. In 2010, his legs started withering; he started wasting. His spine couldn’t be treated at Samitivej, it was too late; at KSA he was again told that he would have problems after 40.
In 2011, he went back to Samitivej; relapse followed exercise; he paid six visits; he went to Mount Elizabeth (which cost 3 lakh takas, about $3,500) in 2016; they said there was no treatment, only exercise and diabetes control. In 2019, Vellore reiterated that no treatment existed, and he stayed around two months to exercise.
Now, his legs are weak, and he barely walks, his legs tingle, cramping in his legs robs him of his sleep.
He’s a wreck.
Psychologists put the proportion of psychopaths in the total population at 1 percent (the figure for prison populations ranges from 16 to 25 percent among men and from 7 to 17 percent among women). Our political parties constitute standing want-ads for this type. But the bafflement lies in the social acceptance of the psychopathic behaviour. Such quotidian goings-on remind one of the masterly cinema by the Russian director Andrey Konchalovskiy, Runaway Train (1985).
When the TV interviewer asks the warden about a prisoner in isolation, “Well, if, as you say he is an animal, then why do all the other prisoners love him so much?”
To which the reply comes pat from the warden: “Because they’re mostly animals just like he is.”
Clearly, a sizable number that should be locked up in Bangladesh are heroes on the streets - lauded by admirers.
Although the cat’s out of the bag after Fahad, the attitude towards the Chatra League, to vary the idiom, persists: boys will be boys, and League boys will be League boys.. Hence, the author felt no felicity at the outing of the felines in this headline in yesterday's (February 19 2023) New Age: “Repeated BCL tortures make campuses unsafe”. For nocturnal pastings continue apace. Between 11 at night on January 22 and 9:30 in the morning the next day, an alleged (unnamed) Islamist received the customary cudgelling from Chatra Leaguers. “Though such incidents are not new in the country,” mutters the daily, “the number and severity of these tortures have increased in recent years.”
Dhaka University, the quondam Oxford of the East, earns the infamy of “concentration camp” from the victims of its illustrious sons, mindful, no doubt, of the spirit of learning, albeit delivered, not in lectures, but in more corporeal form.
POLITICAL RELIGIONS
The greater Platonic reality of the nation can be seen in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Finer notes: “...It contains an inherent and lethal contradiction. It states that all authority flows from the general will, but it also declares that man possesses natural and imprescriptible rights, and the two are not compatible (p 1541, italics original).”
In an aside, it should be noted, in all fairness to Jacob Zuma mentioned above, that his definition of democracy Budovetails with the Declaration: “You have more rights because you’re a majority; you have less rights because you’re a minority.” Not incidentally do the champions of democracy find it necessary to add the rider “...and human rights”. The rider falls to the wayside: From the forced emigration of Palestinians in Israel to the forced assimilation of Kurds in Turkey, majoritarianism, like a despotic monarch, reigns.
When Handan Onal, our Kurdish guide in Cappadocia, Turkey, broke it to her niece living in Istanbul that she was a Kurd, the girl burst into tears. She had been in total denial. And when Handan herself had been in school, she was wary of speaking in Kurdish. Rugrats, encouraged by the school authorities, played ardent stool pigeons. Bilal Akiyildirim, another Kurdish guide in the Kurdish heartland in the south-east in Sanliurfa, spit out venom when, with trepidation, the author observed that yesterday, November 10, had been Ataturk’s death anniversary: “May God perish him.” No love lost there.
Indeed, J. L. Talmon, in speaking of the eighteenth century in general, expounds on the idea of a homogeneous society: “In the past it was possible for the State to regard many things as matters for God and the Church alone. The new State could recognise no such limitations. Formerly, men lived in groups. A man had to belong to some group, and could belong to several at the same time. Now there was to be one framework for all activity: the nation (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1960), p 4). ”
He also points out that “Eighteenth-century philosophes were never in any doubt that they were preaching a new religion. They faced a mighty challenge (p 21).” The philosophes were in competition with the Church, and an alternative world-view - howsoever this-worldly - partook of the nature of a religion. Interestingly, this section of Talmon’s book is entitled “The Secular Religion''. (Of additional interest is Finer’s description of nationalism as a “new secular religion” (p 1566).)
In light of all this, and more, Erich Voegelin suggests a low redefinition of religion. (A low, as opposed to a high, redefinition decreases the qualifications needed to come under the definiendum.) Most of us, and not a few scholars, equate religion with gods, goblins and djinns - that is, the supernatural. For instance, in Big Gods, attention focuses exclusively on the extramundane - with the embarrassing result that East Asia and Confucianism disappear from the world, and the pages (Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)).
“To speak of political religions and to interpret the movements of our time not only as political, but above all as religious ones as well, is today far from self-evident, even though the evidence should compel the aware observer to this conclusion,” begins the philosopher. “...We must therefore enlarge the concept of the religious….(Erich Voegelin, Political Religions, trans. T.J. DiNapoli and E.S. Esterly III (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1986), pp 6-7).”
Consequently, and logically, in view of the evidence, he distinguishes between “world-transcendent” and “world-immanent” religions. The former are the spiritual religions, which find the “Realissimum in the Weltgrund”, and the latter “locate the divine in partial things of the world” (p 14). The translators have refrained from conjuring up English equivalents for Voegelin’s (German) neologisms.
The philosopher distinguishes between “the world as content” and “the world as existence”: the former, which we know as the secular, overgrows the latter, until “Men allow the world content to grow to such a proportion that the world and God disappear behind it”. But the “problematic” of our individual existence remains intractably unresolved, and “when God has become invisible behind the world, then the things of the world become new gods (pp 58-9)”. That is, certain people of the world: “be it mankind, the Volk, the class, the race, or the State, which is expressed as the Realissimum, is a falling away from God .” The apt expression “temporal religiosity” illuminates the falling away with panache (p 79).
Voegelin speaks of “the decapitation of God” several times (p 32).
When a community becomes “world-immanent”, and recognises the equality and brotherhood of its members, we take part in “the continuity of the Ecclesia”. “This is true even where communities and movements take a sharply anti-clerical and anti-Christian position, and introduce, for instance, a new State religion, as in the French Revolution (p 36).”
Substitute “anti-Islamic” for “anti-Christian”, “Bengali nationalism” for “a new State religion”, and “the Liberation War” for “the French Revolution”, and - presto! - we have a Voegelian description of Bangladesh today.
Which should not surprise for, as Voegelin admits in the Epilogue (p 77), that, albeit basing his conclusion - “the life of men in a political community cannot be defined as a profane sphere, in which we only have to deal with questions of organisations, of law, and of power. The community is also a realm of religious order” - on examples from Mediterranean and Western European culture, “'this thesis is meant to be a general one”. That the East succumbed to “the Kingdom of the Devil” just as “the politico-religious history saw the further development of the particular Ekklesia into an intramundane closed one (p 55)” historical and contemporary events testify.
In Bangladesh today, the Hobbesian contract theory of the state and elections gave way to “another, temporal sacred selection principle for the bearers of personality in the community…the comrade of the people….(p 67, emphasis added).” In the comrade - in our case, Bongobondhu, Sheikh Mujib’s honorific, meaning “the friend of the Bengali people” - the Volk-spirit realises itself and the people’s will is formed. “In him, the Volk, which encompasses generations, and for that reason never gathers tangibly in its entirety, achieves visible form (p 68).” The Platonic reality of the nation, denied to every individual, seemingly makes an exception in his case, and no doubt, the Inner Party of Platonic guardians, the sole possessors of the Truth.
However, the enthusiasm requires more: “the tension of the battle and the ecstasy of the deed (p 73)”. In our case, a thugocracy of the Chatra League and Chatra Dal, the student wings of the two political parties. With the Hobbesian contract goes the Weberian state monopoly of legitimate violence: Weber defines the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Our two political parties, with their private armies, the student thugs, the hartal-wallahs, extortionists, and campus torturers, have undermined the state monopoly of violence, reverting Bangladesh to a feudal baronetcy, a pre-modern society. Only during military rule does the state monopoly of legitimate violence return: men with guns unemploy boys with guns.
The enthusiasm percolates through the people. “God is not outside, but rather lives within men themselves; and it would therefore be possible for the spirit of the Volk to express itself in the will of the people too, and for the voice of the people to become the voice of God (p 69).” The Bengali Volk achieves apotheosis.
Knowledge (of the world content) and technical processes, instead of being subordinated to the eternal goal - “life in the world-transcendent God” - are directed towards vivifying the world-immanent God himself (p 65).
These corpus mystica of the collectivity solder the members into the unio mystica, “a religio-ecstatic union of the individual with his God”. The instruments for the mystical union comprise newspapers, radio, speeches, communal festivals, gatherings, parades, war-planning and dying…by means of which the myth is engendered and propagated (p 66).
Voegelin’s list excludes, surely inadvertently, the education system, and thereby youth movements. Fichte had been more thorough, leaving no stone intact. Fichte assigns a special role for the German people, who are to be provided a unisex national education (Vittorio Hosle, A Short History of German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p 104). No doubt Fichte would have approved of our education system today where seven-year-olds are drilled to love Mujib, Mujibism and Bengalism (figure 5, below): “By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body and animated in all its individual members by the same interest (Kedourie, p 83).” The reasoning individual is not the desired outcome: he or she must transcend themselves via the language. As for the three Rs, heaven forbid if they are to be employed for so gross a purpose as double-entry bookkeeping.
Incidentally, these “lessons” are highly redolent of the Little Octobrist (Russian Oktyabryonok, plural Oktyabryata), member of a Communist organisation for children aged nine and under, closely associated with the Komsomol for youth aged 14 to 28.The high schools perform the role of the Komsomol as is visible in these mobile pictures from my former students, who must take their MCQs on pain of failure, so every minutiae must be mastered, as evidenced from the highlighting and underscoring.
And, unlike the “indoctrination scene” in Stalag 17, the propaganda works more effectively on young minds.
FIGURE 4: Ayub Khan, the guy we love to hate (English for Today: Classes XI to XII and Alim [16- to 17-year-olds] National Curriculum and Textbook Board: June 2018, p 7)
Figure 5: War liberated Bangladesh. They were tumultuous times. It was 1971. Pakistanis attacked Bengalis. Bangabandhu’s [Sheikh Mujib’s honorific - Friend of the Bengalis - employed by sycophants] call roused the nation. They had courage, patriotism. Many lost their lives [NOT the touted 3 million, but 500,000]. We won. Red-and-blue flags hung. We love our country. We love our liberation fighters.
Furthermore, having a language of one’s own founds the right to one’s own state. Fichte congratulated Germans on the narrowness of their elite-people divide - unlike the unnatural, affected French (p 104). He also congratulated Germans on the narrowness of the philosophy-religion divide, again, unlike France, the Enlightenment HQ. The Volk, as Herder maintained, constitutes the soul of a nation. However, the German Volk were meant for world dominion, not least because religion among that blessed people rooted their autonomy; the supersensible had never been pooh-poohed, as in the aforementioned HQ, but reinforced by reason. Luther is the person in the drama of the German nation. Fichte’s freedom fighters count their days of salvation from the day of their actions (Hosle, pp 104 - 105).
As for the state, securing law-and-order, the nightwatchman of Adam Smith, does not constitute its raison d’etre. The function of government is not mere provision of safety, but a linguistic jerking off - a peculiar social good not encompassed in the Scotsman’s scheme of national defence, security and public works and institutions.
A state that merely maintained “internal peace and a condition of affairs in which everyone may by diligence earn his daily bread and satisfy the needs of his material existence so long as God permits him to live” earned his scorn. Clearly, a man and woman must transcend this state of affairs - transcend themselves. “All this is only a means, a condition, and a framework for what love of fatherland really wants to bring about, namely, that the eternal and the divine may blossom in the world and never cease to become more and more pure, perfect and excellent (quoted, Kedourie, p 47).” It is small wonder that the young thumotic thugs who allegedly brought down General Ershad scorned all financial rewards he could offer: they were the “pure” and “excellent” youth, incorruptible by dross, responding only to the call to transcendence. The framework, in the fullness of time, became our Procrustean bed.
Finer quotes Heine as having anticipated Nazi Germany 100 years before the event: “There will come upon the scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest; for they live in the spirit, they defy matter like those early Christians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments nor by bodily delights...he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, that he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old German pantheism....The old stone gods will arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries and Thor with his giant hammer will rise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals…(p 1549).”
Voegelin mentions Gerhard Schumann’s Lieder vom Reich. But a more interesting historical development occurred after the appearance of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem Deutschland, Deutschland über alles in August 1841. His deeply patriotic verses were an inspiration to the student movement, and the expressed desire for a German nation out of the congeries of states appealed to the liberal imagination.
Germany, Germany above all,
above all else in the world,
When it steadfastly holds together,
offensively and defensively,
with brotherhood.
From the Maas to the Memel,
from the Etsch to the [Little] Belt,
Germany, Germany above all,
above all else in the world.
The first verse of the popular song became the national anthem of the Weimar Republic on August 11, 1922, and was retained by Nazi Germany (along with the the party anthem, the Horst Wessel Song), when it acquired “unfortunate connotations”: “What was originally intended in 1848 as a call to place the concept of a unified nation above regional differences—with geographic borders marking the extent to which culturally German settlers had spread—became reinterpreted as a justification for German expansionism and misinterpreted by some as a claim to German world hegemony”. Banned after World War II, the third verse was adopted as the national anthem in 1951 by West Germany.
Unity and rights and freedom
for the German fatherland.
Let us strive for it together,
brotherly with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
are the basis of good fortune.
Flower in the light of this good fortune,
flower German fatherland.
A similar regression from the liberal may be discerned in the career of the Burschenschaft (Youth Association”). Founded in 1815 first at the University of Jena, the Burgenschaften were egalitarian, liberal and desirous of German unification. An early presage was the assassination of August von Kotzebue - a German writer who served the Russian tsar - by the nationalistic Burschenschafter Karl Sand in March 1819. The Carslbad Decrees issued by the frightened German governments provided for the partial suppression of the Burschenschaften. In 1848, the clubs, hitherto underground, actively took part in the German Revolution. After unification in 1871, however, the groups espoused aggressive nationalism, with many proclaiming their anti-Semitsn and Pan-Germanism. Ficte would not have been surprised, indeed he might even have been chuffed.
Nationalism, anti-Semitisn and love of violence linked themselves in some heroic bosoms, such as that of Lord Byron’s. The nationalism first:
This must he feel, the true-born son of Greece,
If Greece one true-born patriot can boast:
Not such as prate of war but skulk in peace,
The bondsman's peace, who sighs for all he lost,
Yet with smooth smile his tyrant can accost,
And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword:
Ah, Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most—
Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record
Of hero sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde!
The “sickle-into-sword” theme constitutes the nationalist narrative. Indeed, Fichte, like Machiavelli (whom he “enthusiastically praised in an article”), had ranted against the Christian aversion to warfare, and even against limited warfare (Hosle, p 104). A decade after the martyrdom of Byron (admittedly, through fever, not bayonets), Giuseppe Mazzini proclaimed, prophetically enough, that “Ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs”.
As John Hutchinson observes, “warfare has been central for much nation-state formation”. He quotes Charles Tilly: “War makes states and states make war”. More chilling are his own words: “Many nationalists subsequently have cited the willingness of populations to sacrifice themselves for the nation-state as an indicator of its validity”.
Byronic anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with his anti-capitalism:
Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign
O’er congress, whether royalist or liberal?
Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?
(That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)
Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain
Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?
The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring?-
Jew Rothschild, and his fellow-Christian, Baring.
Those, and the truly liberal Lafitte,
Are the true lords of Europe. Every loan
Is not a merely speculative hit,
But seats a nation or upsets a throne.
Republics also get involved a bit;
Columbia’s stock hath holders not unknown
On ’Change; and even thy silver soil, Peru,
Must get itself discounted by a Jew.
However liberal nationalism’s early promise might have been, its ultimate illiberalism was no accidental mutation.
That liberal imagination had, as we see, highly illiberal roots. Admiration for Jacobinism goes hand in hand with anti-Semitism in Fichte (Hosle, p 98). His Germanism owes more to self-loathing, from the personal to the national level, than on liberal desires for, say, a common market. And in his self-loathing, he was not alone.
Kedourie quotes from Herder’s diary: “Your low origin, the enslavement of your fatherland, your country’s taste for trifles, the vicissitudes of your career have so limited you, have brought you so low that you cannot recognise yourself (p 44)”. Hosle traces Fichte’s sense of mission, to make his reader autonomous, and, no doubt, himself in the process - to the philosopher’s “inferiority complex” stemming from his social background and humiliations as a private tutor (p 98).
About the “intellectuals”, Kdourie observes that they belonged to a class that was low on the socal scale. Sons of pastors, artisans and small farmers, they managed somehow to enrol in university, and acquire, usually, a degree in theology, eking out the remainder of their days with “minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts”. Their degrees conferred no social mobility; the stupid, illiterate nobility looked down on them even as they hogged the public employment closed to the litterati, despite the merit the latter inwardly felt they had..
Eric Hoffer calls this “the unwanted self”: “...a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self (p 12).”
In “To the Germans”, Herder cries (Kedourie, p 59):
Look at other nationalities!
Do they wander about
So that nowhere in the world they are strangers
Except to themselves?
They regard foreign countries with proud disdain.
And you German alone, returning from abroad,
Wouldst greet your mother in French?
O spew it out, before your door
Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine
Speak German, O you German!
Here we see the psychology of the unwanted self playing itself out on both the personal and the national planes.
Substitute Bengali for German, English for French, and Thames for Seine, and you have Bengali nationalism yesterday and today.
The same “cultural cringe” that the German intellectual felt before French culture in eighteenth-century Germany, the selfsame cultural cringe is felt by the Bengali intellectual before English language and literature: a fervent desire to emulate the English runs deep in our vascular system. The sincerest form of flattery occurs in our political realm, which explains the four ideals of our constitution.
However, Herder may not have been amiss in his diagnosis of the imitative German. “The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves,” opines the ever-astute Hoffer, “the greater is our desire to be like others….The imitativeness of the oppressed (Blacks and Jews) is notable (p 101, emphasis added).”
Political psychologist Jim Sidanius uses the expression “outgroup favouritism”: Outgroup favouritism or deference occurs among lower-status groups in relation to higher-status ones. Sidanius’ example is that of Uncle Tomming by blacks towards whites in the segregation era (David Houghton, Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals And Cases (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp 174 – 175). (Lower-status groups may also under-achieve due to lower social expectations.) A Scottish observer said of freed slaves that “chains of a stronger kind still manacled their limbs, from which no legislative act could free them; a mental and moral subordination and inferiority to which tyrant custom has here subjected all the sons and daughters of Africa (Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp 142 – 143).”
This recalls Malcolm X’s justly famous iteration: “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin to such an extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself – from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to? So much so that you don’t want to be around each other.
“No, before you come asking Mr. Mohammed, does he teach hate, you should ask yourself, who taught you to hate what being God gave you?
“We teach you to love the hair that God gave you….”
The corresponding example from South Asia may be Dr. Azizzing after the fictitious character Dr. Aziz in E M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). This video clip from the movie illustrates vividly the self-loathing of the South Asian Aziz (5:10 - 5:47). In George Orwell’s Burmese Days, the narrator observes of another Indian doctor: “Dr Veeraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken. He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race.” The frankest expression of cultural cringe flowed from the pen of Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who favoured all things British against all things Indian: “...all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule (quoted, Mark Tully, No Full Stops In India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p 57).” Certainly, on our side of Bengal, any gaucherie, or worse, may be explained away with the trite observation that “He’s just a Bangalee”, reflecting Lord Macaulay’s contempt for that linguistic group. “Joy Bangla”, the demagogue's war whoop, continues to appeal for precisely that reason.
Swami Dayananda, founder of the Arya Samaj (Society of Arians) in Bombay, in 1875, famously tried to show that all Western scientific knowledge had been revealed in the Vedas – telecommunications, ships, aircraft, gravity and gravitational attraction (Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), p 50).
The South Asian elite are in a parlous state. Spare a thought for Martin Kampchen, who wrote from Santiniketan: “Several daily newspapers of Calcutta flashed the news of Jhumpa Lahiri’s wedding in Calcutta as their first-page leader, complete with a colourful photo of the happy couple. First I thought: O happy Bengal! You still honour your poets as the ancient civilisations used to do. And for a moment I remained in this innocent bliss of satisfaction. Then it dawned on me that not any writer’s marriage is accorded such flattering coverage. Only expatriates who have ‘made it good’ abroad, who have ‘done the country proud’, are subjected to such exaggerated honours (The Daily Star, 27th January, 2001).” Jhumpa Lahiri had just won the Pulitzer for her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies.
Before he became prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan used to insult some people by calling them Brown Sahibs (maybe he still does). Most of his friends fit that description – which means they ape the dress, habits and affectations of the former British colonial masters. Indeed, Khan himself used very much to be a Brown Sahib. “His English is more polished than his Punjabi,” according to the Independent.
South Asians disparage themselves with the description “coconut”: brown outside, white inside.
In 2006, a photo of then prime minister Khaleda Zia taken by Shahidul Alam was printed on the cover of TIME magazine. The Daily Star, the leading English daily of Bangladesh, made a point of mentioning the fact in its pages (April 14, 2006): “We would also like to take this opportunity to commend Mr. Alam for being the first Bangladeshi photographer whose work has been featured on the cover of Time magazine.” Alam had ‘made it’ in the west, so he had to be ‘honoured’.
“You mention the name Bangladesh to a westerner and wait for his or her first reaction and what you hear may not please your ear” lamented the now-defunct English daily The Bangladesh Observer in its cover story (October 20th, 2006). But all is not lost! Mohammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank had won the Nobel Peace Prize, rekindling “the (sic) Bengali nationalism in the teeming millions”. Never mind that a connection, however tenuous, between a Nobel Prize for microcredit and Bengali nationalism, is not immediately obvious. The former, conferred by the outgroup, raises the prestige of the latter.
Yunus, Rabindranath and Amartya Sen constitute the trio of Bangalees who had won the Nobel, an august group that (like our megaprojects) warms the cockles of the national heart, on either side of the Bengal border, awaiting its Anschluss with breathless tachycardia. In this light, the fetish of Tagore owes in no inconsiderable degree to the Swedish trinket. The lionisation of Sen went on full display in no less than the hallowed halls of the London School of Economics, where he rendered his paean to the tyranny of our ruling dynasty on the invitation of our government. Netra News published dire misgivings about the shout-out for Mujib on his 100th birthday on March 17th at the LSE. Sen rambled on: “He [Mujib] was the great political leader of Bangladesh, the founder of the idea of an independent Bangladesh, the biggest influence on the lives of Bangladeshis, the most admired person in Bengal, and as has been noted again and again, he can be rightly seen as the “father of the nation” in Bangladesh”.
With friends like these….
Further evidence for Occidentalism comes from popular culture, namely, Bollywood item songs. A generation ago, Indian women in sarees cavorted on the silver screen, as in this thinly erotic song-and-dance item, Tip Tip Barsa Pani. Nowadays, the saree, which concealed more than it revealed, has been supplanted by pants, cut-offs, mini skirts - and even bikinis. Comely Indian actresses disport themselves in these attire with a great deal of eroticism. However, this sartorial development has been accompanied by another less indigenous development: the use of white (and, more rarely, black) extras. Needless to add, white and black people are usually nowhere to be seen in South Asia.
In Mahi Ve, Aurora Malaika Khan is accompanied by five dancers - all of them white. Deepika Padukone in Love Mera Hit Hit is complemented by a troupe of white dancers. In Chaliya, the bikini-clad Kareena Kapoor is flanked by a bevy of black women.
Then there’s the locale. Bollywood item songs are frequently filmed in exotic settings: London, Paris, New York….Shut Up and Bounce has a conspicuous Miami setting. Allah Maf Kare takes place inside and outside Cambridge, England. Le Le Maza Le apparently takes place somewhere in Spain, with a combination of Spanish, English and Hindi lyrics.
In Bangladeshi films, white extras are yet to appear, but the saree seems to have had its day as far as song-and-dance routines are concerned. A notable exception is the actress Porimoni in the traditional rain dance, Rimjhim Brishti.
As Fatima Bhutto observed in her interview with Adeel Hassan of the New York Times: “Bollywood’s films of the 1950s followed the path of India’s newly independent future, encapsulating ideas of romantic nationalism, social justice and liberty. But now the Bollywood hero lives in London, not in the village, and has no interest in social justice. He wears designer clothes and drives a Ferrari, though he still abides by traditional morality and is unquestioning of the nation. Bollywood’s values today are attached to darker political projects reflecting the mood of the government.” We remember how Amitav Bachan screamed “inquilab” three times at the end of the film of the same name: Today, if his son, Abhishek, yelled for a revolution, his cinematic career would suffer an undesired, but unsurprising, inquilab.
About the Hindu nationalism across the border today, Van Der Veer writes: “They are fantasies produced by a lack of self-esteem (p 104).”
“In eighteenth century Germany French was considered eminently the language of literature and polite society,” observes Kedourie (p 60). What the German intellectual felt before French culture may be adequately represented by our expression “cultural cringe”.
The critical period when “cultural oppression” morphed into “military oppression” formed the juncture in history that produced the ideology of nationalism (Finer, p 1545). Fichte, who had been an enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution, hailing 1793 to be the “last year of the old darkness” (Hosle, p 98), felt less kindly disposed towards that people after the defeats of Jena and Auerstadt. In 1807–08 he delivered his fire-and-brimstone Addresses to the German Nation. Although French military oppression roused rebellions throughout Europe, the German response alone amounted to more than rebellion: the lack of estrangement of the middle class (already mentioned), the efficiency and honesty of the bureaucracy, and, above all, the “men of words”, to use Hoffer’s expression, cloistered in their universities, along with secret societies, contributed to a new awareness, shot through with a sense of wounded pride, anger and assertiveness.
We would do well to tarry a while and take note of Hoffer on the subject, which will recur: “It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. It was Napoleon's humiliation of the Germans, particularly the Prussians, which drove Fichte and the German intellectuals to call on the German masses to unite into a mighty nation which would dominate Europe (p 138)”.
* * *
Hoffer explains the intelligentsia’s solid support for the despotic dynasty of Bangladesh: During the upheavals of 2018, when student thugs of the ruling party beat up harmless child protesters demanding safer roads, Mehdi Hasan went head to head with a former Harvard professor, Gawhar Rizvi, who shamelessly defended every criminality perpetrated by the government; this author has spoken with men (and women) of words, and found the same resistance to criticism. When a bridge opened recently, the men and women of words and song galvanised themselves to create musical paeans to the dynasty (click here for the album Bangladesh: Despotic Dynasty, pictures taken by the author of the images of the ruling family plastered throughout the capital, a superb example of persuasive advertising designed to perpetuate our founding myth of the Father of the Nation). Intellectuals, “ a herd of independent minds”, in Chomsky’s words, appease our collective self-loathing by glorifying and exonerating thuggery.
In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby, a British Member of Parliament, published his tell-all book on British propaganda which he called Falsehood in War-time: Containing An Assortment Of Lies Circulated Throughout The Nations During The Great War. In time of war, he observes with acerbity, “the stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of ‘propaganda.’” His other observation, pertinent to our present purposes, concerned the role of intellectuals. I quote at length:
“A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums.
“Perhaps nothing did more to impress the public mind - and this is true in all countries - than the assistance given in propaganda by intellectuals and literary notables. They were able to clothe the tough tissue of falsehood with phrases of literary merit and passages of eloquence better than the statesmen. Sometimes by expressions of spurious impartiality, at other times by rhetorical indignation, they could by their literary skill give this or that lie the stamp of indubitable authenticity, even without the shadow of a proof, or incidentally refer to it as an accepted fact. The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting.”
The words italicised by the present author could be supplemented with and at all times. In Bangladesh today, the intelligentsia provides the context for a mindset suitable to a wartime situation: fifty-two years after the third Indo-Pak war, seventy-two after Ekushey February (21 February 1952) Pakistan is still the enemy, and Islamists are fair game. George Orwell appreciated well the need for a state of permanent hostility against a fictive enemy to keep the citizenry loyal to the Party. When all eyes - those of the young and the old - are focussed on events several decades ago, contemporary evils, such as the hounding of the Chief Justice, or the burning alive of innocent bystanders, appear remote and ephemeral. The stimulus of indignation, horror, and hatred is assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of “propaganda” - by the government and its handmaidens, the intelligentsia, “the men of words”.
Apropos of the subject, modern social-psychological research, springing from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), confirms what laymen have always suspected concerning the supreme importance of leadership in any group. “The rank and file of any group, especially a big one, have been shown to be remarkably passive until aroused by quasi-parental leaders whom members of the group admire and trust,” observes Bruce Lannes Smith in the Britannica article on propaganda.
Propaganda appeals to the superego’s need for justice by asserting that the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan shortchanged Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, to the ego’s need for order and balance - autonomy for the East - and finally to the craving for power on the part of the id – streets of gold in Dhaka just like in Karachi. Such Byronic mastery of the public pulse - what Harold Lasswell called the triple-appeal principle - only the men of words command.
“Propagandists are wise if, in addition to reiterating their support of ideas and policies that they know the reactor already believes in, they include among their images a variety of symbols associated with parents and parent surrogates. The child lives on in every adult, eternally seeking a loving father and mother.” Hence, the appeal of familistic symbols of “the fatherland”, or, in Bangladesh, “the motherland”, “the mother tongue”; “the Mother Church”; “the Holy Father”; “Mother Russia”; “father of the nation”; “founding fathers”....
To the list must be added “brothers and sisters” and “sons and daughters''. These appear as dramatis personae in agitprop films, songs and posters. Article 4A of the constitution, inserted by Mujib’s daughter, Hasina, consecrated him as pater patriae whose picture must hang almost everywhere - thereby attaining for pater a binary state of simultaneous being and non-being like Schrodinger’s famous cat. Hasina: A Daughter's Tale has become mandatory viewing in Bangladesh. Images of the dynasty - Mujib the father, Hasina the daughter, Joy the grandson - splashed across the capital city and elsewhere appeal to the child in every Bangladeshi adult. The macaronic Ekushey February - 21st February - is ritualised in Bangladesh year after year as potent symbol of the motherland born out of the blood of brothers who died for the mother tongue. The song “Amar bhaiyer rakte rangano ekushey february ami ki bhulite pari”(Can I forget 21 February reddened with the blood of my brothers?) is sung, dirge-like, by a parade of worshippers (one fails to think of a synonym here) at the Shahid Minar (literally, the tower from which the faithful are called to prayer five times each day by a muezzin, secularised to the fury of the umma, while the rank of shahid - martyr - comprises only those faithful to Islam who die in holy war, or those killed unjustly). Brothers, sisters, blood. Think with the blood comes to mind.
* * *
We can confidently aver that nationalism was a Franco-German joint production, reflecting with a vengeance the trite but true observation that it takes two to tango.
It is instructive that Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778 - 1852), author of German Nationality (1810), was forbidden, on his release from prison for his nationalistic views and influence on the youth, to reside in a city with a university or a secondary school: at a public meeting he announced that a father who let his daughter learn French was delivering her into prostitution.
Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769 - 1860) entreated his comrades to make an about-turn from Francomania to Francophobia. He recalled with scorn (echoing Herder from earlier years) how even farmers’ daughters in his small northern town had used to speak morsels of French during the last decades of the previous century. “Let us hate the French strongly,” he entreated in a pamphlet in 1818, “and let us hate our own French who dishonour and ravage our energy and our innocence (Kedourie, pp 60 - 61)”. No doubt he recalled vividly the ruined castles on the Rhine, described in his memoirs, laid desolate by the French armies.
Henri Tajfel’s insistence that European social psychology has something more to offer than the North American variety, therefore, sounds plausible: the latter focuses on the individual while Tajfel could, by taking the group rather than the individual as primal, generate invaluable insights, in keeping with the socio-political upheavals of the Old World.
According to social identity theory, developed by Tajfel and others, social identity threat occurs, among other reasons, when members feel that their group is not sufficiently acknowledged as a separate entity with unique characteristics. Identification with a group, observes Tajfel, increases its members’ self-esteem. Joshua Searle-White teaches that the belief that one’s nation is superior raises one’s self-esteem. Coupled with a sense of victimhood, real or imagined, it provides a powerful prop to the individual ego (Houghton, p 172).
However, of equal, if not greater interest here, is the other source of social identity threat: “Group members may also experience various forms of social identity threats, one of which takes place when the moral behaviour of their group is called into question. The latter form of threat is sometimes experienced even by group members who can in no way be held personally accountable for their group’s behaviour….” The famine of 1974 rests on no contemporary shoulders, yet supporters of the Awami League deny the event in silence. Indeed, every political party remains schtum on the subject: broaching the memories would, as Zurubavel observes, threaten the legitimacy of Bangladesh itself, a sort of Chernobyl-in-the-making. Clearly, we made a big mistake in our “liberation” and “independence”.
While capitalism emphasises social mobility within the group, the “unwanted self” finds no release in climbing the ladder. To quote the highly quotable Hoffer: “People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worthwhile purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky (p 12)”.
In these few words, the gifted longshoreman not only explains the appeal of nationalism in particular, but of the siren-appeal of collectivism in general.
ORWELLIAN ELEPHANT
Anthropologists claim that societies have myths of origin. According to Edmund Leach, they create legitimations for certain present claims of political groups (Van Der Veer, p 136). In Bangladesh, especially under the present government headed by the daughter of the alleged pater patriae, these myths have morphed into Orwellian elephants - exaggerated and blown out of all proportions. Nationalism, like any religion, needs myths and legends: fabrications, falsifications, distortions. (As mentioned, I refer to the elephant in Burma that Orwell shot most unwillingly since its mast was over and the anxiety of the villagers had been overblown. The other elephant is, of course, the one in the room, noticed-and-ignored).
Orwellian elephant number one must surely be the number of people killed by the Pakistani army in 1971. Ask any school children, and she will immediately gargle out: 3,000,000 (she will say 30 lakhs, since that is the unit used in this country). A moment's reflection should reveal the absurdity of the figure: during the Vietnam War, civilian deaths amounted to 2 million over a period of 20 years (1954 - 75). In the First World War, a total war involving the whole of Europe and also America, 13 millions civilians perished over 5 years (1914 - 18). To maintain that the Pakistan army, without any aerial bombardment, napalm and fighting 1,000 miles from home territory, killed 3 million civilians in 9 months beggars belief. David Reynolds puts the number at 500,000 ( p 246).
The socialist paradise Mujib prophesied turned into a nightmare. A consummate demagogue and rabble rouser, he promised Utopia, Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal): he set ingroup, the Bengali-speaking people of East Pakistan, against the outgroup, the supposedly Urdu-speaking half of West Pakistan.
Robert L. Heilbroner and Peter J. Boettke glumly observe that “The socialist experiments of the 20th century were motivated by a genuine interest in improving life for the masses, but the results instead delivered untold suffering in terms of economic deprivation and political tyranny.”
After the Orwellian elephant, enter, tip-toe, the proverbial elephant; that’s the large couch in the corner for you, Jumbo! Having inflated 500,000 casualties to 3 million, we are about to do a switcheroo.
His followers had found that they were turkeys voting for Christmas. In 1974 -5, inflation stood at 300%. The economy grew 2%, and population increased 3% (Jalal, p 88). The misery index (inflation plus unemployment) reached hitherto unplumbed depths.
The proverbial elephant is the famine of 1974.
Willem van Schendel, in his History of Bangladesh, observes: “...it is thought that the excess mortality resulting from the 1974 famine may have been near 1.5 million. In demographic terms it was quite as stunning a disaster as the war of 1971.
“By the end of the year, the Bangladesh government stood exposed as inept, indifferent and heartless. All its political credit had vanished. Seventy distinguished Bangladeshi economists, lawyers and writers issued a statement saying that the famine was man-made and had resulted from ‘shameless plunder, exploitation, terrorization, flattery, fraudulence and misrule.’ They added that the government was ‘clearly dominated by and…representative of smugglers and profiteers’ (p 181).”
(According to the Banglapedia article on famine, the government figure “was, not surprisingly, only 26,000.” But such is the level of self-censorship in this country, out of fear or awe, that even the academics felt the need to absolve Mujib.)
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (“famine”, 15th edition, 1988), after the floods of 1974, “The government did not make available to the hungry people large quantities of rice that were available, and merchants exported it to India”.
Mujib’s autogenocide remains forgotten in an Orwellian republic, where he and his family are lionised. The new elite will not wash its dirty linen.
But it will dirty the clean laundry of West Pakistan, particularly the underwear of Ayub Khan, as we have seen. Ayub Khan invited Norman Borlaug after the latter’s success in Mexico. Pakistan (and India) faced food shortages due to rapid population growth. “As a consequence, Pakistan experienced what became known as the Green Revolution during the late 1960s, leaving a surplus that was partly shipped to East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and partly exported.” Ayub Khan saved millions. The “tyrant” filled our bellies in the 1960s. In the 1970s, we starved by the millions. We bit the hand that fed, and lick the claw that starved.
KLEPTOCRATIC OLIGARCHY
Gunnar Myrdal observed of South Asia in The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Programme in Outline: “...changes of government, or even of form of government, occur high over the heads of the masses of people and mainly imply merely a shift of the groups of persons in the upper strata who monopolise power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p 212).” The transition from East Pakistan to Bangladesh, from military rule to democracy, occasioned changes of personnel at the top.
As Don Fabrizio’s nephew observes in Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, (New York:Random House, 1960), p 40)?” He understood.
After the Awami League came to power in Bangladesh in June 1996, the stockmarket mysteriously began its seductive ascent from 1,000 to 3,672 by November ("The Bangladesh Stockmarket: Slaughter of the Innocents", The Economist, December 7th 1996, pp 90-91). No one with cash in his pockets or her handbag could resist the siren call of the financial market. The heat of enthusiasm sent speculators outside the stock exchange, on to the kerb market. "The stockmarket's total value increased by a staggering 192.1 billion taka ($4.5 billion)." Shares traded at p/e ratios of 80: Confidence Cement, for instance, sold for 1,060 times the year's earnings after a 1,400 % increase in its price.
Greed drove these speculators who got their just desserts – all 300,000 of them, as was to be the case in the coming dotcom bust. Such sentiments were in the air: but they were wrong. That market had been rigged.
"According to the government's report, some of the country's biggest brokers were buying shares on the floor of the stock exchange and selling them on the kerb, where prices were generally 20% higher. A number of big operators are accused of arranging trades among themselves to create an illusion of strong demand. A good number of the transactions may be fictitious," reported The Economist ('Revenge of the Innocents', April 12th 1997, p 74).
Thirty-two arrest warrants were issued, including one for Runa Alam, head of the local office of the infamous (and soon to collapse) Peregrine Investment Holdings, and, more significantly for our story, two for Salman and Sohail Rahman, "brothers who lead the largest group of companies in Bangladesh, Beximco Group".
However, it was later found that the charges against the brothers had been brought under the wrong code! Naturally, they were released.
The prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, appeared on television in a question-and-answer session on every subject conceivable. It was a charade of 'transparency'. Among the three interviewees was one Debapriya Bhattacharya, well-known to the author since his childhood days, and well-known among the elite today (indeed, he was recently president of the Trade and Development Board of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD). He questioned the prime minister how it was that 50 million takas had been siphoned out of the country and the alleged masterminds incorrectly charged. He noted that it was regrettable, and the subject, of such enormous moment, was quietly shelved. But Bhattacharya had earned his fifteen minutes.
It so happened that Bhattacharya's mother, Mrs. Chitra Bhattacharya, was an MP of the ruling party, and the whole family was tight with the PM. This was what allowed young Bhattacharya to appear to be questioning the executive: a very well-choreographed family affair. As a conscientious mother, and an unconscionable citizen, she had realised early in life that unquestioning loyalty to the dynasty would advance her son's career. The prime minister should have resigned, of course, or been forced to resign – but it must be kept in mind that she is the daughter of a dynasty, just as the leader of the opposition is a wife of the other dynasty: the democratic transition of 1990 has encumbered us with two despots where formerly we had had only one benign dictator. Neither woman is accountable for any crime, including murder and rape routinely performed by party cadres. Therefore, to expect Hasina to resign over mere financial jiggery-pokery would strike most Bangladeshis as tantamount to lese-majeste despite the number of people ruined and the loss to the economy of millions diverted to private hands. Even her associates and friends are above the law: it has been reported that Salman Rahman was a friend of the prime minister's late brother. The author covered the story here: CRIMES OF FINANCE.
TO THE VICTOR, THE GOILS
Crimes of sexual violence by the student wings of the political parties cry for attention; unfortunately, only brief notes can be interspersed here: the criminalisation of Bangladesh reaches far: As Graham Greene observed in The Third Man: A racket works very like a totalitarian party ((London: Vintage, 2005), p 63). And we might add: And vice versa.
No better representation of collective perversity can be adduced than a brief report from a local English daily.
"Police on Tuesday submitted charge-sheet of the sensational Mahima gang-rape case accusing four rakes of the heinous crime....They are said to be local activists of Jatiyabadi Chatra Dal [JCD], the student wing of ruling BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party].
"It is stated in the charge that Mahima, 15, daughter of Abdul Hannan of Kathalbaria village in Puthiya upazilla was picked up by the accused from the backyard of her home and gang-raped by them on February 13.
"The rapists also took photographs of the raping scenes and exhibited those to the public to humiliate her and the family.
"Ultimately, the teenager committed suicide by taking pesticides on February 19 to hide her disgrace forever (The Bangladesh Observer, 7th March, 2002)."
This is clearly not 'just' another case of rape. Mahima was raped because her father and brother belonged to the opposition, the Awami League (AL). This was a case of political hatred, rape being a common method used to humiliate men-folk in conflicts. Needless to add, the rapists got away, scot-free. But more significantly, notice the complete absence of any outrage on the part of the electorate. Apparently, voters believe that “democratic” violence justifies itself, especially violence by either of the two dynasties. After all, these students - as the myth goes - toppled two dictators, Ayub Khan of Pakistan and Hussein Mohammed Ershad of Bangladesh, both military men. The myth sanctifies.
And there was precedent.
On November 8, 2005, ruling party activists gang-raped six-month pregnant Tahura Begum because her husband, Babar Ali, refused to quit the opposition: she had an abortion. After being kidnapped several times from hospital, she finally died on November 16th (The Bangladesh Observer, November 20 2005).
These incidents constitute a pattern. "Incidents of sexual harassment at educational institutions over the last few years provide a shocking pattern: the perpetrators are mostly political activists, especially those belonging to the student fronts of the mainstream political parties (The Daily Star, 11th March, 2000)".
xf The political party was not named because of the obvious retribution to be expected by the members of the committee from the ruling party at the time (The Daily Star, July 31st, 2001). Under pressure from university teachers, seventeen student leaders were identified - and not a single criminal case filed.
Nor was this a one-off. Members of the youth wing of the rival Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the Jubo Dal, gangraped two garment factory workers on their way home on January 14 2006 in Dhaka.. The police registered the case only after local people agitated in front of the station, and the Rapid Action Battalion intervened (The Bangladesh Observer, 16 January 2006). Six months later, Karmojibi Nari, a working women’s organisation, attributed the reluctance to the perpetrators’ “political identity” (11 July 2006).
On January 1, the day after the national elections on December 31, 2018, a mother of four was gang-raped in the city of Noakhali, Bangladesh, for voting for the opposition. “They had repeatedly insisted that I should vote for boat [the symbol of the ruling Awami League] but I cast my ballot for 'sheaf of paddy' [that of the opposition],” she said.
On September 25, 2020, a group of Chatra League student activists belonging to the ruling party kidnapped a newly-wed couple on the campus of MC College in Sylhet, took them to a male hostel and raped the 19-year-old woman. Although the suspects are awaiting trial, the plaintiff, her husband, received death threats last April from an individual who visited his home and, not finding him there, threatened to kill him over telephone.
Soon after, on October 5 2020, the gangrape of a woman went viral. “Ruling party’s involvement in both the incidents cannot be overlooked,” observed the New Age. Delwar Bahini - literally, the army of Delwar - goons led by the eponymous Md Dalwar Hossain, who, though also arrested, but, mysteriously, not named in the case, provided leadership. The newspaper commented further: “Dalwar, on his Facebook wall, identified himself as a ‘soldier of Bangabandhu’s ideology’, used the name of the ruling Awami League’s youth front Bangladesh Juba League and the slogan ‘Joy Bangla-Joy Bangabandhu’ and urged to keep faith on ‘boat’, the electoral symbol of ruling Awami League.” He was also said to be close to a ruling party lawmaker.
These student leaders “live off the land”, like a marauding army, and, like a marauding army, they consider women as part of the spoils. As for the loot, extortion provides a leading source of revenue. Javed, whom the author interviewed, bought his first pipe gun and cocktails by shaking down local businesses (the interview, anonymised, is on the author’s blog here) at the age of fifteen, a year after he got into student politics in 1988. A brief excerpt follows:
“How I got hold of arms. The aim was to organise a program at school, save money and buy arms. The teachers tried to stop us, but we went ahead with the program. We also collected tolls [extortion money] from businessmen in the area. Then we bought arms from an iron-smith. Pipe-gun, 250 takas ($6); cocktail, 1100 takas.
“After this episode, the party started giving us total assistance. They started to send boys from the armed cadres, or cells.”
Unsurprisingly, these heroic youth, credited with the myth of overthrowing the general, continued to channel their talents for personal gain. Equally unsurprisingly, they frequently engage in turf warfare, often resulting in murder. These are not secrets. “Like silence, denial involves active avoidance,” maintains Zerubavel. “Rather than simply failing to notice something, it entails deliberate effort to refrain from noticing it. Furthermore, it usually involves refusing to acknowledge the presence of things that actually begs for attention, thereby reminding us that conspiracies of silence revolve not around those largely unnoticeable matters we simply overlook but, on the contrary, around those highly conspicuous matters we deliberately try to avoid (p 9).”
Consider this editorial from New Age:
“THE three photographs that New Age printed on its front page on Thursday, show the police trying to control Chhatra League [ruling party student wing] activists from fighting during a clash between two factions of the organisation’s Chittagong Government College unit, an activist pulling out a gun against rival activists and activists carrying cleavers wrapped in cloth. The photographs together point to law enforcers’ indifference to the rule of law when it comes to restraining ruling party activists, epitomising a partisan application of law.” More to the point, despite photographs and videos a-plenty, the newspaper reading and viewing public show complete indifference to the student mafia run amok. Zerubavel calls this meta-denial: denying the denial (below). “...Our most common response to those who try to open our eyes is actually to ignore them (Zerubavel, p 69).”
The body count by the author came up with the figure of 888 student pols murdered by each other in 2001-2019 (he has discontinued the grim research).
Figure 6
Again, the headlines counted by the author constitute publicly available information, as does the information in the table below (compiled from The Daily Star, April 3rd 2000).
Behind every statistic lies a family rent, if not ruined. “The proselytiser who comes and says “Follow me” is a family wrecker…(Hoffer, p 37).”
In fact, one retired chief justice, Shahabuddin Ahmed, has, during his stint as president, publicly made the observation that students were getting guns instead of education. “He reiterated his stand against the ‘political use of students and urged the students to sever connections with the political parties (The Daily Star, July 11 2000)." Another ex-president, Badruddoza Chowdhury, said: “Students are armed to punish the opposition and we strongly condemn such acts (The Bangladesh Observer, March 30 2005)”. “Silence, as the saying goes, is consent,” notes Zerubavel. “By remaining silent about improper behaviour we help normalise it, essentially enhancing its perpetuation by implicitly encouraging potential offenders to regard it as morally acceptable (p 84).”
Since our violent democratic transition affected by students, that being the myth, violence has come to be seen as not only legitimate but glorious, conducing to a climate of toxic masculinity where women, not surprisingly, finally end up on the receiving end. In 1998, recalls New Age, Chhatra League student pols celebrated the 100th rape by their leader Jasimuddin Manik, general secretary of Jahangir Nagar unit of the ruling party’s student wing. (For discussions on whether, and when, the power of external “situations” trumps the strength of inner “dispositions”, the author recommends David Houghton’s book; for greater depth into Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, no better material exists than Philip Zimabardo’s significantly titled “The Lucifer Effect” (New York: Random House, 2007) of which the italicised serves as an equally significant subtitle. No better material in the social sciences, that is: in literature, the novels of Joseph Conrad relentlessly place people in situations which override their inner, and formerly better, dispositions; the title of this piece, not accidentally, comes from his masterpiece, Heart of Darkness (1902).)
Student thuggery requires a volume, so we’ll close the chapter here. (The question why student politics persists despite the dysfunctions receives a plausible explanation from the insight of Thorstein Veblen according to whom “institutions” - habits of thought - continue long after the circumstances generating them, in this case the language movement of 1952, due to vested interests (Roger E. Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp 195-6); however, Veblen hardly explains the silence of UNICEF, though he renders perfectly explicable the complicity of its sister organisation, UNESCO, lobbied successfully by the Awami League government to declare 21 February “International Mother Language Day”. The student wing of the political party serves as agitprop along with political-cultural organisations like Chayyanat.)
LAST LOOK AT LOOTOCRACY
And while the oligarchs, similarly, squeeze the milch cow of the motherland, children are taught to greet mothers in the mother tongue. Some people are clearly non-delusional and rational enough to pursue their self-interest.
For what prevails in the political economy of Bangladesh is an oligarchy in cahoots with the ruling party; the Center for Policy Dialogue, a think tank, went on record as saying: “The current practice of recruiting Board of Directors [to state-owned commercial banks, or SCBs] on political grounds has to be discontinued. Studies have shown that financial reporting fraud in banks is more likely if the Board of Directors is dominated by insiders”. The level of non-performing loans (NPLs) has increased steadily since 2008, when the current government returned to power: between 2008 and 2018, the level of dud loans soared 297%. Syed Yusuf Saadat, research associate of the think-tank, observed, “In 2017, a single business group gained control of more than seven private banks.” The IMF observed that “important and connected borrowers default because they can”. Precious tax revenue - in a country where the tax-GDP ratio is a measly 10% - has been used to recapitalise depleted banks, to jack up capital-adequacy ratio from an abysmal 10% to 11.5%, still below the BASEL III requirement of 12.5%, thereby putting a sticking-plaster on a gushing wound. The CPD report observes wryly: “It goes without saying that there is hardly any justification to use (sic) public money towards compensating for the greed of bank defaulters and inefficient management of the sector.”
The paw-in-the-public-till persists: According to New Age, in 2021-22, non-performing loans resumed their upwards trajectory to 8.96% of total loans.
The case study of Islami Bank provides a detailed picture, not only of the government’s anti-Islamism, but also the paw-in-the-public-till syndrome that promotes loyalty to the dynasty. “Established in 1983 as Bangladesh’s first bank run on Islamic principles, Islami thrived by handling a large share of remittances from emigrant workers and by lending to the booming garment industry. Its troubles stem from its links with Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, which allied with Pakistan during the war of succession of 1971.” One of the first acts by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on coming to power in 2009, as we have seen, was to try “war criminals” in kangaroo courts. “Leading figures from the Jamaat were sentenced to imprisonment or hanging.”
Then came the asset-seizure. In 2017, the prime minister sent government intelligence operatives to oust senior executives and put in place her cronies: a boardroom coup. The cronies swiftly turned a healthy bank sick - “non-performing, restructured and refinanced loans came to 7.6% of the institution’s loan book at the end of 2017”. This was lower than the 11.5% average share across the industry, but was expected to deteriorate. The Central Bank reported that many of Islami’s loans breached financial regulations. “The report highlighted loans to six companies belonging to Nassa Group, a giant of the garment industry, which it says were granted without taking the required collateral and ignoring the fact that there were several Nassa subsidiaries that had defaulted in the past.” Talking about Islami Bank, Badiul Majumdar of SHUJAN, an anti-corruption pressure group, observed, wittily, “It’s like the Midas effect in reverse. Everything the government touches turns not to gold, but rather from gold to dust.”
According to the latest report from Transparency International, Bangladesh slipped one notch down the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in 2022. Iftekharuzzaman, the local executive director of the watchdog, observed that essential reforms in the banking sector had been frustrated by powerful vested interests: “the zero-tolerance stance against corruption declared repeatedly by prime minister Sheikh Hasina in the past was a (sic) political rhetoric”.
Pigs at the trough? The Pig-and-Believer duet played out its last tango in the late Soviet Union. Before continuing, the author must confess that the unhappy Believer-Pig distinction is not his. He borrows it from the English historian Richard Vinen. And Vinen uses it to explain why Communist Europe went over to capitalism without a shot being fired.
In the early 1950s, the Czech party member Zdenek Mlynar, then a student at Moscow University, was accosted by a plastered Russian. The latter had just voted in favour of keeping out a friend from the party for a minor offence. Ashamed of himself, he asked Mlynar to “call him a pig” (we know from Dostoyevsky how those Russians are given to bouts of alternating criminality and contrition.) When Mlynar inquired why, he received the following reply: “Because you are not a pig, you really believe in all this...You read Lenin, even when you are all alone. You understand? You have faith in all these ideas.” The Pig went on to become a successful military prosecutor. In the late 1970s, Mlynar went on to write, “No doubt he still gets drunk after a trial and gets someone to call him a pig” (A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 424).
The children of the nomenclatura grew up thus, seemingly to the last man and woman. They cared nothing for communism, and a great deal for their inherited privileges. As communism became more manifestly a failure, the Believers – there were still some – tried to reform the system. The Pigs made a show of ‘outward orthodoxy’, to use Vinen’s expression, but were in fact concerned only with their careers. Of course, the Pigs twigged that capitalism would allow them to pass on their privileges better, and that they were in a unique position to benefit from the transition. In the event, according to Vinen, the move to capitalism was a ‘management buyout’ (p 429). Some people lamented that self-interest, rather than idealism, had won the day. Istvan Csurka of the Hungarian Democratic Forum said that “his country had been cheated of the revolution” (p 432).
The Pigs, as in Animal Farm, know their self-interest, as do their porcine counterparts in Bangladesh. In Orwell’s novel, the pigs steal the milk on the first day of the revolution, a significant development in the plot, showing that the later exploitation and resemblance between them and man were not accidental evolutions. As to the Believers, well, an excellent Americanism portrays the tribe: there’s one born every minute.
Then, finally, we in Bangladesh turned to a tried and tested formula - the military government. When two retired generals asked for a nod for a coup to defenestrate the dynasties, Uncle Sam flatly refused, according to Wikileaks. A more avuncular mood prevailed three years later in 2007, when the entire western community raised the alarm. According to TIME: “Such was the exasperation of members of civil society and the international community at the time that, according to an April report of the International Crisis Group, diplomats from a number of Western countries, including the U.S., secretly urged [General] Moeen to intervene.” The magazine quotes the general as saying, “The situation was deteriorating very rapidly. The world saw people dying in Dhaka's streets.” The military intervention “averted a possible bloodbath,” observed The Economist in its article “The coup that dare not speak its name”.
The “minus-two” formula of 2007-8 attempted to rid the country of the two battling begums. Twice, Sheikh Hasina was refused passage on board a British Airways flight from London to Dhaka. The two women were briefly interned in the parliament building. However, the civilians were back, and Hasina was elected prime minister - with Indian cash and advice, according to The Economist - in December 2008. The army had failed to destroy the dynasties.
And what terrible fate has befallen Salman Rahman? Unsurprisingly, today he is the adviser on private industry and investment to Awami League President Sheikh Hasina, who is also (again) the prime minister. Despite his track record, he was elected MP in 2018.
Thus, Gunnar Myrdal’s prophecy that kleptocratic oligarchs succeed on the national carousel in our theme park proves itself true time and again. And these elephants in the room - bellowing and farting - draw no attention.
Yet further lootocracy awaits the jaded reader.
“While some party stalwarts, who were dropped from the central committee and excluded from the Cabinet, were guilty of actively conspiring against Hasina, others were apparently dropped for not being sufficiently loyal — for [committing] sins of omission rather than commission,” was what the American ambassador told Washington, according to Wikileaks (New Age, 17 September 2011); this came after the failed attempt to rid Hadina through the minus-two strategy under military rule in 2007-8. Loyalty must be rewarded, and corruption provides the lucre for the loyal. Thus, when the World Bank insisted in 2012 that she clean up her act by investigating corrupt officials before handing over the soft loan for the Padma Bridge, the lady turned - on the Bank. “Alas, it is easier to train the 5 km-wide river than Bangladesh’s politicians to keep their hands out of the till,” noted a Western correspondent, drily. “In June the World Bank cancelled a $1.2 billion loan, citing alleged corruption by Bangladeshi public servants.”
The bridge (mentioned above), constructed by a Chinese firm, opened last year, and has been ballyhooed by the intelligentsia and the singers and dancers - by the men (and women) of words and the men (and women) of songs. In Bangladesh, the hyped-up bridge assuages our collective self-loathing. Fayyaz Shagor, a member of the pop group Chirkoot, informed the author that Chirkoot performed concerts for the opening of the Padma Bridge, and were handsomely rewarded - with taxpayer money. That the arts serve the state needs no observation in a totalitarian society, especially against its enemies.
In all fairness, it must be conceded that Bangladeshis are not uniquely prone to assuaging collective self-loathing through megaprojects: According to development economists Hla Myint and Anne O. Krueger, less developed countries’ resentment of developed economies stem, not only from measurable differences in income, but from less rational factors such as a reaction against the colonial past and their complex drives to achieve parity. “Thus, it is not uncommon to find their governments using a considerable proportion of their resources in prestige projects, ranging from steel mills, hydroelectric dams, universities, and defence expenditure to international athletics. These symbols of modernization may contribute a nationally shared satisfaction and pride but may or may not contribute to an increase in the measurable national income.” A picture of the Aswan Dam accompanies their article.
GILLETTE V POGONOCRACY
Chhayanaut, the premier cultural institution of the country, promotes the arts on behalf of the ruling party. Its founders earned their nationalist spurs by singing songs - discouraged by the Pakistan government before and during the second Indo-Pak war over Kashmir - by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel laureate, on his hundredth birth anniversary, a lot like the Boston Symphony Orchestra not playing Beethoven on the eve of the Great War. By cocking a snook at the authorities of a country founded on Islamic unity, Chayyanaut’s defiance earned merit for heroic anti-Islamism.
Which brings us to Rabindranath Tagore and his songs.
The songs of Nobel-Prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941) - one of which constitutes the national anthem of Bangladesh - betrays the elitism of our nationalism. Demotic Bengali is sharply different from hieratic Bengali - the latter only spoken by the uber-elite, the self-consciously nationalist. Education is the national cosmetic, concealing all wrinkles of the particular. Rabindranath belongs among the educated.
Rabindranath Tagore symbolised anti-Islamism, Bengalism and pan-Bengalism, all of which makes him a prophet-like personality in the salons of Dhaka, Bangladesh. None of this would have been possible but for the Nobel Prize in literature. Sanjida Khatun observes that his protean output “has made Tagore songs an essential part of life of the Bengalis who sing them in happiness, in distress, and at work”. The mythology around Rabindranath’s songs suggests a less innocent explanation.
Ian Jack, writing on the god-man’s hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, observes: “Then again, love of literature can slide into fetishism, and from there, obscenity. When Tagore died in 1941, the huge crowd around his funeral cortege plucked hairs from his head. At the cremation pyre, mourners burst through the cordon before the body had been completely consumed by fire, searching for bones and keepsakes.” That’s not love of literature; that’s love of divinity.
Art has long been co-opted here for the purpose of propaganda. After the division of Bengal in 1905, the Hindu Bengali elite agitated for restored unity. One of these agitators was Rabindranath Tagore. He composed Banglar mati Banglar jal (“The soil of Bengal, the water of Bengal”). Dwijendralal wrote Banga amar janani amar (“Bengal is my land and my mother”); Atulprasad wrote Balo balo balo sabe (“Say, say, say everyone”). “Among others who contributed to the nationalistic movement was Mukundas, whose jatras [village plays], Desher Gan (patriotic song) and Matrpuja (Worship of the Mother), motivated the Bangalis to fight for their rights and against the despotic rule of the English.” These worked: As Percival Spear remarks, “It had been shown that the despised bourgeois might on occasion get a popular backing” (p 177).
“Bande Mataram” (“Hail to Thee Mother”) became the Congress’s national anthem, its words taken from Anandamath, a popular - and “virulently anti-Muslim” - Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and its music composed by Rabindranath Tagore (the observation on the nature of the novel comes from Stephens, p 86).
Chaterjee’s slogans - bande mataram, matribhumi (motherland), janmabhumi (birth land), swaraj (self rule), mantra, and so on - were used by militant Hindu nationalists, mostly from Bengal, and many of these words continue to resonate powerfully in Bangladesh today. Moderate leaders of the Indian National Congress did not take immediately to Chaterjee’s Hindu nationalist slogans, but were won over by their appeal to the youth during the swadeshi movement. Fuller, the Lieutenant-Governor of East Bengal and Assam, forbade the chanting of bande mataram in public. Congress’s continued emphasis on aspects of militant Hindu nationalism - such as the replacement of Urdu by Hindi, and the singing of bande mataram in schools and on public occasions - was resented by Muslims (Hugh Tinker, South Asia: A Short History (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), pp 195, 220).
“Mother-goddess-worshipping Bengali Hindus believed that partition was nothing less than the vivisection of their “mother province”, and mass protest rallies before and after Bengal’s division on October 16, 1905, attracted millions of people theretofore untouched by politics of any variety,” according to the Britannica. The swadeshi movement, as it was known, inspired terrorists who believed it a sacred duty to offer human sacrifices to the goddess Kali (Spear, p 176). What in actuality had been a purely administrative measure served to catapult national consciousness among the Hindu Bengalis. However, British officials made it clear that one consequence of the partition would be to give Muslims of Bengal a province where they would be dominant: it was a forerunner of Pakistan (Tinker, p 195). According to the Banglapedia article on the swadeshi movement, “The Swadeshi movement indirectly alienated the general Muslim public from national politics. They followed a separate course that culminated in the formation of the Muslim League (1906) in Dacca.” During the first meeting of the Muslim League, convened in Dacca in December 1906, the Agha Khan’s deputation issued a call “to protect and advance the political rights and interests of Mussalmans of India.” Other resolutions moved at the meeting expressed Muslim “loyalty to the British government,” support for the Bengal partition, and condemnation of the boycott movement.
Thus, an all-too-frequently heard Bengali song here goes: “The queen of all countries is my birth land (janmabhumi)”. The land figures prominently in the superabundance of deshattobodhok - patriotic - songs. “O the land of my country, my head touches you/You have commingled with my body….” Again: “You [martyrs] will be the beacon for the new swadesh….” While bhumi unequivocally means land, desh is more ambiguous: it can mean village or country. Since the transition from the former to the latter is far from complete, the word attempts to transfer emotions from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, mirroring inadequately the (far more successful) transition from pays to patrie, from Gesselschaft to Gemeinschaft (Finer, pp 143-4). The pejorative chasha (literally, farmer, but connotes the gauche, the uncultivated) tars all rural inhabitants (and even more in its stronger version, chasha-bhusha), and thereby the entire country, with the same brush. Patriotic songs may be seen as an heroic effort at restoration of self-esteem through imagined restoration of the physical unity of the two Bengals. The portability of song makes it a potent cultural artefact: emigres sing and hear these jingoistic songs in their new countries (typically America, Canada or Australia) where faux nationalism survives in the first generation, fortunately endowed with considerable human capital, the highly literate and numerate. The less fortunate are exhorted to love the motherland (matribhumi/janmabhumi) instead of voting with their feet. A single Youtube video, for instance, plays fifteen chauvinistic lays.
Mother, hail!...
Though seventy million voices through thy mouth sonorous shout,
Though twice seventy million hands hold trenchant sword-blades out,
Yet with all this power now,
Mother, wherefore powerless thou?
According to Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhury, “It was not the liberal political thought of the organisers of the Indian National Congress, but the Hindu revivalism of the last quarter of the nineteenth century - a movement which previously had been wholly confined to the field of religion - which was the driving force behind the anti-partition agitation of 1905 and subsequent years” (Bande Mattaram lines, and Chaudhury, quoted, Tinker, pp 192-3). Rabindranath must be regarded as a pioneer of pan-Bengalism, and the successful reunion of Bengal as our Anschluss.
After Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League came to power in 1996, the state comfortably - and permanently - ensconced Chhayanaut headquarters in a tony part of town, “in recognition of it's (sic) significant contributions for [the] last four decades to the Bangali cultural development”. “Virtually, the Chhayanaut operates unofficially as the apex body in the realm of music and dance.” The organisation, and others like it, provide psychic ammo for the government’s more muscular anti-Islamism - the soft power behind the hard power.
The hard power went on display when, in 2021, the government invited Narendra Modi to the hundredth birth anniversary of the pater patriae and fifty years of national independence, announced by said pater on 26 March, 1971. The Islamist group, Hefazat–e-Islami, asked the government to cancel the invitation, thereby ‘showing respect to the sentiment of [the[ majority [of] people in Bangladesh”. In a written statement, they labeled Modi, not inaccurately, as ‘anti-Muslim and a butcher of Gujarat”. Members of the ruling party, and, predictably enough, its student wing, the Chatra League, attacked worshippers at the national mosque on 26 March after the Friday prayer to stymie the planned protest, leading to a nationwide fracas the next two days. At least fourteen Hefazat members were shot dead by police. “The Bangladeshi authorities must conduct prompt, thorough, impartial, and independent investigations into the death of at least 14 protesters across the country between 26 and 28 March,” insisted Amnesty International, “and respect the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, said 11 human rights organisations in a joint statement today. The organisations also called on the international community to urge Bangladeshi authorities to put an end to the practice of torturing and forcibly disappearing opposition activists.”
The Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha, “a welfare organisation of dance artistes” established in 1978, similarly serves up propaganda as dance. According to noted dance-teacher and impresario Laila Hassan: “It [Bangladesh Nrityashilpi Sangstha] believes that dance not only provides entertainment, it also speaks about the life, society, and culture of the country and its people, and that the liberation war and the country's history and tradition can be presented through it”.
The Bulbul Lalitakala Academy serves a similar function: in addition to ministering to Terpsichore, the academy “plays a pivotal role in the cultural field through its regular observances of shaheed dibash [literally, “martyr’s day”, February 21, the high point of the language movement mentioned above] and independence day and celebrations of pahela baishakh and the spring festival….”
In the article “Dance Groups” of the Banglapedia, the writer observes, “Dance as an art form was seldom practised by Muslims before Gauhar Jamil set up a dance institution called Shilpakala Bhaban in 1948. After partition in 1947, despite the conservative tradition of the Bavgali (sic) society, a number of performers…contributed to removing old ways of thinking and entertainment.” The article on Bulbul Lalitakala Academy mentions “conservative Bengali Muslims”; and Chayyanaut “encountered many obstacles from [the] government of the time, because music and dance, especially of secular genre, were not much in consistence with the ideology of the Pakistani regime”. (Never mind that Ayub Khan removed Islam from the constitution (Jalal, p 58) and passed the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, that the government set up the East Pakistan Film Development Corporation in 1957, that the Iranian singer Googoosh appeared regularly on TV in West Pakistan in the ‘60s, that the dance program Nritter Tale Tale aired every week, as the author recalls….) However, the article on “Classical Dance” observes: “...it appears that, like other classical dances, Kathak developed in the courtyards of Hindu temples and got a fresh lease of life under the patronage of the Mughal rulers”. The Britannnica concurs: Kathak, born of the marriage of Hindu and Muslim cultures, flourished in North India under Mughal influence.
“Classical Dance” also states: “During British rule, Indian classical dancing was patronised by the ruling classes, such as, rajas, maharajas, nawabs and zamindars as well as by British high officials who held 'nautches' in their private chambers.” And Bulbul Chowdhury, according to the same encyclopaedia, succeeded with dance precisely “by showing that dance was part of the Muslim-Mughal tradition”. Disinformation, or, not to put too fine a point on it, lying, conduces to incoherence. Another article in the Banglapedia observes that Khaleda Manzoor-e Khuda, a regular singer on Dhaka Radio from 1951 to 1955, sang Tagore songs. “At that time as a Rabindra singer she was popularly known as Khaleda Fency Khanam.”
In an interview with the author, Benazir Salam, an expert in Indian classical dance with an MA from Rabindra Bharati, Kolkata and a teacher of dance at Dhaka University, observed of Kathak that it developed under Muslim rule, and, precisely for that reason, Chhayanaut allows its performance only at festivals, and relegates it to the tail-end.
“Against this, there are other competing conceptions of art that are never fully suppressed, such as the archaic view that places art in the same general sphere of activity as ritual (a view with which I acknowledge considerable sympathy), and the conception of art as a vehicle of moral uplift or social progress, as is common in totalitarian societies where the creation of art becomes co-opted for the purpose of propaganda (for which, by contrast, I avow a proportional antipathy).” Most of us would go along with Justin E. H. Smith in his aptly-titled book Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp 22-23); we share his conceptions of art, and our sympathies lie with him. The Russian love story, “Boy meets tractor”, finds a creepy analogy: “Men and women meet bridge”.
The conception of Muslim civilisation as hopelessly philistine, if not proto-Khomeinist, persists in Bangladesh. The following from Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora would come as a shock to teenagers and adults alike: “Female slaves were required in considerable numbers, for a variety of purposes. Some were musicians, singers and dancers - neither the status nor the style of a great house could do without a sitara, or chamber-orchestra - reciters and even composers of poetry. There were celebrated schools in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Medina that supplied tuition and training in both musical and literary skills. Such slaves were highly prized and costly (London: Atlantic Books, 2002, p 38).”
The perceptions of the Muslim world transcend boundaries. In conversation with a BNP high-up (who must remain anonymous for his and his family’s safety), he confided the total emasculation of the party; scion of a political family (an uncle had been Member of the National Assembly in united Pakistan), his campaign before this year’s election has been hogtied by the administration. His further revelations added an international complexion: the ruling party propaganda megaphone in the capitals of America and India renders their voices a squeak. (We’ve already seen its global lobbying power in the re-branding and transnationalizing of Ekushey February through UNESCO as “International Mother Language Day”.) The demonisation of Muslims finds eager listeners: anti-Islamism, like Nike sportswear and the i-phone, constitutes a global culture, from Guantanamo Bay to Kashmir to Xinjiang. The milieu echoes back to when the Red Scare and the subsequent propaganda rendered communists fair game. Operation Condor (filmed by J. Lee Thompson with Charles Bronson in the aptly-titled The Evil That Men Do (1984)), however, evokes no deja vu. From the execrable The 27th Day (1957; aliens gift bombs that kill only communists), to the inspired The Manchurian Candidate (1962), bombshell dropped smack in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, to the romantic The Tamarind Seed (1964), the commie had been denounced and demonised. In the case of Islam, the battering ram has not been so much Hollywood as indigenous actors, largely Muslim women, such as Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh, Ayyan Hirshi Ali of Somalia and her associate Theo Van Gogh, not to mention the Western fusillade of endless cartoons, the decorating of savage, undemocratic Arabs in war-paint, the Muslim-bashing far-right in Europe, the banning of headscarves and niqab in France, the Hillary Doctrine equating American security with women’s “rights” in Muslim countries, Amnesty’s “NATO: Keep the progress going!” posters in Chicago to cheer on the war machine to “save” Afghan girls….According to Pew, only 22% westerners believe Muslims respect women; hence, there’s a ready market for Islam-bashing among western (and local self-loathing Veeraswamies) by Tasnima Nasreen and Ayaan Hirschi Ali. The demonised, from Red Indians (in early Westerns, during white settlement post-Civil War, in which “The conflict between white pioneers and Indians forms one of the basic themes” until the ‘60s when there occurred “a shift in sympathy toward the Indians, the previous film depictions of whom were remarkably lacking in both understanding and appreciation”) to negroes (recall D.W. Griffith’s “masterpiece”, The Birth of a Nation (1915), apparently filmed to glorify the Ku Klux Klan reclaiming “their Aryan birthright”) to communists to Muslims, have been legitimate target practice. In Terence Young’s Safari (1956), Mau Mau (1952 - c 1963) savagery appears sui generis, as promised in the poster (“All the awesome spectacle and savagery of darkest Africa”); the earlier Simba (1955), a tad more sophisticated, uses the word “grievance” but leaves unshown (for seeing is believing in movies) the overcrowded reserves for the Kikuyu shunted off from white settlements, the Mau Mau uprising comprising “a dangerous explosion” predicted by Jomo Kenyatta in 1930 in a letter to The Times. British atrocities go unmentioned: indeed, only in June 2013 does William Hague agree to “compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection”. Without stretching facts overmuch, we can affirm that Muslims are the latest Communists. Virgil writes:
Torva laena lupum sequitur
For the fierce lion, read the miso-Islam hunting with hunger the famished skull cap and hijab.
Nor is this animosity newly founded. Malcolm X observed on TV that “Various racist groups that are set up in this country by whites and who have actually practised violence against blacks for four hundred years are never associated or identified or made synonymous with the term ‘violence’. But whites speak of Muslims almost synonymously with violence. Whenever Muslims are mentioned by them, violence is brought up. But this is not connected with any other group. This is a sort of propaganda tactic, or, what I would call, psychological warfare to, in some way, make the image of Muslims in this country be a violent image rather than a religious image.”
According to the OUP description of the book Overcoming Orientalism (2021), “Anti-Muslim sentiment, measured in public opinion polls, hate crime statistics, and legislation, is reaching record levels.”
As for those lies, damned lies and statistics, to date, the author has met every variety, but one statistic remains shtoom: the sex ratio at birth. Muslims tend to eschew the use of the ultrasound machine to learn the sex of the foetus. Aborting a female foetus causes salvational anxiety for the Prophet’s stern denunciation of female infanticide.
The World Bank interactive map reveals the SRB to be 1.05/female birth for North America. Bangladesh, despite strong son-preference, and other Muslim countries display the same ratio. India, on the other hand, scores 1.08 (down from a peak of 1.11 in 2015, according to Pew, but still one of the highest in the world; see below) and China an eye-watering 1.12. But, as behavioural economists know, stats are more art than science. The propagandist picks and chooses, conceals and reveals to the reactor - the miso-Islam. These don’t expend much energy on Hinduism, for instance, which is characterised by the Homo hierarchicus, the caste system (comprising 3,000 castes and more than 25,000 subcastles: “Intermarriage between castes remains rare,” observes a correspondent. “Housing segregation by caste is rife. You can be lynched for marrying above your caste, refusing to work for the local landed castes or even drinking from the village well.”); and a skewed sex ratio. “India has 37m more males than females….” observes The Economist. “Modern ultrasound technology, coupled with a traditional preference for boys, has led to mass female foeticide,” notes the same newspaper in “Missing Sisters”.
That caste disqualifies India as a democracy appeared self-evident to Bhimrao Ambedkar. However, “...few in the West have even a passing familiarity with him, his accomplishments, and his voluminous scholarly writings” writes Scott R. Stroud in the Chicago university blog. “Ambedkar, like Dewey, believed that democracy went beyond and below political institutions and formal decision-making procedures.” That is, “free and fair elections” alone do not make for democracy. “Ambedkar can serve a valuable role in showing us how anti-caste philosophy fits into an expanded notion of social justice. His main problematic was showing how caste divisions were cracks in the solid community we sought with our ideals of democracy. Like Dewey, he desired a community animated by shared interests and freedom. Caste is among those practices that essentialize and divide individuals. Dewey did not know much about caste, but as I show in my book, Ambedkar’s appropriation of certain parts of Dewey’s pragmatism served his need of resisting caste as undemocratic. Ambedkar becomes both a powerful pragmatist theorist of democracy and an anti-caste intellectual we can add to our courses in the West.”
A recent Pew Research Report breaks down the incidence of sex-selective abortion by religious groups: “Hindus make up 80% of India’s population but accounted for an estimated 87%, or approximately 7.8 million (0.8 crore), of the females “missing” due to sex-selective abortions [in 2000-2019]. The share of female births “missing” among Muslims and Christians during this period is lower than each group’s share of the Indian population, meaning they were less likely than others to engage in sex-selective abortions.”
This has consequences - for women, and Muslims. The Washington Post writes how the “bachelor bomb” of 37 million surplus Hindu men “threatens social stability for decades”. Male rage in India has causes beyond strident Hindu nationalism. Toxic masculinity unleashes violence against women as well, according to “Missing Sisters”. “Some men in Haryana are buying “brides” (for between 10,000 and 20,000 rupees) from other parts of India, or Bangladesh. There are an estimated 15,000 such women. Many, though, are treated as slaves. Even their children are shunned.”
In addition to the Koran, there is the work incentive. As the Economist article points out, “Moreover, recent decades have seen a sharp rise in levels of female employment in Bangladesh and Pakistan….”
In Bangladesh, the number of working women has increased 50% since 2005. “Were India to rebalance its workforce, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer”, notes The Economist in The missing 235m: that is the number of women not in the labour force.
In Bangladesh, national income has increased since 1990 (as in Asia as a whole), and in India the economy has more than doubled since 2005: yet the female employment rate has fallen from an already low 35% to 26%, while the number of working-age women has grown by a quarter, to 470m: 10m fewer women are in jobs. “Patriarchal social mores supersede economic opportunity in a way more usually associated with Middle Eastern countries,” notes The Economist: 41% of young Indians think it better if married women do not work.
In all fairness, bright blots begin to appear on this gloomy scene. A refreshing, and refreshed, generation of historians, exemplified by Peter Frankopan, manages to slough off the occidentalism of the older school. “Peter Frankopan attempts something bold: a history of the world that shunts the centre of gravity eastward,” writes a reviewer. “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” is a counterblast to another ambitious book from an earlier generation, J.M. Roberts’s Western-centric “Penguin History of the World”, which came out in 1976.”
Age has not mellowed Roberts. In his Twentieth Century: A History of the World, 1901 to the Present (London: Penguin, 1999) he observes: “Nor is the notion of Islamic unity by any means dead in Islamic lands.. Appalling events in Algeria and in Afghanistan have shown only too well what political action and atrocity it can still spawn (p 620).” Later, he dismisses the sanctions against Iraq, literally parenthetically, as something “(about which Iraq complained with great propaganda effect) (p 804)”. On the same subject, Frankopan cites the Lancet figure of 500,000 Iraqi children dead, and quotes Madeleine Albright on Leslie Stahl’s TV programme 60 Minutes: “We think the price is worth it”. Frankopan concludes: “As such Mosaddegh was the spiritual father of a great many heirs across this region. For a while the methods, aims and ambitions of a group as diverse as Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hossain, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban varied widely, all were united by a core tenet that the west was duplicitous and malign and that liberation for local populations meant liberation from outside influences (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp 491, 417-8 ).” (Robert’s silence and denial stem not merely from his maturity, but from the same motive why most of us deny our group’s actions and highlight theirs: Brian Haw spent ten years at Parliament Square protesting the Iraq sanctions, and received scant attention, to his surprise. Acknowledgement of the Iraqi child deaths, which Norman Finkestein put at 1 million (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation Of Jewish Suffering (London:Verso, 2001, p 148) and The Economist at 1.7 million, would constitute what Henri Tajfel has called social identity threat.)
The ultimately religious response from the Middle East evokes the anti-colonial struggles of earlier ages. Vittorio Lanternari observes: "Religious autonomy resolves the conflict between an outside power striving to destroy native culture and the culture's own power to resist and survive, between willful opposition to an alien culture and supine acquiescence in the demands of an alien ruling minority (The Religions of the Oppressed (trans. Lisa Sergio (New York: The New American Library, 1965), p 253)." That minority may be domiciled on home turf, as in Bangladesh, or afar - in Washington and New Delhi - or in all these places. The Miso-Islam Club.
(A doubting Thomas might be pardoned querying the dramatic ballyhooing of Bangladesh in the Western media on the same grounds: the Guardian’s recent article labelled the country “an economic miracle” undergone “in recent years” - a period coinciding with the “rise and rise” of the Hasina regime since 2009. More sober sources, such as the World Bank, display continuity rather than inspiration: “The emergence of an export-oriented garment in Bangladesh - one of the world’s poorest countries with a GNP per capita of only $170 and with 57 percent of its population in poverty - was a great success in the early 1980s.” The country profile shows a secular doubling of income per head every ten years from 1990 to 2021 - hardly a wunder geschichte. Life expectancy, fertility rate, infant life expectancy all show a similar forward trend over the time period. Interestingly, the Guardian article focuses exclusively on women in the textile business - completely ignoring the number of migrants to the Middle East and elsewhere, who are mostly male. According to The Economist (“Migration in the Gulf”), a migrant to the Middle East earns 250-350% more than one who stays home. Research shows that “by letting in so many migrants the GCC countries do more (per head) to reduce global income inequality than richer OECD countries, which send loads of aid but keep their borders relatively closed. Were the OECD countries to open their borders to the same extent as Kuwait, which has two migrants for every native, global inequality could be cut by a quarter.” Approximately 7.5 million Bangladeshis were migrants in 2010, with 90% working in the Middle East and Malaysia. Between 1976 and 2018, a total of roughly 12 million workers migrated from Bangladesh, starting from a paltry 6,078. The figure compares dramatically with the number of women (4.5 million) employed by the garment sector. According to the World Bank, a 10% increase in the share of international migrants in a country’s population leads to a 2.1% decline in the share of people living on less than $1 per person per day (the poverty level in 2005).
(Since migrants are, by definition, invisible, they do not show up in Western reports on Bangladesh, such as the Guardian fable. Being mostly men, in addition, disqualifies them for attention. Further, journeying to the pogonocratic Middle East from the local pogonocracy is not regarded as a career move by the Western media. The Middle East is where mad mullahs, mediaeval sheikhs and murderous terrorists associate in well-reported disharmony.)
THE OXFORD OF THE EAST
Corruption in Bangladesh, and in South Asia in general, takes the form not only of backhanders, but of a systemic awarding of benefits towards the elite. Consider universities.
It was Mujib’s good fortune - and Ayub Khan’s misfortune - to have met in the ‘60s for a surge in student enrolment meant that student demonstrations exploded across the world, a question of numbers, not politics. Reynolds observes: “Universities were the fastest-growing education sector in the ‘60s, with numbers rising by around 10 percent a year (p 302)”. That students were to a great extent instrumental in the overthrow of Field Marshal Ayub Khan owed entirely to the fact of their numerical explosion - a happy multiplication of foot soldiers for elite exploitation to further the agenda. Their dozen-a-dime deaths today and earlier speak of their expendable utility. The student hero became a fixture in East Pakistan-Bangladesh. Today, that hero has suffered a downward mobility to the status of villain - and why are we not surprised?
However, the figures tell a more disquieting story. Reynolds goes on to state: “The neglect of the primary sector because of national and elite priorities was a theme of many developing countries in the 1960s….For countries at the early stages of development, primary education has the lowest unit costs and highest rates of economic return….Most South Asian governments (backed by self-interested elites) invested disproportionately in higher education: India had one of the highest growth rates in Asia for university students and the lowest for primary enrollments. In the 1970s, Bangladesh and Pakistan were increasing spending on higher education at the expense of primary schools, whose share in Bangladesh fell from 60 percent in 1973 to 44 percent in 1981 (pp 302, 307, emphases added).” We see these statistics clearly bearing out Myrdal’s observation regarding elite-churning.
If we needed any further evidence, it comes from East Asia and Sri Lanka, where the figures were reversed: two-thirds of education expenditure went to primary schooling and less than a tenth to higher education. Apart from Sri Lanka, none of these countries were multi-party democracies, and some were ruled by the military. One can only conjecture what Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, if allowed to continue, might have achieved for Pakistan.
The numbers betray. The World Bank’s Human Capital index is a measure that quantifies the contribution of health and education to the productivity of the next generation of workers. Countries can range between 0 (worst) and 1 (best). It’s calculated based on health and education data during early age, school years, and adult survival rates. The HCI, as expected for Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, averages a measly .45. Compare that with .88 for Singapore and .8 for South Korea, higher than America's .7 and Britain's .78. (Incidentally, the index for Qatar and the UAE stand at .61 and .67 respectively) According to UNICEF, among South Asian countries, Bangladesh spends the least on health and education. Channelling resources to the elite threatens a middle-income trap. These were voiced by the author’s economics teacher, Wahiduddn Mahmud. He said, “building infrastructures (sic) could not ensure development of a country without improvement of human resources to utilise those properly”. He drove the point home observing, “that Germany and Japan revived the economies from destruction they had faced during the Second War because of their quality human resources.” He also blamed the poor quality of the country’s universities for the failure in producing quality human resources.
“The University of Dhaka may be regarded as the cradle of the intellectual movements floated in Bangladesh. Centering this institution there grew the educated middle class society of East Bengal,” boasts the Banglapedia article on the school. The statistics bear out the claim. This middle class fought tooth and nail to preserve and promote its interests through the extramural movements cited: “Simultaneously providing for education and research the University of Dhaka gave successful leadership to all national crises and democratic movements including Language Movement of 1952, the Autonomy Movement of 1966, the mass movement of 1969, the War of Liberation of 1971 and the movement against the autocratic rule of Lt. General Hussein Mohammad Ershad in 1990. A number of teachers, students and employees of this university sacrificed their lives in these movements.” “Cultural capital” reproduces the established order, according to Pierre Bourdieu in Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970), Similarly, cultural capital defends that order, with a slight admixture of not-so-cultured violence. It was in vain that successive governments from the ‘50s to the ‘80s pitted themselves against this bastion of bourgeois privilege, a struggle that only ceased when its representatives, the Awami League, sat firmly ensconced, initiating a reign of terror.
These heroics resulted in the monistic Palace/Forum polity, aka totalitarianism, of 1972-5 and 2009-2023. The heroes fought, not for good government, but for their own government.
Were further evidence necessary, an editorial in the daily New Age incriminates beyond reasonable doubt: When two human rights activists were imprisoned amidst universal condemnation, the Dhaka University teachers piped up for the government. One of them confessed that there was an “internal consensus” to protest any issue that went against the “interests of the government”. The fig leaves finally came off, and the Dhaka University teachers have done the full Monty.
It is, after all, “our turn to eat”.
AFTERWORD
The men of words, who neologised Western political vocabulary, appear to have been men of few words.
The words that have not entered our vocabulary are as interesting as the words that have: demagogue, totalitarianism, personality cult, oligarchy, elite….A young Bangladeshi student can reel off the Bengali equivalents of nationalism, democracy, autocracy…..The previous set of words - every one of which can be used to discredit the origins of Bangladesh and its present - have been effectively excluded from our vocabulary by the (bilingual) intelligentsia. We think of Newspeak as a dystopian possibility in a novel by an apprehensive Englishman. The language “designed to diminish the range of thought” lives and flourishes in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujib, the demagogue, was the middle class mouthpiece (Jalal, p 86), the stentorian voice of the highly educated section of the people: they decide which English words to introduce, and which to leave out. Children are enthusiastically taught the political vocabulary that goes against Mujib’s, his party’s and his daughter’s enemies, and thoroughly fail to describe their malevolence. Simultaneously, the laudatory language of nationalism and democracy, socialism and secularism in our constitution and elsewhere create doublethink: the party that embodies these noble values rises above murders, disappearances, rapes and financial plunder. This is what Zerubavel calls meta-denial: “Like “rules against seeing rules against seeing”, being “forbidden to talk about the fact that we are forbidden to talk” about certain things, or the fact that “we do not see what we prefer not to, and do not see that we do not see”, such meta-denial presupposes a particular form of self-deception famously defined by Orwell as “doublethinking” [belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” “Ignorance is strength.”], or the ability “consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then...to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed (p 53)”.
Writing in the preface, Zerubavel explains the motivation behind his book from his childhood experiences, particularly that of growing up in 1950s Tel Aviv with its unmentioned, Arab past: “Witnessing years later the tremendous pain suffered by individuals who try to resist collective efforts to quash “elephants” through forced silence further triggered my interest in the nuanced tension between what is personally experienced and what is publicly acknowledged (p 7)”.
A curious omission stalked the localising of exotic terminology by the men of words: they borrowed some - and censored the rest. And the word “demagogue” in particular never appeared as neologism, unlike democracy or nationalism, for the Greek term can denote only one person: Sheikh Mujib, Friend of the Bengali People, Father of the Nation. A comrade of the people can hardly be tainted with demagoguery or - horrors! - rabble-rousing. (Recall from 1984, “'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.)
Bankimchandra, a jingoistic, anti-Muslim nationalist had declared: “By reading English, Bengalis have learned two new words, Liberty and Independence (Tinker, p 195). According to the Britannica article on newspapers in Bangladesh, “The Bengali newspapers have relatively small circulations, a fact that reflects the low level of literacy in the country.…Although their circulation is smaller than that of the Bengali papers, English dailies exercise a disproportionate influence, because their patrons belong to the educated classes (emphases added).” Hardly a glorification of the Volk, then. A faux nationalism (as well as democracy, judiciary and the like) are to be expected given that words and their meanings do not travel (interested readers may like to read a brief entry on “translation” in A Dictionary Of Philosophy, ed. Antony Flew (London: Pan Books, 1979). To make a long story short, the meaning of a word arises from the rules for its use in society, the upshot of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s stress on the connection between linguistic activity and a ‘way of life’. Consequently, we cannot translate between languages: we can’t transfer a way of life. Words travel, ideas don't - and certain words don't travel at all).
Without doubt, the English language has done us irreparable harm: words like nationalism and democracy have been inserted into the vernacular, and the native languages have been repressed, peremptorily marginalised by Macaulay. (L.L.Zamenhof, interestingly enough in this context, devised the international language, Esperanto, to promote tolerance in strife-torn pre-war Poland. One enthusiast observes of American English that “it comes with a culture, it's not neutral. It's impossible to accept the American language in isolation, which is one of the causes of the Middle East problems”.)
This is not to suggest that every student pol has well-thumbed pages of Thus Spake Zarathustra in his hip pocket, or secretly peruses On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History late at night when parents aren’t looking, although the cult of the hero derived from these, along with passionate anarchic individualism from Rousseau’s romanticism. Byron’s poetry, as we saw above, affirms the right of rebellion for nationalism and glorifies violence in the name of liberty. But the ideas were “in the air” before and after 1952, percolating down from the men of words to the boys of action. “How many people in our own days have actually read the Capital of Marx or the works of Freud?” asks Talmon. “Few however would deny that the ideas propagated in these books have entered contemporary thinking and experience to a degree that defies measurement. There is such a thing as a climate of ideas, as ideas in the air (pp 69 - 70).”
The English literature department enjoys prestige in Bangladesh shared by no other branches of the humanities: the author was stunned to discover on the website of the University of Liberal Arts that the only liberal arts program on offer at the private, fee-based institution was English literature - neither history nor philosophy appears on the menu. The first English literature department opened at the publicly-funded Dhaka University - that “Oxford of the East” - with its founding in 1921.
“Byron was the poet of this movement; Fichte, Carlyle, and Nietzsche were its philosophers”, opines Russell of the illiberal turn in political thought. Russell’s next words chillingly predict our past and current predicament in this country, thanks to “ideational transmission”, to use Finer’s term (p 88), by means of English and English literature, the continental thinkers rendered into the Anglo-Saxon for the local Anglophiles. “But since we cannot all have the career of heroic leaders, and cannot all make our individual will prevail, this philosophy, like all other forms of anarchism, inevitably leads, when adopted, to the despotic government of the most successful "hero." And when his tyranny is established, he will suppress in others the self-assertive ethic by which he has risen to power. This whole theory of life, therefore, is self-refuting, in the sense that its adoption in practice leads to the realisation of something utterly different: a dictatorial State in which the individual is severely repressed (p 580).”
But our linguistic gatekeepers, the jingoistic Bengalists, have been equally at fault for cherry picking Western political terminology to suit their elite interests.
