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)

Thuggocracy In India

The use of thugs in Indian politics is wide-spread, acknowledged and accepted.

Take the world’s largest volunteer organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an epitome of civil society. Founded in 1925, the flagship of Hindutva today has an all-male membership of 5 million. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, served as an RSS pracharak (a member of a hard core of RSS apostles). According to The Economist: “Some RSS groups exercise quiet influence, lobbying for more “nationalist” economic policy, for instance. Others simply wield muscle. The 2m-member Bajrang Dal, a youth branch of the World Hindu Council, an RSS offshoot, has a reputation for beating up Muslim boys who dare to flirt with Hindu girls. The 3m-strong All India Students Council is aggressive in campus politics. By threat or violent action it frequently blocks events it does not like, such as lectures by secular intellectuals. Just outside the orbit of the RSS lie violent extremist groups, such as one believed responsible for murdering leftist writers.”

At the state level, take Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal, and her Trinamool Congress party. The TMC machine, which critics say is backed in many areas by local criminal gangs, wields an intimidating presence in a state that has long been coloured by political violence. It is often said that whoever controls the ballot box controls the election. It does not help that the state police are seen as subservient to the party. Tales of corruption and extortion under the TMC are rife, and criminality by TMC street thugs has turned poor voters against the the party. Before the election of 2016, aware of West Bengal’s propensity for politically motivated violence, India’s national election commission took vigorous steps. Besides staggering the votes over several weeks, it replaced local police chiefs and election officials with its own functionaries, mounted mobile and stationary patrols and rounded up suspected thugs.  Consequently, the election was the most peaceful in West Bengal’s recent memory. Ms. Banerjee was not pleased. (Nor was the previous lot saintly: after the crushing defeat of the communist-led Left Front – in power for 34 years – in 2011, much of its street muscle went over to Ms. Banerjee.)

When Uber and Ola drivers went on strike last year in Mumbai, the strike was rendered highly effective by the strength of powerful unions, in particular one called Maharashtra Rajya Rashtriya Kamgar Sangh. Thousands would have crossed picket lines but for their colleagues who maintained solidarity by, for example, forcing strikebreakers to strip naked or by smashing their phones. Dozens trying to work were beaten up and their cars damaged.

One of the architects of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December, 1992 was L K Advani. 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. About the state elections in Gujarat in 2002, Kuldip Nayar, an Indian columnist, pointed out that Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi “did best in the area where he planned and executed ethnic cleansing” – a swing of 18 per cent in central Gujarat and 11 per cent in the north. Altogether, the BJP won 126 seats in the 182-member assembly (The Daily Star, December 19, 2002). The Bush administration refused him 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 have seen 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.

Where Failure Pays

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his otherwise stimulating article ‘India, West Bengal and East Bengal’  overlooked two leaders who would disprove ‘the fact...that no responsible political or military leader has ever played with the security of his people when military resistance seemed irrational’. They are Napoleon and Nehru.

The French revolutionaries had every reason to fear that their cause would not succeed: they were surrounded by monarchies bent on killing the infant republic in its cradle. By all rational calculations, republicanism was bound to fail. That it did not was largely the work of Napoleon. However, his astonishing military successes were due to that epochal innovation in military history: the National Army – a body of people dedicated to a set of ideas for which they were willing to die by the thousands.

Again, on his return from Elba, Napoleon knew that this time, not only was all Europe against him, but even his own country: he still destroyed 100,000 lives on a personal gamble.

In our own day, we have seen similar revolutionary wars undertaken by a nation covetous of dignity and freedom against – by all rational reckoning – seemingly invincible military might. Vietnam and Iran are the latest examples. As Joseph Conrad said, “It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world; great achievements are carried out in a warm, blessed mental fog.”

Therefore, pace Nirad Chaudhuri, it is not the “fact of the matter that East Bengal Muslims and their leaders did not know the basic principle of seeking or continuing a political conflict when faced with an overwhelming military superiority of the opponent”. The fact of the matter is that there was no revolutionary, national sentiment shared by the whole people. As Mr.Badruddin Umar has observed, the winners of 1971 were the new elite, totally divorced from the aspirations of the people. As Mr.Afsan Chowdhury has pointed out, those villagers who took up arms did so to protect their homes or as a reaction to violence against their villages, not for the ‘nation’.

There is another parallel to the actions of Sheikh Mujib: those of Nehru during the border-conflict with China. Here was a ‘responsible’ political leader who had been advised by diplomats and military experts not to confront China on the battlefield. He chose to ignore them. Nehru refused to negotiate; he was goaded on by the political class; he firmly believed that China would not attack; the army was politicised at the top and  the officers were inefficient.

The very possibility of Chinese retaliation for Indian provocation was rejected. Without a shred of evidence, the Intelligence Bureau endorsed this illogical view; those officers who questioned the assumption were shunted aside to make room for more docile soldiers. And the most docile of them all was General Kaul. The chief of general staff, without any combat command experience, was moved to active command despite the knowledge of his total unsuitability for the post! When General Thapar suggested that China might counter-attack, Nehru said that he had ‘good reason to believe that the Chinese would not take strong action against us’. Soon, the situation was out of his hand – he was a pawn of the powers he had encouraged, both national as well as international.

Therefore, it is not the Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim who has 'the disease’, as Nirad Chaudhuri put it. Rather, it appears to be a South Asian trait: intransigence, the inability to accommodate any other point of view but mine, an unrealistic appraisal of the situation – all these qualities are on abundant display in South Asia.  We see them at work in the Kashmir question in India, in the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, and in our own domestic politics in Bangladesh.

However, the real lesson of Nehru’s debacle is different. Despite losing the newly-won freedom of India to China (but for Chinese forbearance), he not only did not resign, there was not a murmur against his continued leadership. Moreover, his daughter and his grandson went on to inherit his position. Similarly, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, despite losing half the country, managed to bequeath power to his daughter. The Bandaranaike family, notwithstanding the fact that it was father who started the Tamil-Sinahlase division, managed to keep the prime ministership as well as the presidency simultaneously in the family! Our dynasties have their similar origins in fiascoes and debacles.

The experience of being ruled for several hundred years by foreigners  must have eaten away the intellectual fibre of our elites. Surely, it will take several generations before we start thinking for ourselves, and not let others do our thinking for us. Perhaps 70 years of ‘independence’ is not enough for independent thought. How long before the slave mentality finally disappears?

In South Asia, failure pays. 

My Language

LONDON

My language is Bengali (or Bangla) but I don't know it very well. I can speak well enough but I can barely read. And I can't write at all.

I was born into a middle-class family in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1960. I attended English-medium schools, like St. Joseph High School. I had to study the vernacular, but I hated it.

I envied my father who never had to study Bengali. He was born in Calcutta in 1933 before the creation of India and Pakistan (I don't call it partition because the land had been united by the British imperialists: there was nothing to partition. It had been more like the Ottoman Empire.). He attended the English-medium Hare School and in East Pakistan, St. Gregory's College, also English-medium.

My father's English was very good. At Hare School, the headmaster read his writing and told him in private, "Some day you'll be a great writer." Of course he had no wish to be a writer. But his correspondence was pure literature. He would agonize over a word, seeking the mot juste, an expression borrowed from Flaubert that he often used.

He changed his job and went on a management course, first to Istanbul, and then to London. My mother, brother and I followed. Incidentally, it was in Istanbul that I saw my first mini-skirt! This was in 1970. When my wife and I visited Istanbul in 2014, we saw women wearing hijab.

We moved to London where we had planned to stay three months and then return to East Pakistan. The country was then in the grip of two demagogues, Sheikh Mujib in the East, and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto in the West. The war began, and we found ourselves stranded in London.

My father got a job as a clerk despite having a master's degree in economics. He didn't have a British degree. We lived in cramped quarters, and I recalled the bungalow-like house that we had lived in in Dhaka, with its large compound; back then we had a car (very rare in those days) and servants. I began to resent London and longed to get back home, not realizing that things had changed.

In London, I attended Noel Park Junior School. The kids there were surprised by my English. They wondered where I'd learnt it from. I picked up an English accent, but carefully avoided the cockney the boys and girls spoke. I never said 'ain't', always 'haven't' or 'didn't'. I was a snob and I told them about the lavish life we had back home. They were plebeian, I was patrician. I felt superior, but I was a second-class citizen.

I began to long for home (now Bangladesh). Bangladesh for me then meant the sun - the heat, the humidity as opposed to the cold and rain of London. I never thought about the language.

We returned to Bangladesh in 1973. The firm where my father worked had left. Everything had been nationalized. My father had no job for a year.

Then I entered school. I will never forget the first day. My mother had bought all the textbooks and lovingly wrapped them in white paper. When I got back from school, I announced that I would never study there. Why? Because everything was in Bengali.

The government had made Bengali compulsory for all schools. This was Bengali nationalism. St. Joseph used to be English-medium, as the reader will recall, but now it was forced to teach in Bengali. The headmaster, Brother Thomas Moore, pleaded with the government to allow subjects to be taught in English; he was almost thrown out of the country.

Consequently, I loathed school. But my father introduced me to English literature. I read almost all the novels of Thomas Hardy. I read the essays of Robert Lynd. Then I discovered English poetry. I read Byron, Shelley and Keats with avidity as though my life depended on it.

I also discovered the Bible, the King James version. I didn't care about the religion, but I worshiped the language. 'Before the cock crows thrice, thou shalt regret me three times'. 'Inasmuch as ye shall have done it unto the least of these thy brethren, ye shall have done it unto me; and inasmuch as ye shall not have done it unto the least of these thy brethren, ye shall not have done it unto me'. I am quoting from memory.

I shall forever be grateful to the English language for saving me from the madness of Bengali nationalism.

Under Sheikh Mujib, we had to watch a lot of boring Russian movies on TV. We were then in the Indo-Russian orbit in the cold war. Then General Ziaur Rahman took over, and he moved us into the capitalist world. American and British  programs began to appear on TV. We moved away from nationalism towards a mild form of Islamism. English-medium schools began to reappear.



THE STUDY OF HISTORY

I began to write poetry, in English of course. My writing has been published throughout the world, even in Damascus!

I became an English teacher at Notre Dame College English course at the age of sixteen, a profession I have followed to this day.

After graduation, I began to study history, which had a deep impact on my life. I was heavily influenced by Arnold Toynbee's classic The Study of History. I began to ask myself, what was my parent culture? What culture were we heir to?

The answer was obvious: we were heir to the Muslim civilization - the Perso-Arabic civilization.. But I didn't identify with the rise of Islam, but with the history and secular culture of the Muslim world.

My wife and I enrolled in the Persian (Farsi) language course at the Iranian Cultural Center. I chose Persian, rather than Arabic, because Persian had once been used here, in the Indian subcontinent. You can hear traces of Farsi in Hindi item songs.

In the film Sharavi, Amitav Bachchan sings this line: "Imtehan ho gai intezar ki". Both the words 'imtehan' and 'intezar' are Persian (meaning, respectively, examination or test and waiting).

Again, in the item song Mahi Ve, we hear the words "Ek taraf ishq hai tanha tanha". One-sided  love is lonely, lonely. These are Persian words.

After a few months, I was able to read Persian classics with a little help. Sheikh Sa'adi and Omar Khayyam came alive. We had lost these treasures because of British rule. We had become Anglicized. It was not only the literature that we had lost. We had lost precious concepts. While reading the Gulistan, I came across the words 'zel Allah'. Sa'di had dedicated his book to the king, whom he described as the shadow of Allah. This is the Muslim, secular concept of kingship or ruler. A king must never be overthrown - no, not even criticized. One is immediately reminded of the Middle Eastern monarchs, emirs and sultans. In Bangladesh, General H M Ershad had been zel Allah, but he was overthrown by the western donors. We have learnt democracy from the west, but what we had were two dynasties.

Khomeini was told by learned mawlanas that the Shah of Iran was zel Allah. He scoffed at the idea. That was wrong. Today Iranians regret overthrowing the Shah.

When the East India Company ruled India, it had a policy of non-interference in religious matters. However, the Christian evangelicals (such as William Wilberforce, he of the anti-slave movement) refused to go along. A 'secular' solution was found: teaching English literature. It was felt that this would modernize India along English lines. But the evangelicals insisted on missionary activity. And despite the objections of the Company, missionaries began to arrive.(That the modernization of India largely failed is attested by recent events in India: India acquired an opposition only after the Bharatiya Janata Party demolished a mosque: the architect of the plan went on to become Home Minister and, finally, deputy prime minister.)

My point is this: did the study of English literature turn Indians into Christians? Then why should the study of Persian literature turn us into fundamentalists? Today, hundreds of students study English literature at Dhaka University. Their intellectual fair ranges from the atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the learned piety of John Milton.

I now had my own civilization. True, I still love English and I write in English. But that is because of an inescapable historic fate. The fact must be faced that we had been conquered. Do I love the English? Not at all. I think in terms of civilizations now, not nation-states, and England is a part of western civilization. I agree with Susan Sontag's statement: the white race is the cancer of human history.

According to the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah, the nation-state experiment has failed in South Asia. It has failed in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Each unit has reverted to its own civilization.

The idea of nationalism came from Western Europe. The idea was born of a reaction to Humean skepticism. Kant wrote a critique of pure reason, but the noumenon-phenomenon distinction proved unsatisfactory. The final result was Fichte's philosophy. For Fichte, the world was an extension of the ego. The ego spoke German. Fichte gave several addresses to the German nation. There was no German nation at the time. The idea was to have deadly consequences for Europe.

Our intellectuals imbibed the idea and dreamt of a nation-state. They brought disaster upon us, with the death of 700,000 people (this is the figure given by Albert Reynolds, who rejected the Indian figure of 3 million; that's plausible, for otherwise we would have to believe that the Pakistan army had been more efficient than the American military which killed 5 million Vietnamese after dropping more bombs than in the entire second world war).

But ideas never travel, only words do. In their conception of a nation-state based on the Bengali language, there was glaring incoherence. The Bengali language is spoken across the border in the Indian state of West Bengal. These people are Hindu, and from the beginning until now, nationalists have been pro-India and pro-Hindu. But this is a denial of nationalism. For a nationalist, the nation-state must be sufficient unto itself, with no external loyalties. No nationalist can consistently make the assertion that we are a nation-state and that at the same time we belong to the Indic civilization.

My wife and I spent an evening with a top-ranking bureaucrat. He was an ardent nationalist. He kept a picture of Sheikh Mujib, the father of Bengali nationalism, in his office even when it was illegal to do so. He told us that he didn't believe in the Abrahamic god who demanded loyalty. He was more at home with the likes of Apollo and the Hindu pantheon. With considerable pride, he showed us an instrument for embossing Shiva on his stationery. We ran from his house.



Yet the bureaucrat is typical of a nationalist in Bangladesh. My parents were nationalists and they loved Hinduism. As an agnostic myself, I find it impossible  to comprehend how one can love any religion. All religions are equally good or bad.

Indeed, nationalism itself is a religion. It has all the seven dimensions of a religion as adumbrated by Ninian Smart in his The World's Religions (see The Two Religions of Bangladesh). It is small wonder that I have never felt any affinity for nationalism.



Further, Bengali nationalism is not a shared idea. The mass of Bangladeshis have no conception of a Bengali nation-state. The elite and the people lead separate lives. I once investigated the role of cinemas in Bangladeshi life. In the cinema halls, I saw mostly day labourers, rickshaw pullers and garments factory workers - no gentleman or lady. In newspapers and on TV, the latter decry the tastes of the former, looking down their collective noses. An interview of people was conducted by a television channel, and it was found that no one could identify the meaning of a certain historically important nationalist day. That nationalism - which implies a total collective - is not shared by most people must be a source of considerable embarrassment for the elite nationalists.

And even among the elite, there is no loyalty to the nation-state. Almost all of my cousins live in the United States. One of the worst things about being a teacher in Bangladesh is the sure knowledge that most of your students will quit the country for good. When a student goes to the principal of Notre Dame College for a reference, he lectures him on his duty to study abroad and then come back to the country. I'm not against emigration: but in Bangladesh  it is the children of the well-to-do who emigrate, not those down-at-heel. When taking a flight from Kuwait, one encounters a long queue of Bangladeshis returning to their country. These people are labourers, they have nothing but the power to labour. These workers are widely employed in the Middle East and it is their remittance that helps pay for our imports. I would not mind the least if America took these people, but America takes the best minds - it is called brain drain.

Again, from the very initiation of Bangladesh, there has been rejection of its status. This was the reaction of the Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Our nationalism bred a new nationalism, and the whole of the Chittagong Hill Tracts demanded autonomy. The Chakmas don't speak a different language, but speak a dialect of Bengali. But that was enough to alienate them from Bengali nationalism. In this, they anticipated the English-speaking Scottish nationalists. An insurgency ensued in the south-east, and we did what West Pakistan did to us when we wanted autonomy - we attacked them militarily. Rebellion always brings swift retaliation.

Our nationalists take pride in being a Bengali nation-state. But do we have a state at all? We are totally dependent on western foreign aid. Without aid, Bangladesh would have ceased to exist. That is cause for shame, not pride.

The elite of Bangladesh also suffer from cultural cringe. This is a feeling of inferiority to western civilisation. The feeling dates back to colonial times, and was successfully inculcated in us by British imperialists. We admire all things western - including their political system. When somebody is praised by westerners, newspapers rush to print the story and the individual is lionised. There are over 10,000 NGOs in Bangladesh, financed by western donors. We have become an outpost of western civilisation. We should be able to stand up and say: non serviam. 

Our inspiration comes from Europe, but what is Europe today? Not a congeries of nation-states

Each sequestered in its hate

but a supranational union with its own currency, its own bureaucracy, its own judiciary and its own parliament. Europe has been through two terrible wars, and it wants to shun that path forever.

Does all this mean we must be fundamentalists? Let's look at Persian and Arabic literature. The Gulistan   is an entirely secular work of art. Omar Khayyam was a hedonist and atheist. The Arabian Nights is very earthy literature, modeled on the Persian Hezar Afsane. The Perfumed Garden is the Kamasutra of the Arabic world. The Shahnama is based on ancient Iranian fables. Ferdousi wrote:

Besi ranj bordam
Dar in sale si
Ajam zinde kardam
Bedin Farsi

He had laboured thirty years to revive the Persian language.

Inja zi, wa jame behesht mi saz

Live here, and make heaven's wine, wrote Omar Khayyam. I listen to Persian songs too. My favourite is Zemestoon by Sheila. Persian songs are mostly the product of Iranian exiles living in the United States.The culture is life-affirming, not life-denying.

The people of Iran are ruled by fundamentalists, but they are secular. Most Iranian women don't wear strict hijab anymore. And they have plenty of premarital sex. Homosexuality is rampant. The have revolted in private. The mullahs have failed.

Indeed, the appeal of fundamentalists is that fundamentalism is unhistorical, ignoring the 1.400 years of Muslim civilisation. The Ummayad dynasty, for instance, was secular and this-worldly. In Bangladesh (as in the whole of India) the religious strand of Islam known as Sufism flourished since the thirteenth century. Fundamentalists have almost no place for Sufi shrines. Since 2013, 14 Sufi saints have been killed by militants. The phenomenon of the pir, or Islamic holy man, has been attacked by fundamentalists. Former president, General Ershad, used to be a murid (loosely translated as follower) of the Atroshi pir. 

It may be alleged that I do not love my country. I love my country enough to live here when all my peers are living abroad. I may not love the language, but that is something entirely different. My love of my country can best be expressed, not by me, but by a great writer. George Orwell wrote these lines while in Burma. He was describing an Englishman who had gone to Burma as a young man and had returned after a brief stint in England.

"Something turned over in Flory’s heart. It was one of those moments when one becomes
conscious of a vast change and deterioration in one’s life. For he had realized, suddenly,
that in his heart he was glad to be coming back. This country which he hated was now his
native country, his home. He had lived here ten years, and every particle of his body was
compounded of Burmese soil. Scenes like these—the sallow evening light, the old Indian
cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets—were more native to
him than England. He had sent deep roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country." 

Flory had come to love Burma. For me, Bangladesh is a set of images, memories, sensations. My wife and I have traveled to every corner of Bangladesh.  Love of one's country should not be talked about too much, but should be acted on.

But what kind of government should we have, assuming we, and not foreigners, can determine our own destiny? 1.400 years of Muslim history reveals monarchy to be our best system of government. But we have no royal family. So we must settle for the next best thing: military rule. In Muslim history, all our rulers had been military rulers. There was no separation of the military from the civilian. In Bangladesh, civilian government has always led to violence and worse. In the early '70s, the private army of Sheikh Mujib terrorized the countryside; in 1974, under his rule, more than a million people starved to death in a famine. There was enough food in the country, but it was exported to India (see Famine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition). This is what love of India has done for us.

When democracy returned in 1991, under donor pressure, there was unceasing violence between the two parties. Not content with burning vehicles, they resorted to burning people to death. Besides, in a democracy, the minority is never safe. Under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Hindus were persecuted. All our best rulers had been military rulers: General Zia, Ershad and Moeen. We have no place for John Locke; Thomas Hobbes, yes, but not John Locke.

Bangladesh is not going to achieve modernity along western lines. We have to find a different route.