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.)

 

 

 

General Ershad passes away

General Ershad has passed away. May he rest in peace.

He gave us nine years of peace and stability himself before the western donors, with the Cold War over, pushed him (plunging us into toxic politics). He gave us no more than that, though - no frisson of irrational loyalty to a cause, no ideological horripilation....

He wasn’t much loved because he was non-ideological, uncharismatic, the anti-hero. He was boring as civilization. 

He privatized state assets, but that was at the behest of the Bretton Woods sisters; otherwise, aid money would have been cut off (which finally proved his undoing). He boasted to me of paving 8,000 km of highway and generating 3,000 mw of electricity. But numbers are so dull.

His leadership was rational, matching ends to means, not inspirational, not inspiring hatred or fear enough to kill or die for. Nobody was burnt alive or beaten to death on high streets on his watch. No women were raped for finding themselves on the wrong side of the political divide. It was a pedestrian provision of safety and security, a good administration, but perhaps not enough to stifle a yawn.

He never interfered with the judiciary, taking each case thrown at his face by a judge with equanimity, as the executive should.  How times have changed! 

O tempora! O mores! 

There was no politics under the General, hence the absence of animosity, group solidarity and other-directed malice. We got along.

Nor did he take himself seriously. You could laugh at him in newspapers and meetings or stage a play like “The Captain of Kopenick” to mock his military rule, and get away with it. 

It will doubtless be years, if not decades, before a staid, moderate, reasonable gentleman reemerges. He should be given a state funeral to remember the end of a rational administration of the country. 

Mendacity in Bangladesh

Pravda told the 'Truth'

"There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death."

- Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


 



Writer Tahmima Anam says that “The founding fathers of Bangladesh were also interested in another idea, one that had yet to fully take root in Pakistan: democracy.”

“But far more than our neighbour, India, the political leadership in Bangladesh had had a troubled relationship with democracy (emphases added). Again and again the army has muscled into power.”

The emphases above show how the writer sidesteps the issue as to who killed democracy first and made it impossible - by her own account, not the army. But for the army, the country would have sunk in the Ganges.

(Our redoubtable neighbour, India, has been an autocracy from day 1 - or, at least, since 1962, when Nehru lost the Sino-Indian war. He didn’t resign; nobody asked him to resign; not even the opposition. His biographer, Michael Edwards, has observed that “It is difficult to believe that in any other democratic state he and his cabinet could have survived”. But India was not a democratic state.)

Clearly Nehru was an autocrat. He delivered the message to India that the executive is unaccountable: it can get away with anything. Nehru was the first Maharaja of modern India.

Today, India - following inexorably from Nehru’s logic - has a mass murderer for prime minister, twice elected. For as long as he remained chief minister of Gujarat, where he was complicit, for want of a better word, in a pogrom that killed 1,000 Muslims, America refused him a visa.

Indian democracy rests, no doubt, on rationality: rational voters exchange ideas and information in the political bazaar, and the soundest views and the most factual evidence transcend other concerns and considerations.

This is the democracy so admired by Tahmima Anam - the path, not only sadly but wantonly, not taken by us.

Look closely: instead of rational, deliberative politics in fine democratic forums, the Indian gentleman (spare the ladies!) prefers a blunter instrument- a sledgehammer taken to a mosque.

Thus, in India today, we have thuggocracy, not democracy (unless the two are synonymous). And, because of the felicitous absence of democracy here before 1990, we have only recently, after that annus mirabilis/annus horribilis (according to taste) reached that nadir of human development, to the horror even of the familiar brutes on our streets and the exotic fauna of our zoos, could they but speak.

“The longest-standing example of this was the dictatorship of General Hossain Mohammed Ershad, who ruled Bangladesh for nine years, destroying our nascent democratic institutions and creating the foundations for the unbridled corruption that has since hobbled the nation.”

But she had already written that our political leaders played footsie with democracy: so how did Ershad destroy our never-nascent democracy?

Furthermore, it appears that Ershad, alone among the luminaries, created “the foundations for the unbridled corruption that has since hobbled the nation”.

There was, therefore, no corruption before Ershad. On that score, even the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Bangladesh is surely mistaken in the matter of our prelapsarian incorruptibility (along with other error-vendors and yellow journalists).

General Ershad in mufti

The elephant in the room was, of course, the famine of 1974, which trifling non-event seems to have slipped her mind. There was enough food in the country, but it was exported to India (famine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, 1988). Various sources, including the Banglapedia, estimate the number dead at 1.5 million. This was a massive case of government failure (failure of a non-military, elected government.)

People like me and my wider family did not starve. The priests at Notre Dame College started a feeding program in 1974; every day, they filled 1,000 bellies. They were able to get food in Bangladesh, not from outside it. Thus, the biggest national failure - what WE did to US, and not what THEY did to US - was a democratic failure.

Our second puerile ludo of democracy was played after 1990 among contending children. As children without adults, their will was law (percipient readers will notice an attempt to sneak in the parable of The Lord of the Flies!)

About this period of democratic awakening, she congratulated herself and her compatriots (some departed to a higher realm prematurely, dispatched by the student thugs in hartals): “For three consecutive elections, we have had a large and enthusiastic electorate who have ushered in freely elected governments and representative parliaments. Although young and sometimes faltering, we have been understandably proud of our fledgling democracy”.

Proud, indeed, of arson and immolation, vandalism and the dexterous use of the Molotov cocktail. DIY bomb-making became de rigueur.

And here’s the loudest laugh: the elections were phony. Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell crunched the numbers and found that the elections of 1996 and 2001 were not on the up and up (1991 was an exception). Yet the Carter Center and the European Union had vetted the eye-wash. Our authoress, it seems, has partners in the recent tendency not to call a fact a fact, but to cook a hodgepodge of post-truth for the mass consumption of an ever-gullible - dare I say it? - electorate.  (A brief search for Walter Mebane in the Economist search facility will yield the article, Political Science: Election Forensics, How to detect voting fiddles, February 22, 2007. This article is publicly available, yet not a single newspaper thought we had the right to know, and seems to have outmatched even Pravda in its economy with the truth.)

In retrospect, it is not the eleven years of General Ershad’s rule, but the succeeding 30 years of thuggocracy that seem to mirror the General a latter-day Augustus (whereas the civil strife preceded Augustus, here, it followed General Ershad’s illegal imprisonment).

In history, one man may be a bulwark against chaos, or watch helplessly the spread of chaos from behind prison walls, knowing he would have stood firm against the advance of the factions, had he been, like the Roman god, in command.

*   *.  *

(Interested readers are directed to the author’s expanded essay Bangladesh, and the Lucifer Effect – The Allure of Toxicity: A Situationist Explanation of the Evil in Bangladesh)