Showing posts with label military rule. Show all posts

Friday, 14 June 2019

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)

Sunday, 14 April 2019

Why do civilian rulers of Bangladesh have wicked dispositions?

Is it possible that every one of our military rulers had good dispositions, and that every one of our democratically elected rulers had bad dispositions?

This seems farfetched. Instead of appealing to dispositions, explanations along situationist lines would be more illuminating.

First of all, there is no political hatred when politics is in abeyance, almost by definition. Society under military rule was not divided between us and them, ingroup and outgroup. Under military rule, there is no political hatred, simply because there is no politics.

Even in a peaceful democracy like America – invariably held up as a model for the world, ‘the city on the hill’ – democracy creates civic or situational enemies. Even before the election of Donald Trump, more than half of Democrats told pollsters that they were afraid of Republicans and almost half of Republicans said the same about Democrats.

Cass Sunstein observes that in 1960, only about 4 to 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats would be ‘displeased’ if their children married members of the opposite party; now, about 43% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats admit they would be displeased (Against Democracy, p 234).

Violence is never far below the surface even in the oldest democracy. After a Republican congressman was shot by an unstable gunman last summer, leading Democrats expressed outrage at the idea that their rhetoric had played any part. Yet they used the attempted bombings and the synagogue shooting to begin a debate about the precise degree of presidential responsibility for domestic terrorism.

In the Mother of Parliaments, tribalism has descended like an evil mantle. On June 16, 2016, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a troubled, far-right 52-year-old gardener. Working-class Labour voters, like the ones who put her in Parliament, tend increasingly to be pro-Brexit and nativist. Mrs Cox was a fervent pro-European.

She had complained to the police of abuse, but MPs do not receive police protection. This year, British Members of Parliament were advised to take taxis home, over fears that they could be attacked by members of the public over the handling of Brexit. "Personally, I have never felt this level of tension during my time in the House and I am aware that other colleagues feel the same," wrote the Deputy Speaker in an email. "Many colleagues have already been subject to widely publicized abuse and intimidation."

On January 1, the day after the national elections on December 31, 2018, a mother of four was gang-raped in the city of Noakhali, Bangladesh, for voting for the opposition (Daily Star, January 2, 2019).

“They had repeatedly insisted that I should vote for boat [the symbol of the ruling Awami League] but I cast my ballot for 'sheaf of paddy' [that of the opposition],” she said.

Around a dozen ruling party men armed with sticks entered her house after midnight, tied up her husband and children, took her outside and raped her. The woman alleged the rapists were accomplices of Ruhul Amin, a former member of Char Jubilee Union Parishad.

Her husband said that she had gone to cast her vote at Char Jubilee-14 Government Primary School centre around 11:00 am on Sunday. She took the ballot paper from the assistant presiding officer and went to a booth.

At that time, Ruhul, an Awami League man, insisted she vote for the “boat”. He allegedly tried to snatch the ballot paper as she said she would vote for the “sheaf of paddy”. But she put the paper inside the box.

This made Ruhul furious and he threatened her, he said.

We began this essay with an earlier case of political hatred, as the reader will recall.

Second, and this is closely associated with the above, is the absence of the monopoly of legitimate violence. In his lecture “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), the German sociologist Max Weber defines the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In short, under democratic rulers, the state is missing in Bangladesh (and India as well, where the RSS, the Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and others routinely act outside the state; the use of thugs in politics is widespread, as depicted in the Hindi movie Vaastav (1999)).

Sheikh Mujib had a private army (the Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini), his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, has the Chatra League and Jubo League, her rival, Khaleda Zia, has the Chatra Dal and Jubo Dal. After the slaughter by the Rakhi Bahini in the early ‘70s, we see slaughter again after 1990 – more than 80% of all hartals on this land since 1945 occurred after the miraculous year. Hartals require enormous personnel, in short, a private army.

With General Zia (1977-1981), General Ershad (1983-1990) and General Moeen (2007-2008), the military possessed the monopoly of legitimate violence. By means of democracy, it seems, we have reverted to the Hobbesian state of nature. These men may or may not have had good dispositions, but the situation they were in made for goodness.

Third, we must recall that the quality of the electorate determines the quality of the candidate pool, and ultimately the quality of governments and the rulers. Norman Davies described German voters in the 1930s as “cannibals” who elected a government of “cannibals”. The European elite have been vigilant against the return of this species of voters. In South Asia, the elite, by pandering to the people, have produced toxic rulers.

When extra-judicial killings, disappearances, battery of child and student protesters by student-thugs, allegations of threats to the former Chief Justice’s friend, and so on, and so forth, increase the popularity of the government, it can hardly be faulted for a rational course of action, aimed at maximising votes. After all, it is not Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch that put the party in power, but the people.

On the campaign trail in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, in speaking of an Australian missionary who had been raped and murdered during a prison riot, lamented that he had not been first in line to abuse her sexually. He treated allegations of his links to vigilante killings in the city of Davao, of which he had been mayor, with pride. And when he promised that he would, as president, dump the corpses of 100,000 gangsters in Manila Bay, the crowd went wild. After he was elected president of the Philippines, the country’s police killed at least 40 suspected criminals in the following two months, more than in the preceding four months combined. A human rights worker, on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, told a newspaper that Duterte was “our most popular president since Cory Aquino”.

Thaksin Shinawatra, former prime minister of Thailand, meted out bloody vigilante justice to alleged drug-runners and to government opponents in the Muslim and often strife-torn south of the country. In a shooting spree in 2003, over 2,500 people died in three months, making the prime minister a hero. The police blamed gang violence; human-rights groups accused the government of condoning extra-judicial killings by the security forces. And a panel set up in 2007 by the outgoing junta concluded that over half of those killed in 2003 had no links to the drugs trade. The panel blamed the violence on a government “shoot-to-kill” policy based on flawed blacklists. His popularity was such that it took a military coup to remove him from office. Yet, his mantle passed easily to his sister.

That the quality of voters would determine outcome is an observation as old as democracy itself. Thus we have Plato’s famous lines in The Republic:

“And those who have been of this little company and have tasted the sweetness and blessedness of this possession and who have also come to understand the madness of the multitude sufficiently and seen that there is nothing, if I may say so, sound or right in any present politics, and that there is no ally with whose aid the champion of justice could escape destruction, but that he would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all, and that he would thus, before he could in any way benefit his friends or the state, come to an untimely end without doing any good to himself or others – for all these reasons, I say the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, standing aside under the shelter of a wall in a storm of blast of dust and sleet and seeing others filled full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep himself free from iniquity and unholy deeds through this life and take his departure with fair hope, serene and well content when the end comes (496c-e).”

Compare Thucydides:

“Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude –in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude (History of the Peloponnesian War, (trans. Richard Crawley, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65).”

For Aristotle, democracy is a perversion of constitutional government: “Of the above-mentioned forms, the perversions are as follows: of kingship, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all (Politics, 1279b4-10).” “But when the many administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name – a constitution (1279a36-37).”

Aristotle’s view of democracy was to have a lasting effect on Europe. According to John Dunn, democracy was “a form of government which simply did not aim at a common good. It was a regime of naked group interest, unapologetically devoted to serving the many at the expense of the wealthier, the better, the more elevated, the more fastidious or virtuous…. Not only was democracy violent, unstable and menacing to those who already had wealth, power or pretension, it was, Aristotle taught many centuries of European speakers to mean, ill-intentioned and disreputable in itself through and through (Setting the People Free, p 50).”

It is interesting to note what Aristotle has to say about democracy, the rule of law, and demagogues. “For in democracies which are subject to the law the best citizens hold the first place, and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. For the people becomes a monarch, and are many in one; and the many have the power in their hand, not as individuals, but collectively…. At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarchy, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour; this sort of democracy is to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. The spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens; the decrees of the one correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other. Both have great power – the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind we are describing. The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all things to the popular assembly…. Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution (1292a6-32).”

We find an echo of this in Byron:

I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings—from you as me.

We have seen that democratic practice, such as it is, in South Asia, has been inconsistent with the promotion of human rights and the rule of law. There is nothing axiomatic or universal about the latter: they are values, shared or un-shared, with or without consensus. The question of abortion may be recalled.

It would be tempting to join Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in their struggle for human rights and the rule of law, but it is a fruitless endeavour. Violation brings popularity, the life-blood of toxic leaders. The followers and the followed are on the same page.

Besides, there is, as always, the problem of translation. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘rights’ must be translated into the local language. Without going into a detailed analysis, let us consider the famous definition offered by Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa. “You have more rights because you’re a majority; you have less rights because you’re a minority. That’s how democracy works.” Or take the equally revealing translation of the word ‘democracy’ made by Turkey’s toxic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said that democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.

Words travel; ideas don’t.

We recall that democracy had been a pariah world. Today, we glibly pronounce ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ as somehow entailing each other, a Holy Trinity. But, as Helen Rosenblatt, author of The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), points out:

“A common mistake we make today is to use the expression “liberal democracy” unproblematically, as if “liberalism” and “democracy” go together naturally. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably as if they were synonyms. However, for the first one hundred years of their history, most liberals were hostile to democracy, which they associated with chaos and mob rule. Certainly, the founders of liberalism were not democrats. Although he believed in popular sovereignty, Benjamin Constant insisted that it be limited and advocated stiff property requirements for voting and office holding. Madame de Staël championed the “government of the best,” which she distinguished from democracy.

“To Constant, de Staël, and many other liberals, the French Revolution proved that the public was utterly unprepared for political rights. People were ignorant, irrational and prone to violence. Under popular pressure, the rule of law had been suspended, “enemies of the people” guillotined, and rights trampled upon. Napoleon’s despotic rule, repeatedly legitimized by plebiscite, only confirmed the liberals’ apprehensions about democracy. They watched with horror as demagogues and dictators manipulated voters by appealing to their lowest instincts. It was obvious to them that the masses lacked the judgement necessary to know their true interests, and even less those of their country. Liberals accepted democracy very late and even then they thought hard about ways to contain it. They pondered methods to “enlighten” and “educate” democracy and make it safe.”

Clearly, there is a leadership role here for the elite, one that the South Asian elite is incapable of fulfilling, not having got over their colonial hangover. The post-war European elite have shown a sense of responsibility forged in the furnace of history.

In Charles Taylor’s prophetic words, “European societies have tended to follow along behind their elite cultures more than American, we said above. But this effect is magnified at the “European” level, where the running has been entirely made by these elites - with consequences which have emerged recently in referenda in various states on the Continent (A Secular Age, p 831, n 46).”

We have seen Louis Michel’s heroic manoeuvring to side line the Freedom Party, which had Neo-Nazi roots. However, in 2017, the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) formed a coalition government with hardly a susurrus from Europe. When the two last formed a government, back in 2000, the news provoked diplomatic sanctions: visits and meetings were cancelled. The Freedom Party has redefined the outgroup as Islam in lieu of their former anti-Semitism (recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital long before Donald Trump).

The refugee crisis was, in the argot of psychiatrists, the ‘trigger’ that drove voters into the arms of far-right xenophobes. The sudden upswell of an outgroup, alien in language and religion (though not the latter in Britain), made a salience for the ingroup: nationalist feeling re-emerged. This has strained the compact between the cosmopolitan elite and an increasingly nationalist society.

In 2013 the Alternative for Germany (AfD) fell short of the 5% of votes needed to enter parliament. The party had been founded to oppose EU bail-outs of debt-stricken countries like Greece, which many Germans saw as a transfer from industrious German taxpayers to feckless Greeks. The AfD was then transformed as nationalists took it over and began to rail against immigrants and Islam – an outgroup that afforded greater scope for hostility. Unsurprisingly, the AfD won 13% of the vote in 2017, making it the third-biggest force in parliament, causing some disquiet.

Although the AfD’s agenda is not remotely like that of the Third Reich (people seen giving Nazi salutes have “nothing to do with our party”, said Beatrix von Storch, its deputy leader), a new paper finds an uncomfortable overlap between the parts of Germany that support the AfD and those that voted for the Nazis in 1933.

German expellees after the war flocked to the north, where the Nazis had done well, thus upsetting pre-war demographics. In the south-west, these were preserved. It is only in areas where pre-war demographics still persist that electoral maps show strong echoes of the past. Parts of the south-west that backed the Nazis in 1933 also embraced the AfD, and those that shunned Hitler rejected it. Overall, the paper’s authors found that among municipalities with average far-right support but few expellees, a 1% increase in the Nazis’ vote share in 1933 was associated with an extra 0.3-0.5% gain for the AfD from 2013-17. The Nazis are not coming back, but nationalism has deep roots.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the Northern League, a populist party that forms part of Italy’s governing coalition, has a ready explanation for the global rise of movements like his. “It is a common factor,” he says. “The confrontation of the people versus the elite.”

Scholars agree. Since 1999 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has surveyed political scientists about European parties’ policy positions and rhetoric, yielding ideological ratings for each party on various issues. The attribute most correlated with gaining votes since 2014 has been criticism of elites.

The repression of nationalism by the European elite has been a Herculean effort at cleansing the Augean stables. Nationalism is a formidable religion, founded on the atavistic human need for ingroup-outgroup hatred, and requiring little or no education, its doctrinal dimension being well-nigh a black hole. Any enterprise built on rational foundations, such as the European Union, and not resting on a visceral myth, will be sorely tested by hoary impulses to the contrary. One can only hope (one is almost tempted to say, pray) for its future.

Whatever may be the future of the European Union, it is an undeniable fact that in certain ‘suitable’ situations, human behaviour will become pathological. “The banality of evil” is one of the most insightful expressions to have come out of our experience of evil.

Toxic leaders do not occur only in politics. They occur in business and non-profits as well, where leaders do not have the coercive power of police, spies and thugs at their disposal. One of the most toxic leaders in history (and much admired by Machiavelli) was the Pope - until one of his followers got up the guts to revolt. More recently, it took nearly fifty years for lay members of the Catholic Church in Boston to call for the ouster of toxic religious leaders involved in the sexual abuse of hundreds of young parishioners (The Allure of Toxic Leaders, p 126).

Leadership is not an action, but an interaction. People seem often to prefer toxic to benign leaders. Lippman-Blumen observes: “During their heyday, Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers, ImClone’s Samuel Waksal, Tyco International’s L. Dennis Kozlowski, Sunbeam’s Al Dunlap, HealthSouth’s Richard Crushy, Adolf Hitler, Boston’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law, TV evangelist James Bakker, and Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight, for starters, enjoyed – and many still enjoy – enthusiastic support from followers (p 4).”

To this illustrious list may be added such luminaries as Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan….

An example of toxic followers in the corporate world can be given. When a jury convicted Michael R. Milken, the ‘junk bond king’ of investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, former DBL employees arrived on Phil Donohue’s TV show. Unanimously, the still unemployed stockbrokers and administrative assistants spoke glowingly of their former boss, despite the fact that Milken’s illegal actions led to the closure of the firm and the loss of their jobs (p 4).

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Communist Party played it down, declaring it a “disaster”. Yet Maoists maintain that the Cultural Revolution was a good idea: China needed one to prevent the kind of slide towards capitalism that the country was now suffering. In May Maoist websites in China published photographs of a meeting of Mao-lovers in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province. “Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” proclaimed a red banner along one side of the room, where more than 50 people sat in rows before a large portrait of Mao.

Do not look for saints among formal leaders, warns Lipman-Blumen. Saints rarely seek elected or appointed office. She adds that “followers knowingly tolerate, seldom unseat, frequently prefer, and sometimes even creates toxic leaders (p 5).”

The best example of a created toxic leader must be Aung San Suu Kyi. A long-time military prisoner in Burma (Myanmar), she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic determination to bring democracy. However, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees streamed out of Rakhine state in south-east Burma to Bangladesh, Ms. Suu Kyi (who rules as the only ‘state councillor’, remained shtum. The UN said Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya was tantamount to “ethnic cleansing”.

Hatred of the Rohingya is the one thing that unites almost everyone in Myanmar, said another diplomat: “The extremist Buddhists, the masses, the army, and even the NLD [National League for Democracy, Ms. Suu Kyi’s party].” Even somebody of her charisma cannot stand up to her own ingroup against an outgroup perceived as alien. Nyan Win, a party spokesman and Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal lawyer, voiced the views of many in Myanmar when he told Radio Free Asia: “I think everyone knows the Bengali. There are no facial features like Bengalis’ in our Myanmar, nowhere in the country.” The Rohingya are regarded as illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh.

“If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep,” the South African social rights activist and fellow Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote.

When she finally broke her silence, her speech was described by Amnesty International as a “mix of untruths and victim-blaming”.

She found herself at the centre of global ire. Her face again adorns placards at protests across the globe but this time the chants are angry. An attempt to revoke her Nobel peace prize has garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. More recently, one of South Korea’s largest human rights groups said it will strip Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of its 2004 Gwangju prize because of her "indifference" to the atrocities against the Rohingya minority.

Thursday, 10 May 2018

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.

Sunday, 18 March 2018

Burmese Days

When a saint loses her halo, you hear a tinkle as it drops to the ground. In the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, one hears a crash.

One always doubted her ability to handle the democratic transition. For democracy is a violent form of government: witness the two World Wars. The Forum Polity has since antiquity been associated with violence.

In Bangladesh, democracy unleashed untold violence; now that democracy is dead, peace has returned.

But what explains The Saint? Western civilization has a hankering after saints. At the Vatican, an entire bureaucracy is devoted to unearthing saints. No other civilization has this craving for saints. Mahatma Gandhi squats uniquely between two civilizations.

Sainthood has been secularized. This has mostly been the work of the media and, among other things, the Nobel Prize. Even Princess Diana was canonized - as well as Aung San

Friday, 18 January 2013

Colonial Democracy (essay)

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Colonial Democracy

By Iftekhar Sayeed (about the author) Permalink (Page 1 of 1 pages)
OpEdNews Op Eds 2/19/2007 at 21:48:49

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The natives were restless that night. ‎

Hence, the imperial powers Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, ‎‎- asked the president to declare a state of emergency and impose a one-night curfew. ‎After this one-nighter, the elections scheduled for 22 January were cancelled, and the ‎caretaker government was revamped. Jubilation followed. ‎

International newspapers published the fact that the army was now running the ‎country. The Economist article on Bangladesh bore the facetious title "The coup that dare ‎not speak its name". And why dare it not speak its name? Because western powers, ‎especially the United States, want to see a Muslim country like Bangladesh to be ‎democratic. Only the spectre of civil war with one set of parties boycotting the ‎elections, and threatening mayhem, and another set contesting them showed the donor ‎countries the madness of their methods. Patrica A. Butenis, the U.S. ambassador, had ‎been so busy before the emergency that she has clearly been seen as the "Governor-‎General of Bangladesh". Other diplomats appeared to play the role of Deputy Governor-‎Generals. ‎

Civil war in Bangladesh would not have mattered much to America but for the ‎similarity such an outcome would bear to the failed experiments in democracy in Iraq and ‎Palestine. A third Muslim, democratic country in a state of civil war would have been ‎seen as too great a failure of foreign policy. The jubilation in Bangladesh was, sadly, ‎made possible by the misery in Iraq and Palestine. ‎

The paradox of being a colony and a democracy must seem very new. Yet the ‎origin of the oxymoron goes back to the time of Darius. When Darius sent to Athens for ‎the signs of submission, earth and water, the democrats were all too willing to kowtow; it ‎was the conservatives who held out. It would appear that the reforms of Cleisthenes did ‎not preclude rule under a distant monarch. After Darius conquered the Ionian cities, he ‎permitted them to practice democracy under his imperium: the tyrants were expelled by ‎the satrap Mardonius only when Darius was certain that he had subdued Ionia! Eretria ‎was betrayed by the democrats, and the punishment meted out to that hapless city ‎dissuaded even the Athenian democrats from following suit. The rest is history. ‎

‎"We quite forget that we ourselves long since passed through the town-meeting ‎stage, "observed A.T. Olmstead, "when we governed ourselves much like the Athenians, ‎and have now become a mighty world empire whose problems are those of the Persians." ‎He was writing in 1948. ‎

I wonder how many Americans perceive themselves as Persians and their ‎presidents as the members of the Achaemenid dynasty. Even more, how many of us here ‎in Bangladesh perceive ourselves as an American colony? That we pride ourselves for ‎holding three elections under the benign auspices of that mother country testifies to the ‎poverty of our insight into our true status as subjects of a vast empire, not citizens of a ‎free country. Whatever form of government we adopt, the incontrovertible fact of our ‎dominion will stare us in the face. ‎

Other parallels and dissimilarities with the Persian Empire are even more ‎illuminating of our present discomfiture. The Persians exacted tribute; America confers ‎cash. The Persians perfected the art of bribery; America is past master. Our entire elite ‎have been bought! And not only with cash, but with the more subtle currency of kudos, of ‎careers in the mother country, of respect conferred by way of labels. Persepolis lacked ‎universities to confer graduate or postgraduate degrees, held here in such high esteem. ‎

Take an egregious example. I questioned the Palestinian counselor, Faik Hamza, ‎regarding our attitude towards the Palestinians. He has been living in this country for ‎thirty years, and in all that time, he observes, he has never seen any discussions held on ‎the Palestinian subject. After the third anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat, I again ‎met Mr. Hamza. I asked him if any public commemorations had been held. He sadly ‎replied, "No." We had evinced the same neglect the previous year. Why would a ‎Bangladeshi Muslim wish to offend the imperial power by betraying the least loyalty for ‎his kindred in religion? The local chapter of Transparency International holds seminar ‎after seminar on the subject of corruption: yet how can they cast the first stone? It is ‎surely convenient for western powers that we are one of the most corrupt nations: this ‎makes us docile. Of course, the Americans have not been able to do what the Persians ‎had succeeded in doing: bribing the priests. The Persians bribed the oracles, but that is ‎not possible with Islam which has no priesthood. This makes rare exceptions like Osama ‎bin Laden possible. For a people who are supposed to espouse jihad as an obligation, ‎Muslims have been notoriously pacific under an imperial yoke. ‎

Our democratic experiment which so reminds me of the Tuskegee experiment ‎has been relegated to the back burner by all our overlords. Yet what have we learnt from ‎sixteen miserable years? That some of our politicians are corrupt and criminal, but the ‎system works just fine. We have taken as self-evident the truth of the counter-factual "if ‎it hadn't been for these venal chaps, the system would have worked". We point to ‎America: the system works there, so why wouldn't it work here? How can it be said of a ‎system that it works when it contradicts the very principle on which that system rests: ‎respect for the dignity and freedom of other people? The very fact of our fetters renders ‎false the precept of liberty. ‎

On my estimates, around forty student politicians were murdered every year ‎‎(mostly by their own members in intra-party feuds over sharing of extortion money); ‎these boys were systematically used by the parties to rotate in power. That means, over ‎sixteen years, around 800 boys died because of our democratic transition. In 2005, 310 ‎people were killed in political violence, a figure that jumped 21% to 374 in the election ‎year of 2006. Assuming that 300 people were killed in political violence every year, then ‎over sixteen years 4,800 people have died because of politics. And in the last four years, ‎‎700 extrajudicial killings by the state have been reported: killings that were immensely ‎popular with a public disgusted by violence, despite the fact that those killed were ‎Frankensteins created by the two major parties. The number of rapes committed by the ‎thugs of the political parties has not been recorded, but the Ministry of Women's and ‎Children's Affairs tells us that the number of rapes rose from 248 in 1984 to 982 in ‎‎1991, that is, just after the democratic transition, to reach the astounding figure of 2,224 ‎by 1997! We can conclude that thousands of women would have been spared the ‎agonizing humiliation of rape if the democratic experiment had not taken place. ‎

What finally brought around the elite to suspend democracy? The nationwide ‎blockades enforced by the opposition crippled the country in the second half of 2006, ‎and, as observed, the election would have brought something like civil war. American ‎interest and elite interest converged: neither wished to plummet into an Iraq-like ‎situation. That means neither the murders of young boys, nor the routine political ‎violence, nor the rapes of thousands of women could stir the elite from their apathy and ‎subservience. Only when their financial interests were affected, when business could no ‎longer be conducted and children could no longer go to school did the elite and their ‎masters put an end to a nightmare. ‎

Such are the workings of a colonial democracy. Darius would have been ‎delighted. ‎

http://iftekharsayeed.weebly.com

Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, "ŽBangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL "ŽTEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. "ŽHe is also a (more...)

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