Toxic Leaders in South Asia - Why We Follow Them

The highest level of human growth, according to Abraham Maslow, is that of transcendence. Transcendence, for Maslow, encompasses the need to rise above the interests of the self, to find fulfillment in helping others reach their potential (Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Resist Them (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p 129).

According to Lipman-Blumen, control myths are rationalisations that we use to persuade ourselves to act or desist from acting, and these are deep-buried in our subconscious existential, psychological and psychosocial needs. “Both because of and despite the fact that they travel incognito, these powerful control myths prevent us from even attempting to overthrow toxic leaders (p 130).” She lists several control myths, but the most powerful and positive ones come at the end, or at the top, for they promise ennoblement and immortality, thus speaking to the needs that Maslow describes as self-esteem, self-actualisation and transcendence. A few samples follow (pp 135-136).

“This leader is an unique being. Participating in his/her vision will make me unique, too.” (Self-esteem and belonging; self-actualisation and transcendence.)

“Whatever promises the leader makes will come true.” (Safety)

“This leader’s vision is so ennobling, I would follow her to the ends of the earth.” (Self-actualisation and transcendence)

“When I am part of the leader’s group, I can do no wrong.” (Aesthetic [order, symmetry and beauty]; self-actualisation and transcendence)

“Being part of the leader’s group fills me with a sense of doing something really important.” (Cognition and transcendence)

“The vision is worth any sacrifice.” (Transcendence)

“Attaining the vision through my heroic efforts will earn me immortality.” (Transcendence)

The writer adds: “Believing in the special, god-like qualities of the leader makes it difficult to evaluate his claims to mana.”

“They beat her to death with their clubs,” wrote a student about his teacher. “It was immensely satisfying.”

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionary bugle to advance” first sounded 52 years ago, on May 16th 1966, when Mao approved a secret circular declaring war on “representatives of the bourgeoisie” who had “sneaked into the Communist Party, the government, the army and various spheres of culture”. Between May 1966 and Mao’s death in 1976, which in effect ended the Cultural Revolution, over 1 million died, millions more were banished from urban homes to the countryside and tens of millions were humiliated or tortured.

How could an entire nation follow a toxic leader like Mao Zedong? Jean Marie-Lupmen has a few answers. She also explains the allure of toxic leaders in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and other places like Cambodia and the Soviet Union.  

Mao stood on the threshold of Paradise, Communism, the end of prehistory and the beginning of history. A few million deaths seemed a paltry sacrifice in a cost-benefit analysis. He stood at the terminus of human civilisation, the Prophet over the Promised Land, with his eager Communist disciples.

Charles Taylor, although the winner of the Templeton Prize, is clear-eyed about the history of Christianity, unlike Larry Siedentop, and the dangers to the devout. He observes:

“So religious faith can be dangerous. Opening to transcendence is fraught with peril. But this is particularly so if we respond to these perils by permanent closure, drawing an unambiguous boundary between the pure and the impure through the polarization of conflict, even war. That religious believers are capable of this, history amply attests. But atheists can as well, once they open themselves to strong ideals, such as a republic of equals, a world order of perpetual peace, or communism. We find the same self-assurance of purity through aggressive attack on “axes of evil”, among believers and atheists alike. Idolatry breeds violence (A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007) p 769).”

Thuggocracy In India

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

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

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

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

One of the architects of the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December, 1992 was L K Advani. The breaking of the mosque triggered riots in which an estimated 1,000 people died. He  became home minister (twice) and then deputy prime minister. About the state elections in Gujarat in 2002, Kuldip Nayar, an Indian columnist, pointed out that Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi “did best in the area where he planned and executed ethnic cleansing” – a swing of 18 per cent in central Gujarat and 11 per cent in the north. Altogether, the BJP won 126 seats in the 182-member assembly (The Daily Star, December 19, 2002). The Bush administration refused him a visa, blaming him for the pogrom in which 2,000 Muslims were killed, according to The Economist. “He may be a mass murderer,” opined Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times, the newspaper he edits, “but he's our mass murderer.” This was a common reaction among Indians to the Bush administration’s decision. We have seen the role of intergroup bias, in which we are forgiving of our own group’s shortcomings and scathing about the outgroup’s misdeeds. Today, Narendra Modi is India’s prime minister.

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.)

Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Irrational Reasons First

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

When Stanley J Tambiah identifies democracy as the cause of violence in South Asia, we should not be surprised. “The general theme of whether democracy as a political process and the democratic state as a system intensify the occurrence of violence is an old one in the history of political theory. From the Greeks onwards, even up to the nineteenth century, many theorists, perhaps most, associated democracy with civil strife, and it is only subsequently that this became a minority view (Levelling Crowds, Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997), p 262).”

The minority view is not held by the elite of Bangladesh (or of South Asia). Why do they persist in believing in a system that is shown to be dangerous by empirical evidence? There are two reasons for this tenacity: one rational, another irrational.

First, the irrational.

The psychology of an elite has deep roots in experience, not so much immediate, but distant, as is history. We have seen outgroup-ingroup 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 ‘massmurderer’ but he’s ‘our’ mass murderer, and so on.) However, 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” (Political Psychology, p 174 – 175).  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.”

An interesting corollary to this theory is the notion of outgroup favouritism. Outgroup favouritism or deference occurs among lower-status groups in relation to higher-status ones. Sidanius’ example is that of Uncle Tomming by blacks towards whites in the segregation era. A Scottish observer said of freed slaves that “chains of a stronger kind still manacled their limbs, from which no legislative act could free them; a mental and moral subordination and inferiority to which tyrant custom has here subjected all the sons and daughters of Africa (Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), p 142 – 143).” Lower-status groups may also under-achieve due to lower social expectations.

The corresponding example from South Asia may be Dr Azizzing after the fictitious character Dr. Aziz in E M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).

Pherozeshah Mehta, one of the early graduates from the University of Bombay, speaking in 1867, drew attention to “the strong Anglicising undercurrent which has begun through the deeper instincts of Indian students”. With pride, he predicted: “There will ere long be produced in India a body of men out-Heroding Herod, more English than the English themselves”. The instrument was English-language education. In 1860, there were 40,366 students in the schools of Bengal receiving an English-language education; in Madras Presidency, the number was 6,552 and in Bombay, 2,984. The number of university graduates in Bengal, Madras and Bombay were, respectively, 28, 11 and 8; in 1885, the corresponding figures were 264, 163 and 72 (South Asia, pp 180 – 181). My late uncle went to Presidency College in Calcutta, where he once blurted out a few words in Bengali for which he received a severe reprimand from the teacher: English was the intra-mural language!

In 1882, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society was moved from New York to Adyyar near Madras. For a brief period, Madame Blavatsky, a co-founder, lived in India. Speaking at Banaras, she said: “If the modern Hindus were less sycophantic to their Western masters, less in love with their vices, and more like their ancestors”, they would acquire mastery, through occult power (South Asia, p 182).  

“In any town in India,” writes George Orwell in Burmese Days (1934), “the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. It was doubly so in this case, for it was the proud boast of Kyauktada Club that, almost alone of Clubs in Burma, it had never admitted an Oriental to membership.” Thus, Orwell gives brick-and-mortar shape to the psychology of the ruler-ruled relationship that was the Raj, where a couple of hundred thousand British soldiers controlled teeming millions.

Dr. Veraswami befriends our anti-hero, Flory, and urges the latter to let him join the Club to escape the machinations of U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada.

“And you do not know what prestige it gives to an Indian to be a member of the European Club.  In the Club, practically he iss a European,” observes the good doctor. The members naturally object to having a ‘nigger’ in their midst. “He's asking us to break all our rules and take a dear little nigger-boy into this Club.”

Dr. Veraswami’s admiration for the British is pathetic. “Dr Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken.  He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race.”  Flory and the doctor have a regularly comic conversation, in which the Englishman knocks down the English and Veraswami defends them. Dr. Veraswami says: “'My friend, my friend, you are forgetting the Oriental character. How iss it possible to have developed us, with our apathy and superstition?  At least you have brought to us law and order. The unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica.”

The frankest expression of cultural cringe –as we may call this type of outgroup favouritism -  flowed from the pen of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who favoured all things British against all things Indian: “...all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule (quoted, Mark Tully, No Full Stops In India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p 57).”

Swami Dayananda, founder of the Arya Samaj (Society of Arians) in Bombay, in 1875, famously tried to show that all Western scientific knowledge had been revealed in the Vedas – telecommunications, ships, aircraft, gravity and gravitational attraction (Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), p 50).

The South Asian elite are in a parlous state. Spare a thought for Martin Kampchen, who wrote from Santiniketan: “Several daily newspapers of Calcutta flashed the news of Jhumpa Lahiri’s wedding in Calcutta as their first-page leader, complete with a colourful photo of the happy couple. First I thought: O happy Bengal! You still honour your poets as the ancient civilisations used to do. And for a moment I remained in this innocent bliss of satisfaction. Then it dawned on me that not any writer’s marriage is accorded such flattering coverage. Only expatriates who have ‘made it good’ abroad, who have ‘done the country proud’, are subjected to such exaggerated honours (The Daily Star, 27th January, 2001).”  Jhumpa Lahiri had just won the Pulitzer for her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies.

Before he became prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan used to insult some people by calling them Brown Sahibs (maybe he still does). Most of his friends fit that description – which means they ape the dress, habits and affectations of the former British colonial masters. Indeed, Khan himself used very much to be a Brown Sahib. “His English is more polished than his Punjabi,” according to the Independent.

In 2006, a photo of then prime minister Khaleda Zia taken by Shahidul Alam was printed on the cover of Time magazine. The Daily Star, the leading English daily of Bangladesh, made a point of mentioning the fact in its pages (April 14, 2006): “We would also like to take this opportunity to commend Mr. Alam for being the first Bangladeshi photographer whose work has been featured on the cover of Time magazine.” Alam had ‘made it’ in the west, so he had to be ‘honoured’.

“You mention the name Bangladesh to a westerner and wait for his or her first reaction and what you hear may not please your ear” lamented the now-defunct English daily The Bangladesh Observer in its cover story (October 20^th, 2006). But all is not lost! Mohammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank had won the Nobel Peace Prize, rekindling “the (sic) Bengali nationalism in the teeming millions”. Never mind that a connection, however tenuous, between a Nobel Prize for microcredit and Bengali nationalism, is not immediately obvious. The former, conferred by the outgroup, raises the prestige of the latter.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the first American novelist, knew all about cultural cringe, and was probably the first person to articulate the phenomenon of cultural imperialism. Consider this footnote from his novel Afloat and Ashore (1844):

‘The miserable moral dependence of this country on Great Britain, forty years since, cannot well be brought home to the present generation. It is still too great, but has not a tithe of its former force. The writer has himself known an Italian prince, a man of family and high personal merit, pass unnoticed before a society that was eager to make the acquaintance of most of the agents of the Birmingham button dealers; and this simply because one came from Italy and the other from England....(Afloat and ashore, a sea tale (New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1871), p 439n).”

Despite the fact of American independence, the reality was that Americans still suffered from a colonial mentality. His book had been ‘puffed’ in England, which gave it greater mystique in America.      

A more recent case of cultural cringe has been detected down under. In fact, the term has been coined to cover the feeling that Australia is only a reflection of the mother country. In “The Lucky Country” (1964), Donald Horne famously suggested focus on Asia as an alternative to the “sometimes humiliating attempts to keep up the family relationship with Europeans…It is in dealings with Asian countries that Australians might regain a sense of confidence and importance” (Quoted in The Economist, December 14th, 1996, ‘Australia’s Identity Crisis’, pp 35-37). In the ensuing brouhaha, the thought got buried in static. Nevertheless, Paul Keating went down in history as the man who suggested ingratiatingly in Singapore that ‘mateship’ was an Asian value!

Parents in Bangladesh proudly announce that their children live in Britain, America, Canada or Australia. Living in the Middle East just doesn’t cut it. As an English teacher, I can vouch for the fact that those fluent in English positively look down on those lacking English. One of my former students said that she hated English medium students who proudly say they are weak in Bengali, the mother tongue. And this despite years of Bengali nationalism – Bengalism – when teaching in English was prohibited up to the age of 16. Father Peixotto, an American, delivered his physics lectures at Notre Dame College in the 1970s in Bengali, despite complaints from the students that he couldn’t be understood. He insisted he was required by law to lecture in Bengali. All that is over, of course. English medium schools have spawned all over the country. On YouTube, young people in intimate talk shows such as this one with D J Sonica combine fluent English with Bengali, which is considered ‘cool’ (modern). 

The intelligentsia to which people like Tahmima Anam belong (her mother, Shaheen Anam, is executive director of the mega-NGO, Manusher Jonno (For the People), which dispenses donor money to lesser NGOs), have extra-rational as well as rational motives. To observe one extra-rational motive yet again, consider that a lasting insult in Bangladesh is to call somebody “a Bangalee” (speaker of Bengali) – the antithesis of a westerner, lacking in refinement, sophistication, upbringing. Echoes of Macaulay, who had some nasty things to say about Bengalis, reverberate even today. This is a classic case of ‘outgroup favouritism’, Uncle Tomming or Dr. Azizing, as we saw above.

Imagine, then, what affirmation and rejection by the outgroup mean for the psychology of an intellectual in Bangladesh. It is a commonplace in economics and business that the customer is king, and in our case the customer is the West. But this particular customer is a monopsonist – a single buyer – and has the power to exploit. Liberals rail against colonial and neo-colonial exploitation, but is shtum on this subject.

The result is anti-empiricism.

In her BBCarticle, Tamima Anam continues, “Otherwise, even if the military cleans up the political landscape, even if they arrest all the corrupt politicians, even if they seize the illegal assets and raze the buildings that were made with black money, who will become our new democratic leaders? Who will we be left to believe in? Only those who wrested power in the first place: the army.” (She is referring to the military takeover by General Moeen U Ahmed on January 11, 2007 when the caretaker arrangement came unglued and the country threatened to tear itself apart in an orgy of violence and murder – which Ms. Anam keeps mum about -under the two toxic leaders, ending with elections in December 2008 in which the old Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina won.) Note her lament: “Who will be left to believe in?” This need for heroes has landed us with toxic leaders, leaders who seem miraculously to have inherited heroism. It is about time we stopped looking for heroes, and started trusting in our own finite resources, talents and abilities.  

‘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 (Continuations in Anthropological Psychology, p 165). Thus, in Europe ‘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 never quite succeeded in pushing it below the surface, and has come into its own in full daylight. 

Today, everything to do with the white race appears to us as remarkable. The belief that western civilisation is superior to ours is deeply ingrained in the elite. We have relieved the white man of his burden, and carry it on our shoulders. And the white man left us with a democratic burden, which we carry like a cross.

Despite the slaughter of the two world wars, despite the killings in Vietnam, despite the murder of 1.7 million Iraqi children through sanctions, the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, our respect for western civilisation remains undimmed. “The white race is the cancer of history,” wrote Susan Sontag, but we believe the white race to be the benefactor of humankind.

Local And International Connivance To Promote Fake Democracy

Let me begin my overview of the media elite in Bangladesh with an autobiographical account. After the democratic transition of 1990, I did some research and the output was an essay called “Democracy: The Historical Accident”. I submitted the piece to the highbrow English weekly, Holiday. The editor changed the title, saying it was “too loud”.

Then I wrote an article on the emergency of 1958 in Ceylon, which I called “The Devil And The Deep”. The editor of the most widely circulated English daily, The Daily Star, Mahfuz Anam, objected to the title. “The devil of democracy!” he gasped. “People want democracy now.” The title was changed.

After a series of violent hartals and murders, I concluded another article with the one-sentence paragraph ‘We can have either democracy or safety, but not both’. The article appeared in the Daily Star, but with the last paragraph expunged, and the editor’s own words in its place, pleading for democracy.

My final and last encounter with the Daily Star occurred when an editor, Modon Shahu, told me “We know people want martial law, but we can’t print that”. If a newspaper knows what the people want, but won’t say it, that’s self-censorship. (Strangely enough, the motto of the Daily Star, blazoned across its online articles and print issues, is ‘Committed to PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO KNOW).

But these are mere peccadilloes compared to what the newspapers in Bangladesh got up to in order to connive at fake elections.

A little background first. As the reader will recall, General Ershad (always ‘General’) resigned the presidency on December 6, 1990. Illegally, he was kept in jail along with the vice president, Moudud Ahmed, who, by the constitution, was supposed to assume the presidency on the incumbent’s resignation. Instead, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, violated the constitution of which he was chief protector, became president, without a murmur of protest from the national as well as international community.

The first ‘free and fair’ elections were held in 1991, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won, with Khaleda Zia as leader. The Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina was now the opposition.

At the end of her tenure, Khaleda Zia refused to budge and only a series of hartals, blockades and sieges by the Awami League succeeded in removing her from office. A Solomonic arrangement was arrived at: a neutral, caretaker government would henceforth oversee all elections, and not the ruling party, which would step down. (The advisor to the caretaker government would be the previous retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – what this would mean for the independence of the judiciary can be guessed at.)

Elections under the neutral, caretaker government were held in 1996 and 2001, with the parties rotating in power. The democratic miracle had been achieved – a two-party system, with opposition and ruling party changing place every five years.

After the election in 2001, a government officer told me confidentially that the election had been bogus. I didn’t believe him.

Then, I read an article in The Economist and felt like a fool for disbelieving such a reliable source. Now, our newspapers always report and even republish news items on Bangladesh published in prestigious western journals like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and, of course, the Economist.

Not a single word appeared in the newspapers of Bangladesh about the findings of Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell reported in the Economist. Mebane and others studied the figures for the three elections in this country in 1991, 1996 and 2001. The first was clean, the second showed that some 2% of results were problematic and the third, a glaring 9%. Yet the elections had been vetted by the Carter Center and the European Union.

The caretaker government had been a ploy to provide the illusion of an alternation of power. Its latent function – as opposed to its manifest function of overseeing true elections - was to ensure Buggins’ turn. Local as well as international actors connived at the chimera. (The caretaker government was ditched after the 2008 election held under a military government. Since then, Bangladesh has been a one-party state.)

The sentiments of the elite were echoed by writer Tahmima Anam, daughter of Mahfuz Anam, when she wrote for the BBC: “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.”  Apparently, we, the people of Bangladesh, are brains in vats being fed our stimuli by malevolent/benevolent forces.

The Untold Story Of Bangladesh - How Jornalists Failed A Nation

For years, I tried to bring to the attention of the international mainstream media how student politicians in Bangladesh were raping girls and killing each other – and failed.


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 mankind (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/ indymedia.

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's not easy to get through to Bangladesh!

You can access the article here:

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23393.shtml

It's called THE FREEDOM INDUSTRY AND STUDENT POLITICS IN BANGLADESH: every year, on the average, 50 student politicians were being murdered after the democratic transition of 1990. Why? Because these kids were being used by the political parties to bring down the incumbent in street battles and campus violence. Those street battles are called 'hartals' (these are not 'general strikes'!). Here's a description of a hartal: " Salahuddin (33), a fisherman, was killed in a skirmish between the two student wings of the political parties in the latest hartal. Two rickshawpullers – one of them unidentified, the other Badaruddin (32) - were bombed while they were pulling their rickshaws during hartal hours. It took them 24 to 48 hours to die. An auto-rickshaw was burned to ashes, and when the driver, Saidul Islam Shahid (35), tried to put out the flames, he was sprinkled with petrol, and burned to death. It took him more than two days to die. Truck driver, Fayez Ahmed (50), died when a bomb was thrown on his truck. And Ripon Sikder, a sixteen-year-old injured by a bomb, died on 4th May at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital after struggling for his life for eleven days." The whole idea of a hartal is to keep traffic off the roads to paralyse the country and discredit the ruling party – and that's where you need the boys.

The boys were allowed – even encouraged – to rape with abandon. According to the Minister of Women and Children's Affairs, the number of rapes skyrocketed from 407 in 1990 to 2224 by 1997.

In September 1998, a committee investigated allegations of sexual abuse at Jahangirnagar University against boys from the Chatra League, the student front of the then ruling Awami League. It revealed that

“more than 20 female students were raped and over 300 others were sexually harassed on the campus by the "armed cadres of a particular political party. "

No one was charged.

In desperation people resorted to lynching: lynching was unknown in Bangladesh. If people caught a thief, they used to give him a good beating and hand him over to the police. Now, they started killing them. And then came the public torching of muggers and robbers – they were cremated alive in broad daylight by a populace that had had enough.

Then, I realised that reading newspapers – ranging from The Economist to the Guardian to the New Statesman – would not give me a true picture of the world.

Only anthropologists could do that.

The first eye-opener was Stanely J. Tambiah of Harvard University. In his book, Ethnonatioalist Conflict and Collective Violence in South Asia (a book that, to my knowledge, no mainstream paper ever reviewed), he blames the rise in violence throughout South Asia on the party political system.

He says: ‘...participatory democracy, competitive elections, mass militancy, and crowd violence are not disconnected. (Stanley J. Tambiah ,Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia, (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1996), p. 260)."

I noticed that none of the NGOs ever raised their voices against student politics. Odd: these were supposed to be "civil society". Then two anthropologists revealed the truth.

The writers speak of an "aid market" that local NGOs know how to exploit.

“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.”

The authors also - like myself - attribute the spread of democracy since 1990 to foreign donor pressure, and reject outright the notion of an emerging civil society: “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.” (Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999)23, 22, 118).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, donors insisted on multi-party elections. The Economist finally acknowledged the truth after fourteen years: “...the cold war’s end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms” (December 18th 2004, p. 69).

Then, when democracy threatened to turn Bangladesh into another failed Muslim state, western governments intervened: they again allowed the army to take over on January 11th 2007.

The number of student politicians murdered plunged from 48 in 2006 to 10 in 2007 and 6 so far this year. The restoration of (colonial) democracy in December means that more kids are going to be killed every year, and more women raped by these kids.

But no newspaper will ever tell you that.


(For more articles on Bangladesh and violence, you can visit my website.)  

The Frankish Disease

"Your language is closer to you than your jugular vein."

From where did this piece of wisdom come to this part of the world? It wasn't always there. When the British came, we gladly relinquished our languages and learned English (and still do). Something changed between the time the English arrived and the time they left. They taught us more than 'Jolly good!" and "Old boy": they taught us nationalism.

But not all of us: only the microscopic minority of educated 'monkey-see-monkey-dos' produced by the imperial education system in South Asia.

But nationalism was not all we ingested from the superabundant harvest of western civilisation. There was Marxism, socialism, secularism, democracy….

That these contradictory ideas could lodge in a single head seems extraordinary today, but one must keep in mind the fact that we had been ruled for two hundred years, and rendered incapable of thinking for ourselves.

Take the Middle Eastern expression for nationalism: when it first arrived there, it was known (correctly) as the 'Frankish idea'. The accompanying physical malady that accompanied it was known as the 'Frankish disease'. Now, syphilis has the same effect on the brain as the Frankish and other assorted ideas. Therefore, we were able to accommodate all sorts of opposing ideologies in one diseased brain.

The climax of these intellectual developments, if lunacy can be credited with development, was the 1972 constitution of Bangladesh. Nationalism was part of it; as was nationalisation of all industry in solidarity with the workers of the world (but – heaven forbid – not the nationalisation of land). How Bengali nationalism could appeal to a Czech factory worker was beyond comprehension. The architects of the constitution wished to create a paradise on earth – but for Bengalis only. But 'Bengalis' also designated those living in West Bengal in India. So, Bengali paradise was not for West Bengalis. Yet nationalism reached across the border….In other words, the constitution was a cocktail meant for immediate inebriation.

In fact, one can't blame the pater patriae for kicking over that piece of paper as a colonial-period relic: it was really just that.

A constitution not in keeping with the culture, the 'manners', to use de Tocqueville's expression, of the people must be worth less than the paper it is printed on. Indeed, it is not worth less, but worthless.