Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Rational Reasons

[For Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Irrational Reasons, click on the title.]

Do the elite have extra-rational reasons for their faith in democracy? Yes, as we have seen. However, they also have eminently rational reasons for pretending to have faith in the system.

For depth of analysis, we will consider faith and pretended faith in the God that failed: Communism.

In the early 1950s, the Czech party member Zdenek Mlynar, then a student at Moscow University, was accosted by a very drunk Russian. The latter had just voted in favour of keeping out a friend from the party for a minor offence. Ashamed of himself, he asked Mlynar to “call him a pig” (we know from Dostoyevsky how those Russians are given to bouts of alternating criminality and contrition.)  When Mlynar inquired why, he received the following reply: “Because you are not a pig, you really believe in all this...You read Lenin, even when you are all alone. You understand? You have faith in all these ideas.” The Pig went on to become a successful military prosecutor. In the late 1970s, Mlynar went on to write, “No doubt he still gets drunk after a trial and gets someone to call him a pig” (Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 424). 

The children of the nomenclatura grew up, pigs almost to the last man and woman. They cared nothing for communism, and a great deal for their inherited privileges. As communism became more manifestly a failure, the Believers – there were still some – tried to reform the system. The Pigs made a show of ‘outward orthodoxy’, to use Vinen’s expression, but were in fact concerned only with their careers.

Of course, the Pigs twigged that capitalism would allow them to pass on their privileges better, and that they were in a unique position to benefit from the transition to capitalism. In the event, according to Vinen, the move to capitalism was a ‘management buyout’ (p 429). Some people lamented that self-interest, rather than idealism, had won the day. Istvan Csurka of the Hungarian Democratic Forum said that “his country had been cheated of the revolution” (p 432).

While the communist threat remained alive, it was American foreign policy to promote non-democratic rulers and strongmen in the Third World. We have seen that both Sheikh Mujib and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto appealed to the poor with their socialist ideas to win elections. The CIA actions against Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende constituted the end of the socialist wave that began in the late 1960s, according to Ayesha Jalal ( Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A comparative and Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p 84). Both leaders were destined to be killed by the army. General Ziaur Rahman came to power in 1977; he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and reversed Mujib’s socialism and nationalisation with a program of privatization and denationalisation, moving the country firmly towards free markets and capitalism. He was killed by army personnel in 1981. General Hussein Mohammad Ershad (1982 – 1990) continued the manoeuvre to the right. 

In the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick was perhaps Ronald Reagan’s most influential foreign policy advisor. In her obituary, The Economist observed that “she supported military interventions, covert proxy wars, the coddling of anti-communist dictators and the full-blooded, unapologetic pursuit of America's national interests”. America had loss its confidence under Jimmy Carter; she felt no need to compromise or apologise, coming out fighting against an ‘expansionist’ Soviet Union.

Her 1979 article ‘Dictatorship and Double Standards’ seethed with realism:

“No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratise governments, anytime and anywhere, under any circumstances.” “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.” “The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers.”  

When the Cold War ended, the West reversed its policy: now it would champion democracy. The myth was born that on December 6, 1990 General Ershad was forced to resign by the thumotic student thugs of the political parties. The reality is more banal: The General didn’t jump, he was pushed – by the western donors. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the number of democracies in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 4 in 1989 to 33 in 1995 (The Economist, September 7th 1996, ‘Survey of Sub-Saharan Africa’, p. 5). About this epidemic of freedom, anthropologists Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their book Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999) says: “It cannot simply be a coincidence that, now that the West ties aid to democratisation under the guise of multi-party elections, multi-party elections are taking place in Africa (p 118).” And in Bangladesh.  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”. And it was only in 1991 in Harare, Zimbabwe that heads of state declared that the Commonwealth should promote democracy and human rights. “When the Commonwealth moves collectively, that is, when all countries are pursuing the same objective of free and fair elections and good governance, it can act against countries that don’t even pay lip service to those values,” wrote Sir Donald McKinnon, Commonwealth secretary-general 2000-2008. “The fact that Zimbabwe and Gambia are no longer in the Commonwealth is because of a reluctance by the leaders of those countries to accept, adhere, commit and administer those values.” Apparently, Bangladesh at least pays “lip service” to the values of the Commonwealth (and no more, as we shall see.).

Money that had hitherto been channeled through the state now began to flow to non-state actors – NGOs. Unsurprisingly, these have proliferated. Again, Chabal and Daloz make an astute observation: “The political significance of such a massive proliferation of NGOs in Africa deserves closer attention. Our research suggests that this expansion is less the outcome of the increasing political weight of civil society than the consequence of the very pragmatic realisation that resources are now largely channeled through NGOs (p 22).” In other words, a rational response to monetary rewards.

Between, 2000 and 2005, Bangladesh languished at the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index; in 2013, the World Bank scrapped South Asia’s biggest foreign-funded infrastructure project, the Padma bridge, because of corruption by Bangladeshi officials. It is naïve to argue that there is corruption everywhere in Bangladesh except among NGOs. It has been estimated by economist Abul Barkat that only 25% of donor money reaches the poor in Bangladesh (New Nation, September 26, 2003); the remainder goes towards meeting administrative costs, including salaries. Chabal and Daloz observe that “...there is today an international ‘aid market’ which Africans know how to play with great skill. Indeed, there is very little doubt that NGOs spend an excessive proportion of their budget on furnishing their members with sophisticated and expensive equipment (from computers to four-wheel drives), leaving all too little for the development projects which justify the work of the NGOs in the first place (p 23).” This observation can be made of Bangladesh verbatim. Dr. Mozaffer Ahmed, economist and former chairman of Transparency International Bangladesh, echoed Abul Barkat when he observed that “Beneficiaries get only 20 to 22 percent of the foreign funds while [the] rest are used as ‘cost of fund’ meaning house rent, salary and other expenses”. According to The Economist: “There are about 20,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangladesh, probably more than in any other country.”

Therefore, it is not surprising that a BBC survey found that every section of society was suspicious of NGOs. Only three percent surveyed wanted to give them more power - and only two per cent admired social work, the 'least admired' of all kinds of work.

I became quite friendly with a top NGO honcho, and over dinner at a party, he gave me his job description. “I’m supposed to speak well of the West, say how good it is….” He had no illusions. Today, he lives in Baridhara, a posh enclave in Dhaka city.

Here is a sprinkling of facts about the income of NGOs and their connection with democracy. The reader should keep in mind the fact that the annual per capita income in Bangladesh is $4,200 (on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis). 24 local NGOs were given Takas 15 million - $260,000 – by USAID, DFID and the Swiss Development Corporation to observe the elections in 2001(at the exchange rate at the time). Another NGO – Association of Social Advancement – garnered Takas 10m - $175,000 - to meet monitoring expenses alone (The Daily Star, July 25, 2001 and August 11, 2001). And, again to meet election monitoring costs, the Coordination Council for Human Rights in Bangladesh received Takas 7.6m - $133,000 - from ‘an institution in the Netherlands’ (The Bangladesh Observer, April 5 2002). And Acting High Commissioner of Australia, Dr. Michele Forster, handed over a cheque for Takas 405,000 to the Executive Director of Democracy Watch, Ms. Taleya Rahman, for a Democracy Festival in northern Bangladesh (Observer, March 16 2002). Before the local (Union Parishad) level elections of 2003, eight NGOs were granted Takas 23,000,000 ($383,333) by the Danish aid agency DANIDA to monitor the elections – and some familiar names and acronyms crop up, such as, Democracy Watch, Bangladesh Manobadhikar Bastobayan Sangstha, ASA, NEOC, MMC....( The Daily Star, January 21, 2003).

The manifest function of NGOs is to promote civil society (as well as development); their latent function is to purchase the loyalty of the elite.

The total silence of the NGOs and civil society in general on the subject of student thugs killing each other over turf can be explained in terms of their eagerness to please donors: the thugs are an integral part of the democratic process. If they did not take to the streets (hartal), the ruling party would continue in power.

People like Tahmima Anam write for the BBC and the Guardian and, I’m sure, other western publications. In the latter, she wrote that “I can insist that the story of Bangladesh is not the story of a secular country that has turned to radicalism: it is the story of a country that has, against all odds, survived, even flourished.” Whether Bangladesh has flourished or not is moot: statistics on Bangladesh are hard to find. But for my present purpose that is neither here nor there. (When statistics are available, they are often depressing; for instance, the official unemployment rate is an enviable 4.4%. However, about 40% of the population is underemployed; many persons counted as employed work only a few hours a week and at low wages. The only industry, the garments sector, is incapable of absorbing these surplus workers. And the outlook for even this one industry is gloomy as labour-replacing machines take the place of unskilled workers.)

When I tried to portray an unflattering picture of Bangladesh and its toxic leadership (which is mentioned in neither the BBC nor the Guardian articles), I met with resistance, at least, and indifference, at worst.

I recall writing to New Hope International, and the editor sending me a terse note saying that if I found democracy so deficient, what alternative did I propose? Earlier, the chief editor had said that they would have been happier if I had attributed the violence I described to the market-friendly policies of the World Bank and the IMF!

I approached the Christian Science Monitor – they weren't remotely interested. I wrote to The Nation – thinking that this paper would surely be concerned about the plight of teenage boys used as thugs by the political parties; I never even heard from them.

I sent an article to the New Statesman. I got a reply saying that the relevant editor would get back to me after the Christmas holidays. I never heard from him again.

Then, my own analysis told me what was going on – these major newspapers were part of what I have come to call ‘The Freedom Industry’. Since their readers have been indoctrinated into believing that democracy is God's gift to humanity (George Bush's phrase), any criticism of democracy would not go down well with them. Prestige and money were at stake.

Finally, I learned about the Alternative Media/ Indy media.

My first ‘break’ came when Csaba Polony of Left Curve published a cycle of poems on the murder of student politicians by student politicians. I was grateful: I realised that criticism of students – who were supposed to have overthrown a dictator in 1990 – would only be acceptable to low-budget, low-circulation. non-mainstream newspapers and magazines.

And that turned out to be the case: I sent my article to an online journal called Axis of Logic. The editor was breathless with excitement: he immediately published it, and even tried to call me from America – but it wasn’t  easy to get through to Bangladesh. (The article is called The Freedom Industry and Student Politics in Bangladesh.)

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.