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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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, 15th 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.
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| 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, 15th 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.
“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.
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| Pedocracy: The Cultural Revolution and the superior sensibility of children | |
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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.
