The Ayatollahs - And The Missing Hartal Pictures

 

 

There were 591 hartals between 1990 and 2011, according to the Banglapedia article on “hartal”.

 

WHERE ARE THE PICTURES?

 

Not a single newspaper published a single photo of a hartal. 

 

The answer is not far to seek: After Ershad resigned under western donor pressure, the consensus was “Democracy at all costs, even human lives”. 

 

This was what Western donors wanted, and our self-censoring editors went along.

 

Imagine a picture of a girl in flames - what would be the reaction? If not in Bangladesh, abroad the entire democratic experiment would have been discredited.

 

I’m thinking of Napalm girl, whose pictures brought home the horrors of the Vietnam war. 

 

Of course, democracy would have been similarly discredited: a Daily Star editor, Modon Shahu, told me that “We know people want martial law, but we can’t print that.” He chuckled to conceal his embarrassment. 

 

At Holiday, my article title, “Democracy, The Historical Accident”, was unacceptable, and it was revised. 

 

An entire society stood hostage to western donors and their local ayatollahs - the intellectuals. If you weren’t a democrat, you were a hick from the sticks. 

 

They lobby Washington, London, Brussels, New Delhi…for the ruling party. They pump us full of “ekattorer chetona”, “bawannor chetano”, Bengalism, dynasticism…They legitimise every crime committed by the government. 

 

And, most crafty of all, they finger the traditional ayatollahs as the boogeyman. 

 

 

Like the Napalm girl, our girls and boys were incinerated: 16-year-old Ripon took 11 days to die (The Daily Star, May 6 2001); 2-year old Meem, fortunately, died the next day; of two girls, one was incinerated beyond recognition - no one claimed her body. These are a few examples. 

 

When Iranians girls die, we commiserate: the taking of a life is heinous. 

 

But when our secular party disappears people (Haaretz), drills into people’s heads , hangs them upside down, pulls out their nails, beats their genitals…we remain silent. After all, the Awami League is not the mullahs. So, that’s OK.  

 

And the mullahs alone, strangely enough, are the danger to society. 

 

(Pictured: Napalm girl;

Screenshot of statement by Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, from Haaretz, to halt the sale of Israeli spyware to the RAB due to its horrendous human rights record.)

 

 

 

Our Fascist Circus

 

 

 

Fascists of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose, but your Blue Suede Shoes!

 

-       With apologies to Elvis (and You-Know-Who)

 

 

                                         Jackboots are soooo yesterday!

 

A Guardian article last year on Bangladesh’s “superb” economy mentioned the usual suspects - the garments factories and the garments workers.

 

Curiously enough for one of the ​most ​outstanding newspapers around, the article totally failed to mention the expatriate workers in the Middle East.

 

And thereby hangs a - marvelous - tale.

 

As Bangladesh emerges from lockdown, we will need all the remittances we can muster. Our remittances - and hence our sizable imports (we import everything, basically) - depend on the Middle East  in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular.

 

Therefore, had our government invited Mohammed bin  Salman (MBS), it would have been construed a rational manoeuvre in uncertain times - or at any time. Instead, we were treated to the august spectacle of our neighboring prime minister, Narendra “Mislosevic” Modi. (“He may be a mass murderer, but he's our mass murderer.”)

 

   Mass murderer? But he’s ours.

 

 

Irrational? No, not for everyone concerned.

 

As a people without a future - and any concern for the future - the authorities can spotlight the past to focus attention away from the present. When the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, the audience doesn’t look elsewhere. The light is on the rabbit. Such sleight-of-hand was on display on 26th March, our “independence day” engineered by the Indian Army in 1971. Who was the rabbit for?

 

The rabbit was for the rabids - the hard core of party loyalists that hate Islam and regard themselves Hindus (though they are not). The author’s family are representative samples of the rabid Leaguers. The oligarchy - as in Orwell’s 1984 - of the Inner Party backslapping each other in an orgy of patriotic and extra-patriotic fervour - by soliciting an outsider​ - was on display. ​

 

Who controls the past, controls the future.

 

Fascists were wont to pull rabbits, too. Scapegoats, in fact​:​ ​s​mall, defenseless minorities, blown out of all proportion - Muslims in India​, ​Islamists in Bangladesh, gypsies in ​fascist ​Germany​. And these minuscule minorities threaten the majority, in much the same way that a mouse threatens an elephant. To create anxiety and terror and divert attention away from present evils is a tried and tested fascist technique.

 

It works.

 

The two-minute hatred a day keeps sanity at bay.

 

In a Graham Greene short story, if I recall correctly, a British tourist arrives at an island state. He buys a lottery ticket and wins: he generously donates the money to the exchequer. The police had been on strike for months, but now they got their salary from the donation, and returned to work. However, they promptly seized the state.

 

Without the police, a stolid officer assured the donor, “The Inquisition will return”.

 

“Surely not!” exclaims the tourist.

193

The bogeyman of the Inquisition turns the country into a police state: a police state guarantees that the Inquisition does not reappear.

 

Amartya Sen (one of the signatories for the release of photo-journalist Shahidul Alam when wrongfully jailed - Alam was declared “Person of the Year” by Time magazine, although our prime minister declared him “mentally ill”) affirmed as much, like the gendarme, that The Kingdom of Bangladesh should be a police state to preserve “secularism”, despite the state worship of gods. Netra News published dire misgivings about the shout-out for Mujib on his 100th birthday on March 17th at the LSE, organised in cahoots with the Bangladesh High Commission: “As one of the world’s leading academic institutions, LSE should be committed to ensuring freedom of expression and critical and constructive comment — but  it is unclear how this will happen when it is organising the meeting jointly with a government that has imprisoned people who criticise Sheikh Mujib, the very subject of the meeting”. Quite.

 

Sen rambles on: “He 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.  Being a friend of Bangladesh, or Bangabandhu, is really a very modest way of describing Mujibur Rahman.  The fact that he did not ask for a more grand designation tells us something really important about him.  He did not seek nominal glory — people admired him instinctively.”

 

Audi alteram partem.

 

Willem van Schendel, in his History of Bangladesh, observes:

 

“There was a strong reaction from civil society: Bangladeshis acted in many ways to help the famine victims. Private voluntary organisations all over the country began providing free cooked food and relief, and government-sponsored gruel kitchens followed a little later. These efforts saved the lives of millions. Even so, 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.” Clearly, there was enough food.

 

"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’ (A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge University Press: 2009), p 181).”

 

The online Banglapedia has the same thing to say:

 

"According to some estimates, more than one million people died during the period from July 1974 to January 1975. The government estimate of mortality was, not surprisingly, only 26,000."

 

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (famine, 15th edition, 1988) confirms the case against Mujib:  “there was enough food in the country but it was exported to India”.

 

Lawrence Ziring has written a masterly account of the events leading up to the killing of Mujib in his “Bangladesh: From Sheikh Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study” (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1994).

 

"Mujib presided over a court corrupted by power. It acted as though it could shelter itself from the realities of Bangladesh. But the license that might have been ignored in some other societies, could not be ignored in a country overrun by self-styled enforcers, gouged by profiteers, and raped by government officials. With literally hundreds and thousands dying from hunger, with millions more threatened, high living in Bangladesh could only be equated with debauchery and hedonism, with irresponsibility and indifference. To anyone with a grudge or a sense of national purpose, the conclusion was the same. Deliberate efforts had to be made to reverse course, and the only option for such a reversal lay with a new team, and the only team capable of making the manoeuvre was the Bangladesh army (p 103)."

Mujib, distrustful of the army, formed his own personal army, the Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini, or National Security Force. "Opinion was strong that the paramilitary organization was no different from Hitler's Brown Shirts or the Gestapo (Ziring, p 98)." The Rakhi Bahini unleashed a wave of terror and murder.

 

Then, as we have seen, in the summer of 1974, famine struck, and Mujib did not lift a finger to help his Bengali followers.

 

Viewing the decline of their creator's popularity, the Rakhi Bahini turned, not exactly on Mujib, but on his followers. By the end of 1974, four thousand Awami Leaguers were believed to have been murdered, including five ministers. Mujib then belatedly distanced himself from the Rakhi Bahini, and called in the regular army to restore a semblance of order. This exposed the army to the full extent of the national problem.

 

On 28^th December, Mujib declared a state of emergency – effectively martial law, minus the army. He thus put the constitution – the covenant between the ruler and the ruled – aside, abandoning the three-year old document as a legacy of colonial rule. The Awami League was swept away by its leader. It was a civilian coup.

 

In January 1975, Mujib had himself declared president. "Mujib, not the Bangladesh army, had removed the constraints on the arbitrary uses of power (Ziring, p 102)."

 

What was to take the place of the Awami League? It was to be BAKSAL: Mujib's expression of the one-party state. "Thus in a more significant way, BAKSAL was meant to serve the purpose of the Bangabondhu's [Mujib’s endlessly repeated honorific: friend of the Bengalis - with bondhu like these, who needs enemies?] personal dictatorship, not the cause of national development and unity. BAKSAL was proof positive that Mujib intended to convert the country into a personal fiefdom for himself and his family members, and his many detractors did not need convincing that their once respected leader, not they, was the real threat to the nation's 'democratic' future (p 105)."

 

Mujib thereby anticipated, by some forty years, the famous (infamous?) definition of democracy proffered by Turkey’s elected strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Democracy is like a train, he said; you get off once you have reached your destination (Getting off the Train). 

 

 

 

Mujib and his ilk comprised a pack of moral monsters of the twentieth century infesting their countries around the same time: Mao and Pol Pot in Asia, Robert Mugabe (“Comrade” Bob”), Mengistu Haile Miriam (who was tried for genocide in his native Ethiopia in absentia and found guilty) and Kwame Nkruma in Africa - to name a few.

 

Either the erudite Sen blinds himself to such cross-cutting information, or he openly brown-noses the dynasty: his own words clearly confirm the latter. “People admired him (Mujib) instinctively” could, and should, read “loathed” him, but not instinctively - only by looking at the evidence of the man’s actions. Mujib was clearly an auto-genocidaire.

 

Does Sen recall, or eat, his words: ‘Freedom of expression, including through photojournalism, is extremely important for democracy”?

 

The London School of Economics was a fitting venue for complimenting our Kingdom on keeping the subjects under the cosh. The giant sucking sound heard at the university was that of Sen’s lips coming off of the backside of our prime minister, daughter of our first tyrant and president. As a Bengali, his affinity for the motherland (he claims to hail from Manikganj), and a desire, perhaps, for our Anchluss with West Bengal, explain his pirouettes.

 

Ah! Anschluss!

 

“The only good Islamist is a dead Islamist,” seemed to  opine the Nobel laureate. “There can never be too many dead Islamists,” affirmed the learned philosopher, almost. Indeed, at least a dozen of them were shot dead while protesting Modi’s presence here. 

Here follows a rogue's gallery of a sampling of  learned fascists: Martin Heidegger, Paul de Mann, T.S.Eliot, Nobel Prize winner ("totalitarianism can retain the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and give them its own meaning”), W.B. Yeats, Nobel Prize winner…. Sen appears in splendid company.

In his book, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and The Descent of the West, (New York: Penguin, 2006), Niall Ferguson fingers the intelligentsia: “The key to the strength and dynamism of the Third Reich was Hitler’s appeal to the much more numerous intellectual elite; the men with university degrees who are so vital for the smooth running of a modern state and civil society ( p 240, whence the Eliot quote).”

 

Furthermore, as a self-loathing elite ("Blasted Bangalees": Bangalee is a term of opprobrium, cue from Macaulay) a seemingly superior strongman (himself of a self-loathing elite) jacks up our pride - someone who defecates on us is considered good for our souls. Good for the complexion, it is alleged.

 

But then, we're supposed to be a miracle economy. Why the diversion? Post-war Germany was in bad shape, and scapegoating is an ancient human impulse (as the term shows).

 

Bread and circuses pacified the Roman mob. But why do we need pacifiers?

 

It couldn't be the looting of our banks by the oligarchs, their recapitalisation with scarce taxpayer money, the hounding of the Chief Justice out of the country, forcing him to seek asylum, the stolen elections, the disappearances, the extrajudicial killings, the shooting of peaceful protesters, the torture, the death squads, the illegal spyware...? Perish such curmudgeonly carpings.

 

People are happy to be exploited by those they know rather than by foreigners; and the boot-in-the-face is a Freudian need of the herd:

 

“Since a group is in no doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and is conscious, moreover, of its own great strength, it is as intolerant as it is obedient to authority. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes is strength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion from all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition....”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meddlesome Monk

“A Rural Story” - fiction based on events - and the morally challenged Fr. Timm, c.s.c. 

 

A Rural Story

 

(click above for story) 

 

Excerpt:

 

“He [Fr. Ricardo] has a vision. He thinks the Church is the archetypal civil society, neither business nor state. He wants to spread this blessing of Christendom to other parts of the world. Voluntary associations and freedom. That’s what’s driving him.”

    “But what about our civilization? Our historical development? For fourteen hundred years we’ve had military rule.”
 

    “I’ve  [black Muslim ambassador speaking] tried to reason with him. I myself am Muslim, and I can’t accept his arguments. I have known in childhood what violence can do to people. I was one of the lucky ones. But, as I said, he has friends in Congress.”
 

    I mumbled under my breath, and I didn’t care if the ambassador was listening:
 

    “Where there is love, let me sow hatred,
    Where there is pardon, injury,
    Where there is truth, error,
    Where there is faith, doubt,
    Where there is hope, despair,
    Where there is light, darkness,
    Where there is joy, sadness....”
 

* * *.  

 

The villain of this piece based on events is Fr. Timm, who recently passed away. I said nothing negative about his memory at the time.

 

 

He and the priests at Notre Dame College valiantly fed 1,000 people daily during the man-made famine of 1974.

 

Yet, in the '90s, he appeared in the Economist pages (where he was inaccurately described as a Jesuit), boasting of having got so many women to vote! He believed in democracy.

 

​"NGOs like ASA, with support groups in 40,000 villages, are canvassing women to back the secular Awami League. “In a Muslim state,” says Father Timm, ASA's American Jesuit president, “we've managed to ensure more rural women cast their vote than men.” It is, he says, “a social revolution to combat the medievalism of the fundamentalists.”” ​

 

Apparently, he had learnt nothing from the fact that 1.5 million people had starved to death under a democratically elected​​ – and fanatically anti-Islamic -  government of the same party, run by despotic pere, now by despotic fille.

​​

 

“By the end of the year [1974], 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’ (Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge University Press: 2009), p 181).’

​​

 

His belief in democracy - or, rather, faith - was evidence-transcendent.

 

 

How many religions does a man need?

 

 

Notre Dame College, where Fr. Timm taught and resided (I often saw him playing basketball with the boys), is famed not only for academic excellence, but for keeping students out of politics. These juveniles are routinely exploited by the political parties as thugs - Notre Dame, unlike I the infamous Dhaka College, kept parents informed if kids got into politics (students enroll at16 and leave at 18: they’re minors during their stay). 

 

Fr.Timm, therefore, was uniquely privileged to know how “democracy” and “politics” function in Bangladesh. He knew about the hartals enforced by student thugs who burnt people alive. 

 

An excerpt follows:

 

“Police and witnesses said six people were incinerated in the bus, a fire-burnt man jumped to death on the street and two others including a two-year-old child died from injuries at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).

 

“Three of the nine dead are identified as Meem, 2,Yasmin, 25, and Tahura, 27. Thirteen of the 15 injured admitted to the DMCH are Meem's mother Monwara, 22, Wahed, 14, Abdur Rahim, 35, Abul Kalam, 45, Rowshan Ara, 30, her son Rony, 12, Alamgir, 14, Jognu Akhter, 18, Mustafiz, 40, Saidur, 22, Babu, 8, Kabir, 40, and Rabbi, 4 (The Daily Star, June 5, 2004).”

 

 

Yet he never spoke out on the subject. 

 

(He was vocal against child labour in the garments factories, but that children were being exploited by the political parties seemed not to matter given the “greater” cause of democracy. Unsurprisingly, these boys, once criminalized, end up killing each other (see chart).)

 

 

 

[“But how is it possible that a doctrine [democracy] so patently contrary to fact should have survived to this day and continued to hold its place in the hearts of the people and in the official language of governments?" asks Joseph Schumpeter in his classic (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), pp 264 - 265).

His answer:

"The very word may become a flag, a symbol of all a man holds dear, of everything that he loves about his nation whether rationally contingent to it or not. On the one hand, the question how the various propositions implied in the democratic belief are related to the facts of politics will then become as irrelevant to him as is, to the believing Catholic, the question how the doings of Alexander VI tally with the supernatural halo surrounding the papal office. On the other hand, the democrat of this type, while accepting postulates carrying large implications about equality and brotherliness, will be in a position also to accept, in all sincerity, almost any amount of deviations from them that his own behavior or position may involve. That is not even illogical. Mere distance from fact is no argument against an ethical maxim or a mystical hope (p 266).”

"All this is settled for us by the plan of the Creator whose purpose defines and sanctions everything. What seemed indefinite or unmotivated before is suddenly quite definite and convincing. The voice of the people that is the voice of God for instance. 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 harbors a strong equalitarian element. The Redeemer died for all: He did not differentiate between individuals of different social status. In doing so, He testified to the intrinsic value of the individual soul, a value that admits of no gradations. Is not this a sanction—and, as it seems to me, the only possible sanction —of “everyone to count for one, no one to count for more than one”—a sanction that pours super-mundane meaning into articles of the democratic creed for which it is not easy to find any other (p 265)?”]

 

 

Fr. Timm had both an other-worldly and this-worldly religion – both directed, in his mind, against Islam.