The Linnet and the Leaf

The Linnet and the Leaf

If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

- W. B. Yeats, Prayer for my Daughter

Rupert Brooke: poet, warrior, and shahid

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways…

It was the year 1969, and my brother and I sat behind in the Vauxhall Victor. My father was driving, with my mother next to him. He was driving out of the narrow, trishaw-infested lane at Malibagh in Dhaka, East Pakistan leaving the house of his in-laws, my aunts and uncles and grandmother.

Suddenly, he was stopped by a mob.

“Are you a Bangalee?” they demanded to know.

My father insisted he was Bangalee, a speaker of Bengali, not an Urdu-speaking West Pakistani.

“Prove it!”

Abba asked them to bring a book by Rabindranath Tagore and he would read it out to them, fluently. No! They wanted proof, there and then. 

My uncle, meanwhile, had got wind of what was going on. He hurried down the lane, and met the mob. My uncle is dark and short, while my father was tall and fair – the way Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis were supposed to be in their imagination. Besides, he drove an expensive car, as a member of the oppressive race was expected to do.

They let him go, reassured by my Bengali-looking and Bengali–sounding uncle. To this day, I wonder what the mob would have done if my uncle hadn’t come along.

This was my first experience of ingroup-outgroup hatred. I was nine.

Years later, my mother told me about our brush with a lynch mob, after Bangladesh had split off from Pakistan. But this is anticipating events.

How did this ingroup-outgroup hatred arise?

But first, what were the two groups? As the reader must have guessed, one group purported to be Bangalees, and, for them, the other group were the West Pakistanis, our collective oppressors. West Pakistan was a polyglot affair, Urdu being the language of a small minority: according to Ethnologue, there are 74 languages in Pakistan. These include Sindhi, Pashto, Siraiki, Balochi, Brahui, and Punjabi, according to the Britannica. Urdu and English serve as Pakistan’s linguistic adhesive (the logical combination of Bengali and English is not possible in Bangladesh due to linguistic nationalism: besides, the banning of English as a medium of instruction for years has rendered us monolingual).

Like many countries (including the United States today, at least according to socialists like Bernie Sanders, et al) Pakistan was an oligarchy. Indeed, according to Robert Michels and others, society is governed by an Iron Law of Oligarchy. And, in hyper-capitalist America, it has been found that concentration in business is par for the course, with competition being the exception: Alfred Chandler, America’s leading business historian, once summed up the history of American business after the civil war as “ten years of competition and 90 years of oligopoly”.

Thus, every society appears to have a centripetal pull towards a narrow centre, in politics, organisation and business. Therefore, it is not surprising that a coteries of Punjabis came to dominate economic and political life in Pakistan. The aggrieved groups should have been the entire linguistic mosaic of Pakistan, but only the Bangalee elite in East Pakistan expressed resentment. And to further their goals, they appealed to the majority, who had the votes.

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 - for ‘the orators lead the people’ said Aristotle.

“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."

These illiterate peasant ‘brothers’, who lived one thousand miles away from West Pakistan across Indian territory, had no way of ascertaining for themselves if, indeed, the port city of Karachi was lined with gold, or whether it was just another dusty Third World town. For a demagogue’s playbook consists of these elements:

        1)  Create an enemy, no matter how fictitious;

2          2) Promise utopia;

3          3) Give stem-winder speeches arousing hatred and hope;

4          4) Disappoint.

Indeed, 4 follows logically and inevitably from 2. Sheikh Mujib promised a Golden Bengal, or Sonar Bangla, and the voters listened, and repented at leisure.

Grievance is not a fact. It has to be articulated, stimulated and directed by a leader. This is not rational. “Politics makes us hate each other, even when it shouldn’t” concludes Jason Brennan. “We tend to divide the world into good and bad guys. We tend to view political debate not as reasonable disputes about how best to achieve our shared aims but rather as a battle between the forces of light and darkness.” He observes that voters are “ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists”.

Indeed, linguistic nationalism was the bedrock of our hatred. Voters in the east felt the West Pakistanis were a homogeneous lot, ‘the enemy’ who did not speak our language. A civil war followed, and East Pakistan broke away to form Bangladesh.

“Your language is closer to you than your jugular vein”.

Insert English, French, German, Italian, Russian…in place of “your language” and you have the recipe for the First World War. Substitute ‘God’, and you have a Koranic verse (50:16). So, in essence, Bengali nationalism, like all nationalism, is a religion. I have fleshed out my arguments in The Two Religions of Bangladesh, so I won’t go into them here. The two hostile religions were Bengalism and Islam – because Pakistan was born a Muslim country, and they – the Urdu-speaking minority – were our oppressors.

But before we continue, let us look into the psychology of hatred, and why politics makes us hate each other, even when it shouldn’t.

Hatred has been created in laboratories by social psychologists, again and again. In fact, as an English teacher, I have generated hatred in my classes: when I separate the class into two groups, and have them play a competitive linguistic game, the loyalty to the ingroup, and the animosity to the other group, are remarkable.

One of the pioneers in this line of research was Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish social psychologist who had emigrated to America. He reasoned, strangely enough, that, America being a democracy, Americans would tend to be conformists because their democracy emphasised mutually shared agreements. In the early 1950s, he devised an ingenious experiment at Robber’s Cave, Oklahoma, to test his hunch. He took twenty-two schoolboys, none of whom knew each other, to a summer camp and divided them randomly into two groups. He had screened the boys for pathological traits to rule out any dispositional effects, ensuring that only the situation prevailed, rather than the inner workings of the individuals.

Each group was then separated from the other for a week, during which time they developed their own leaders, identity and culture. Sherif then threw the two groups into a series of competitive activities and games. “Hostility quickly emerged between the two groups, to the point where they could not engage in non-competitive activities without insulting and even fighting one another”, reports political psychologist David Houghton. Mere, arbitrary classification of the boys into two groups sufficed to create hostility, a situational effect.  Political parties, divided by personality, ideology, history and values must generate far greater hatred. In Sherif’s experiment, nothing was at stake; in national politics, issues like language, religion, money create a life-and-death struggle. Democracy makes us situational enemies, to echo Jason Brennan’s felicitous expression.

British social psychologist Henri Tajfel has found that hostility towards outgroups and favouritism towards one’s own can occur in the absence of any interaction between them and in the absence of any ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’ differences between the groups. The ‘situation’, and not the ‘disposition’, makes the difference. In this respect, we are all Homo psychologicus, the irrational animal, not Homo economicus, the calculating creature.

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.  

Henri Tajfel's Theory of Social Identity

Political psychologist Geoffrey Cohen did a number of scientific studies to determine how political partisanship – or what is sometimes unflatteringly called ‘tribalism’ – affects judgment about policy issues. The experiments presented participants with two contrasting alternatives – stringent or generous – of a social welfare policy. Judging each policy on its merits, participants chose the policy consistent with their ideological views. However, when the policies were attributed to either the Republican or the Democratic Party, liberals preferred the Democratic-labeled policy regardless of whether it was generous or stringent, and conservatives favoured the Republican-labeled policy regardless of the details.

This brings us to another dimension of the irrational: conformity.

In 1955, Sherif’s findings were challenged by social psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch believed that Americans could act autonomously even when the group challenged their view. To test this, he devised an experiment in which he showed subjects four perpendicular lines, A, B, C and X, where C and X were the same length, and the others shorter or longer. Asch speculated that even if the group gave the wrong answer – A = X, or B = X – the individual would not subscribe to a transparent falsehood.

The subject made few mistakes (less than 1 percent of the time). But there were seven other members of the group (who were Asch’s confederates posing as subjects). They were instructed to give incorrect answers unanimously on specific ‘critical’ trials.

Of the 123 participants in Asch’s study, the individual yielded to the group 70 percent of the time on some of those critical trials. Thirty percent of the subjects conformed on the majority of trials, and only a quarter of them maintained their independence throughout the testing. 

We conform out of two needs: informational needs (other people will have knowledge that may be useful), and normative needs (other people will accept us more if we agree with them, the need to belong). The first is rational, unlike the second. The reason is not far to seek: prior to civilization we lived in small, close bands to which we clung for security, suspicious of other groups; that is to say, for most of our prehistory until very recently over the last ten millennia, a wink. Demagogues succeed through sheer atavistic appeal.

Technology, unavailable in Asch’s time, now allows us to peer into the mind – literally. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) scans reveal which parts of the brain are active – ‘light up’ – during the experiment. When we yield to the group’s erroneous judgment, conformity shows up in the brain scan as changes in selected regions of the brain’s cortex dedicated to vision and spatial awareness (specifically, activity increases in the right intraparietal sulcus).   However, if you make independent judgements that go against the group, our brain would light up in the areas associated with emotional salience (the right amygdala and the right caudate nuclear regions). This shows that resistance to the group creates an emotional burden for those who maintain their independence. That is to say, autonomy comes at a psychic cost.

“We like to think that seeing is believing,” observes neuroscientist Gregory Berns, “but the study’s finding shows that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.”

For a literary rendition of the psychic cost of independence, the reader is directed to the masterly short story by D H Lawrence, England, My England. It is the story of a fiercely independent young man, too independent to earn a living. He depends mostly on his father-in-law, and neither of them mind; he loves his wife, children and nature. They have a happy life, until his daughter has an accident. This experience proves devastatingly disorientating. He relinquishes his autonomy, and goes to war, fighting the Germans, a cause he doesn’t believe in, and dies. 

The psychic cost of autonomy

Conformity ensures compliance, and double standards. We have seen ingroup-outgroup  hostility and favoritism at work: in the context of Bangladesh, what West Pakistan did to ‘us’ is beyond criminal, but what ‘we’ did to ourselves, as in the famine of 1974 and other events of the period, must not be discussed; in India, Narendra Modi may be a ‘mass murderer’ but he’s ‘our’ mass murderer, and so on.  

But for me – as the case should be for everyone - it is what we have done to us rather what they what they did to us that that is more troubling: there’s the forgotten famine (curiously overlooked in the article on Bangladesh in the Britannica, 15^th edition, 1988), and also the murders after our democratic transition of 1990 perpetrated by the private armies of the two political parties during the hartals when innocent bystanders were burnt alive: 16-year-old Ripon Sikder (14), fisherman Salauddin (33), rickshaw puller Badruddin (32), auto-rickshaw driver Saidul Islam Shahid (35), truck driver Fayez Ahmed (50), the young wife Yasmin Rahim incinerated on the upper floor of a bus before her husband’s eyes.....

These constitute our national omerta.

As Orwell observed in 1984: “He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.”

The present government of Bangladesh, a totalitarian state centred around Mujib’s personality cult led by prime minister Sheikh Hasina, Mujib’s daughter (surrounded by brown-nosers who have even produced a biopic with another one on her father on the way, so eerily similar to goings-on under the Kim dynasty in North Korea), indoctrinates school children starting from the age of 7 until 18. They are taught about events leading up to 1971 in selective bites – and nothing about events after 1971. The mythical, or narrative, dimension of the religion of nationalism is drilled into them with the looming threat of failing exams ever present: Sheikh Mujib loved Bengalis, hence his honorific ‘Bongobondhu’, friend of the Bengalis. Like a Messiah, he delivered the Bengali nation, the chosen people, the peculiar people, from the wicked Egyptians, and a tyrannical Pharaoh, to a land of milk and honey (the diet turned out to be one of tares, but children must not be taught these things – not good for the soul).

Trouble is, with bondhu like these, who needs enemies?

In the famine of 1974, more than a million people starved to death (government estimate: 26,000) even though there was enough food in the country (my family didn’t starve, and Notre Dame College priests fed 1,000 people every day - they bought food in Bangladesh, so food was available). According to the Britannica (famine, 15th edition, 1988), food was exported to India. Bongobondhu didn’t lift a finger to help. 

Bongobondhu set up his own private army, the Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini (National Security Force - compared by Lawrence Ziring, a political scientist, with Hitler’s Brown Shirts or the Gestapo). The Bahini terrorized the populace, killing many. And why should there be a private army in a state that is at peace and not in a state of war, or even of civil war? Alarmed, a few brave soldiers – with the connivance of the entire armed forces – put down the Lockean lion on August 15, 1975.

Fifteen years of peace and tranquillity followed, first under General Ziaur Rahman, then under General Hossain Mohammed Ershad.

Tragically, there are no words for ‘demagogue’ or ‘totalitarianism’ in the Bengali language: the former is translated as ‘people’s leader’, the latter as ‘all-devouring’, according to Google translate. The vocabulary of the minuscule English-speaking elite who are aware of the history of dysfunctional politics includes these words, but they cannot communicate with the people. We have no inner defences against these perversions.

Sheikh Mujib will long be remembered as the Jim Jones of Bangladesh (rather than its Moses).

Jim Jones was a pastor of Peoples Temple in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He set out to create a socialist utopia (just like Sheikh Mujib) in the jungles of Guyana, where brotherhood and tolerance were to replace the materialism and racism of the United States. Unlike the analphabet peasants that rallied to Mujib’s call, Jones’s followers were literate Americans. Like Mujib, he became an egomaniacal tyrant and ultimately an Angel of Death. It is one thing to kill your neighbour (like Mujib), but a different thing to kill your own children on command. The command was given by Jim Jones to his 900-plus followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Most of them obeyed willingly.

And if people can follow Jim Jones, they can follow anyone.

Jim Jones receives a Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award from Pastor Cecil Williams, 1977

In retelling the story of the emergence of Bangladesh, one is reminded of Old Major’s prophetic song in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Beasts of England.

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,

Beasts of every land and clime,

Hearken to my joyful tidings

Of the golden future time.

Soon or late the day is coming,

Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown,

And the fruitful fields of England

Shall be trod by beasts alone.

Rings shall vanish from our noses,

And the harness from our back,

Bit and spur shall rust forever,

Cruel whips no more shall crack.

Riches more than mind can picture,

Wheat and barley, oats and hay,

Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels

Shall be ours upon that day.

On Animal Farms, the pigs replaced Mr. Jones, the farmer, and in Bangladesh, Mujib and his corrupt cronies replaced the previous oligarchy. Today, Bangladesh is a kleptocracy.

As we observed above in our discussion of oligarchy and oligopoly, society at any given time consists of groups that dominate other groups. Heavily influenced by evolutionary psychology, the group dominance theory, chiefly associated with Jim Sidanius and his colleagues, views society as inherently oppressive and group oppression to be the “normal, default, condition of human relations”.  Sidanius argues that

“most forms of oppression including racism, ethnocentrism (including the oppression of religious minorities such as Jews) sexism, nationalism, and classism and as well as a number of other social attitudes, human drives and social institutions function, in part, to help establish and maintain the integrity of this group-based hierarchical structure.”

The Drunkard’s Search

A drunkard was looking under a streetlamp. A passerby comes along, and offers to help.

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

“My car keys,” he mumbles.

They look for some time, and then the passerby gives up.

“Are you sure you dropped them here?” he asks.

“No. Over there.” The inebriate indicated a darkened alley.

“Then why are you looking here?”

“The light is better here.”

The Drunkard's Search

Political psychologist David Houghton uses the Drunkard’s Search to highlight a problem with the social sciences – the invariable attempt to use quantifiable data to explain behaviour when, in fact, that behaviour is hard to explain in rational terms.

The behaviour of Bengali-speaking people in East Pakistan, including that of their leaders, such as Mujib, has been endlessly explained in terms of differential GDP growth rates between East and West Pakistan, divergent flows of foreign aid, job disparities at high levels of the bureaucracy and military, etc., etc. (Example: “During the years 1960 - 65 the annual rate of growth per capita was 4.4 percent in the West and 2.6 percent in the East” (Bangladesh, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15^th edition, 1988).

These are rational explanations. An aggrieved majority expressed discontent through its leaders against an oppressive minority. “They” exploited “Us”.

But we have seen that no rational considerations need be present to create animosity. And who defines who They are and who We are? West Pakistan, we have seen, was no monolithic entity, but a veritable Babel of tongues, dominated by a Punjabi oligarchy. The deprived were scattered throughout Pakistan. Bengali nationalism (the Us in Us versus Them) was, and is, a social construct. Let us note what Sir Ernest Barker has to say on the subject:

“The self-consciousness of nations is a product of the nineteenth century. This is a matter of the first importance. Nations were already there; they had indeed been there for centuries. But it is not the things which are simply “there” that matter in human life. What really and finally matters is the thing which is apprehended as an idea, and, as an idea, is vested with emotion until it becomes a cause and a spring of action. In the world of action apprehended ideas alone are electrical; and a nation must be an idea as well as a fact before it can become a dynamic force.”

Houghton adds the transformative potential of leaders and other individual agents as critical variables. Equally important, he says, is the the nature of the authority itself. He cites the usual suspects, Hitler, Milosevic, Hutu leaders….

I have devoted a section to the Drunkard’s Search because it is peculiarly relevant today – not only here, but in the west. The case study: Donald Trump.

Thus, in a Special Report in September 2016, a few months before the election, the Economist wrote:

“Some claim that the growing discontent in the rich world is not really about economics. After all, Britain and America, at least, have enjoyed reasonable GDP growth recently, and unemployment in both countries has dropped to around 5%. Instead, the argument goes, the revolt against economic openness reflects deeper anxieties about lost relative status. Some arise from the emergence of China as a global power; others are rooted within individual societies. For example, in parts of Europe opposition to migrants was prompted by the Syrian refugee crisis. It stems less from worries about the effect of immigration on wages or jobs than from a perceived threat to social cohesion.”

So far, so promising – in the darkened alleyway. But the very next paragraph begins with the usual rationalization:

“But there is a material basis for discontent nevertheless, because a sluggish economic recovery has bypassed large groups of people.”

We’re back under the streetlight.

In an essay by Barack Obama in the same newspaper published in October 2016, the former president observes:

“Much of this discontent is driven by fears that are not fundamentally economic. The anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment expressed by some Americans today echoes nativist lurches of the past—the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Know-Nothings of the mid-1800s, the anti-Asian sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and any number of eras in which Americans were told they could restore past glory if they just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control. We overcame those fears and we will again.”

He’s saying that American voters, like voters elsewhere, simply go nuts now and then. This is not news for political psychologists. But in the very next line he says:

“But some of the discontent is rooted in legitimate concerns about long-term economic forces.”

It is indeed difficult for the president, or the Economist, to say flat out that voters are “ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists”.

In fact, in the September 17 2016 issue of the print edition of the newspaper, the third page displays a small cartoon of Trump kissing Pepe, the frog, a sort of mascot of the alt-right.

“It is hard to criticize Mr. Trump without insulting his voters.”

(That leadership is an interaction - and not an action – between leader and follower is a theme I’ve addressed here, and I direct the curious reader thither. I will merely mention Brennan’s observation that the quality of the electorate determines the quality of the candidates.)

On November 5, 2016, a week before the election, the Economist published a chart showing voter intentions by annual family income. The picture was startling, but not unexpected. Those with income less than $20,000 were the least likely to vote for Trump and most likely to vote for Clinton. Support for Trump rose with income, instead of declining. Those with an income of more than $100,000 were just as likely to vote for Trump as for Clinton.

And finally the penny dropped.

“Political scientists find no clear economic rationale for Mr. Trump’s victory,” the newspaper announced last week.

“Mr. Trump’s race card was the winning one.”

At last. The drunkard’s search for rationality is over. The economists, addicted to the rational, have been trumped (pun intended) by the political scientists, more familiar with Human Nature in Politics (the title of the book by Graham Wallas that urged us to consider the irrational; a book also mentioned by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - “the best introduction to political psychology” - and for the same reason).

“Yet they [economic, cultural and personal fears] had not been such a big factor in voting decision-making until he made them so, by drawing out his audience’s inner grievances, like a magnet tugging at a metal splinter.”

Exactly so. We, in Bangladesh, have living memory of what a demagogue can do. Grievances and resentment are not objective facts; they have to be fanned and stimulated into a flame of hatred and dark hopes.

***

About the other tectonic shift in the west, the Brexit referendum, in a letter to a newspaper a senior lecturer in European politics at the University of Birmingham pointed out the extra- and indeed anti-rational mindset of Brexiteers. “Stressing the economic benefits of migration misses the point,” wrote Daniele Albertazzi. “The success of the campaign to leave the EU suggests that national cultures and identities matter more to large sections of the electorate than the health of the economy, and that voters may be prepared to take a risk with the latter if they believe it is necessary to defend the former. Liberal commentators such as yourselves can keep telling these people that they are wrong, but it clearly isn’t working.”

We have seen that in experiments performed by Henri Tajfel, groups were perfectly willing to forgo financial benefits rather than share with the outgroup.

The Sacred and the Profane

On December 6, 1990, General Ershad was forced to resign, apparently by a motley group of student thugs, but, in fact, by Western donors: The Cold War was over, and an anti-communist bulwark was no longer necessary. Time for democracy. As The Economist observed: “…the cold war's end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms”.

Democracy, as noted, makes us civic or situational enemies. Hitherto a peaceable people, Bangladeshis were now engaged in an orgy of violence. In one corner, stood Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League, and in the other corner stood Khaleda Zia, widow of General Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). And both commanded an army of student thugs ready to bring the other party down. There were, in effect, two private armies. The state had lost its monopoly of violence.

The Awami League is self-described as secular, and the BNP is perceived to be Islamic. In fact, the idea of the secular is totally absent in Bangladesh, and indeed in the whole of South Asia. Stalwart Awami Leaguers known to the author are, au fond, Hindus.

Like my father.

In my whole life, I have known my father to be indifferent to religion. As a child, he used to take me to the Eidgah for our Eid prayers, but that stopped soon after. I was told by his friends that, as a young man, he used to be very religious, hence his appellation, pir sahib, which stuck. In my early teens, I was confused about religion and I asked him about it. He said the important thing in life was not to harm anyone. That satisfied me.   

Even when I was a child, my parents would drag me to movie theatres to watch English movies. I understood nothing. But it was always English movies – and when the television came, English programs like The Fugitive and Dangerman. We never watched Bengali movies or read a single Bengali book.

When democracy came, I saw my father change. He took sides. In the early ‘70s, he, like most people, spoke about Sheikh Mujib with derision. Now, he became an Awami Leaguer, hating the BNP. No matter what crimes the League committed, he condoned them, whereas the BNP was the epitome of evil. Murders, rapes, immolations – nothing mattered.

My party, right or wrong.

I watched the state dissipate between these two parties, transfixed with horror and alarm. It was a Hobbesian war of all against all.

But that wasn’t all. He began to express a wish to become a Hindu. He began to keep very poor company, low-brow people who shared the same beliefs, or rather, the same hatred. And yet, in private, he told me he was afraid of God’s wrath.

He began to watch Bengali movies – only Bengali movies. And Indian Bengali movies, not local ones, which are deemed smutty and lewd, with poor acting and directing, fodder for the hoi polloi, beneath even elite contempt: such is the respect we have for the people of this country. He would spend hours poring over a Bengali dictionary. Yet, he would go to great lengths to improve his English pronunciation.

He was as mixed up as the country. And he had completely forgotten being nearly lynched for Bengali nationalism. He’d seen first-hand the Medusa features of nationalist hatred. But democratic pressure and the living room herd disallowed the dissident memory.

I would subscribe to Time magazine for him. He enjoyed reading that. One day, he read a book review about a scathing biography of Mao Zedong, and got terribly upset. He had never been a communist, but I knew what was troubling him.

“A man can’t be bad in every respect!” he remonstrated.

Pedocracy: The Cultural Revolution and the superior sensibility of children

He was comparing Mao with Mujib – both toxic leaders. He still had enough logic left in him to appreciate that men like Mao, Mujib, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Hitler…were evil.

That’s why he needed the group. People tend to be influenced irrationally by perceived authority, social pressure, and conformity, as seen in the experiments by Muzafer Sherif, Solomon Asch and Henri Tajfel.

The curious case of the Foreign Secretary, who had been my colleague at the Notre Dame College English Course, merits attention. In 1996, when the Awami League laid siege to Dhaka to overthrow the BNP government, several bureaucrats, breaching discipline and their code of strict neutrality, went over to the besieging Awami League.

This augured that every institution in Bangladesh – the bureaucracy, the military, the judiciary – would, ere long, be politicized.

My erstwhile colleague wore his Awami League heart on his sleeve. He hung a picture in his office of Sheikh Mujib, the pater patriae, against the explicit order of the BNP government. My wife and I paid him a visit at his government residence. We met his wife, also a former friend, and two daughters.

We spoke in English. Naturally.

He began his harangue. “I don’t believe in Gods that demand loyalty,” he said. Clearly, that ruled out the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – including the God of Islam. “I prefer Apollo!”

It was curious that he felt the need for some kind of deity, instead of a secular world-view. Invoking Apollo, the god of rationality, for purposes irrational seemed ironic. But the recherché revelation was yet to come.

‘And Lord Vishnu.”

Whereupon, he ordered his servant to get his seal and some paper. He pressed the seal, and embossed on the paper was an image of Vishnu. At this point, I began to doubt his sanity. His wife maintained a studied silence.

I realised it was impossible for him, as it was for my father, to live in a desacralized world (on which, below). Loyalty in South Asia is to the divine, not the Hobbesian secular state.

And since the Bengali language is spoken across the border in West Bengal in India, loyalty to the language went together with loyalty to the Hinduism of India. Extraterritorial loyalty – going beyond the sovereign’s territory – did not appear to be a contradiction. Rationality, let’s just say, is not our forte.

And nationalism has contributed to the irrational.

“If I were told that our place is the capital we live in I beg to differ. If I were told that our place is limited by the political boundaries of our country I also do not agree,” wrote Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab nationalist. As an Arab nationalist, he felt bourneless. And he gave the Egyptian person-in-the-street

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be

to quote the Romantic Shelley this time.

Egypt does not end at its borders; but continues eternal into the Arab world. Bangladesh does not end at the borders; it continues into the Bengali-speaking (and Hindu) West Bengal. As an Arab or a Bengali, we are disbodied beings.

“Nationalists,” argues Elie Kedourie, “must operate in a hazy region, midway between fable and reality, in which states, frontiers, compacts are at once both real and unreal”. Compacts, that is, not only among states, but among citizens of the same state, the social contract. The Hobbesian contract never existed, hence the private armies.

The state is weak in South Asia, and religion is the dominant force in life. Fatalism comes naturally to the South Asian. When a person leaves the house, he or she says a silent prayer, to one or more than one deity. She feels safe.

Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, made a trenchant remark in his History of Religious Ideas to the effect that, “… the reader will be able to judge the sole, but important, religious creation of the modern Western word. I refer to the ultimate stage of desacralisation. The process is of considerable interest to the historian of religions, for it illustrates the complete camouflage of the “sacred” – more precisely, the identification with the “profane”.”

Desacralisation is beyond envisioning in South Asia. We, on the subcontinent, cannot think beyond religion. The sacred and the profane are kept asunder under vigilant surveillance.

‘The return of the repressed’, in Freudian language, refers to the tendency of repressed psychic material to reemerge in the life of an individual – or society. Thus, in Europe there was ‘the spectre of communism’ and, today, fascism and, in America, racism, and anti-Semitism in both have resurfaced to bedevil society. In Bangladesh, the repression of Islam under Sheikh Mujib was reversed by General Zia; the repression of the love of English, banned from schools by Mujib to blinker the eyes of students steadfastly away from that vile, foreign tongue., never quite succeeded in pushing it below the surface, and has come into its own in full daylight. Under the Nehru dynasty, Hinduism was kept briefly in check and has flowered fully today, locating an internal enemy, the Muslims. Ataturk and the Kemalists suppressed Islam, even annulling the elector victory of Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah (Welfare) party. A non-electoral strategy was pursued by an imam called Fethullah Gulen, whose followers spread like bees throughout Turkish society, settling in every niche, subverting Kemalism from within: after the failed coup of 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initiated a mass purge of suspected Guleninsts, for the two men had fallen out (Mr. Gulen has been living in America, where he wisely betook himself after the army ousted Erbakan). But the Islamists under Erdogan are triumphant today.

Take the Language Movement of 1952 in East Pakistan, when a few young people died, it is said, for the Bengali language (apparently, the wicked Pakistanis had been attempting to kill our mother tongue and substitute it with Urdu: those who believe in this sinister plan for linguicide ignore the fate of the 74 languages spoken in West Pakistan, then and now. To date, only one language in the world has been deliberately rendered extinct – Hawaiian, due to American imperialism, but it’s  back.)

These children are designated shahid. And the innumerable mausoleums erected throughout the country are called shahid minars. Now, shahid is someone who dies for Islam – not for a language. But the religious appropriation is fascinating, to say the least. It is an explicit attempt to sanctify a nationalist movement with Islamic overtones. The day of their death is shahid dibosh, a curious amalgam of Arabic and Bengali. But even more curious is the date itself – Ekushey February, an amalgam of the Bengali and Gregorian calendars. Surely, a people’s movement would have been recorded in the local calendar. (One thing to note in passing is that the country is a paedocracy, to use Elie Kedurie’s term.)

This brings us to the origins of nationalism in Bangladesh, and South Asia. “The educated, multilingual cosmopolitan elite of Europe grew weaker,” writes the historian Norman Davies of the era before the Great War, “the half-educated national masses, who thought of themselves only as Frenchmen, Germans, English or Russians, grew stronger.”

However, in South Asia, it takes considerable education to be a nationalist, for only in schools and universities is western education imparted. And nationalism is a western ideology.

S. E. Finer, the historian of government, explains the explosion in the size of the military in Western Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thus: “In the old days, no state could have supported the cost of paying so many troops. But now they did not have to pay them more than a mere pittance. Here was a complete contrast to the eighteenth century: after all, it was the cost of the American War that led to the financial crisis in France and thereby the Revolution. This was all turned on its head, and the reason for it was that by now the ideology of nationalism had gripped the masses. It no longer seemed exceptional to be a soldier. Every able-bodied man regarded this, now, as a sacred duty. That is how, when 1914 came, so many millions of men went to their graves like sheep (italics original)”. Rational, monetary considerations gave way to extra-rational loyalty.

The best expression of the sentiment are these words by Rupert Brooke, from the only nationalist poem in English known to me:

If I should die, think only this of me:

      That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

(And he did die - of septicemia on a hospital ship off Skyros and was buried in an olive grove on that island.)

First World War: Europe gone made

But first, a revolution in education was necessary in these regions, and this was provided by Lord Macaulay. Where once South Asians had studied Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, now they were required to study English literature. Europe, and European ideas, came to the educated local. And with that came the ideas of Rousseau and the Romantics, privileging sensibility over rationality (hence, the paedocracy of Bangladesh, for children are savvier than adults; in addition, the ruling party and assorted sycophants have fully absorbed the rubbish about the “general will”, criminalizing all individual ‘deviations’ as not only wrong, but heretical, diagnosing deviants as “mentally sick”). Macaulay succeeded in his civilizing mission with us colonials beyond his wildest fantasy – and bequeathed our current fantods.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
               Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
               He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
     Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
          And by the vision splendid
          Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.


Infancy, Youth, Manhood…downhill all the way.

Hence, the army of young, student thugs with their extra-rational loyalty to political parties, especially to the quasi-nationalist Mujib dynasty.

However, European ideas are not heading our way anymore. When Emmanuel Macron decries the “leprosy” – mot juste! -  of nationalism –  our intellectuals scarcely notice.

In an authoritarian culture, where obedience to parents as opposed to independence, is inculcated from infancy, children tend to believe what they are told – especially if it comes as a textbook issued by the government. The mythology of nationalism is imbibed by many a student who evince great conviction and equal indignation if the official narrative is queried. Adolescents who pride themselves on their ‘modernity’ and ‘secularity’ (meaning, hatred of Islam) are the most indoctrinated.

On the Hofstede index of individualism, Bangladesh scores a measly 20 (the same as Singapore and China) while America scores 91 and hierarchic India scores 48, with Japan close at 46. Pakistan’s score is even lower than ours (14).  

Bangladeshis (and Chinese, Singaporeans and Pakistanis), therefore, show a preference for a tightly-knit framework in society in which individuals can expect their relatives or members of a particular ingroup to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. A society’s position on this dimension is reflected in whether people’s self-image is defined in terms of “I” or “we.” Obedience greatly outweighs independent thought in these countries.

(At the same time, Bangladeshis are highly averse to uncertainty: Bangladesh scores 60 on the uncertainty avoidance index, while the United States scores 46, India 40, China 30, Pakistan 70, Japan 92 and Singapore only 8. A high score indicates a propensity to exert control over the future rather than let things unfold. Countries exhibiting strong UAI maintain rigid codes of belief and behaviour, and are intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas. Weak UAI societies maintain a more relaxed attitude in which practice counts more than principles. Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and the Japanese are more hidebound than the others.)

But the indoctrination of children can only go so far. Five years ago, none of my female students used to wear hijab. Some wore shalwar-kameez and some wore shirts and pants. But now many students – and their mothers – wear hijab (and my students are as young as ten, graduating at fifteen). In the shopping malls, hijab used to be a rare sight; now, women, some of them speaking in fluent English into their mobile phones, are covered by the hijab. The burqua and the niqab are frequently seen. This is a recent change, indicating that government indoctrination is not only having a limited effect, but is also spurring a backlash.

Repression rarely works.