Will Bangladesh Ever Have a Future?

PANKAJ MISHRA

To an Indian who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s, the sights of Dhaka, Bangladesh, seem to belong to a past that Indian metropolises have mostly outgrown: exuberantly battered buses, unpainted buildings, pavement book vendors with faded posters of Rabindranath Tagore and Karl Marx as well as the Rolling Stones, and pitch darkness on the unlit streets and squares where rural migrants congregate in the evenings. The countryside still feels closer here than in Kolkata or Mumbai.

In recent years, Bangladeshis have suffered the brutality of security forces and massive environmental destruction. For months now, the news from the world’s seventh-most-populous country has been dominated by the fractiousness of the country’s main leaders, the trial of men suspected of war crimes during Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, and the slavery-like conditions of the country’s garment industry.

I arrived in Dhaka during one of the many recent strikes called by the opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, against the ruling Awami League. The shutdowns, imposed through force, seemed economically ruinous, damaging small businesses the most; they resolved nothing. At first glance, Bangladesh seemed, like many countries in its neighborhood, to be struggling to find a way forward.

Irreconcilable Differences

Shackled by irreconcilable differences between political personalities, the country offers yet another instance of a fledgling democracy undermined by an undemocratic winner-takes-all attitude among its leaders. Bangladesh does have its innovators, such as Muhammed Yunus, the pioneer of microcredit. The banking system seems more responsive to the poor majority than in it does India. Bangladesh also does better than its much richer neighbor in almost all indicators of the United Nations’ Human Development Index.

But the benefits of trade liberalization -- and, in general, Bangladesh’s integration into the global economy -- have been more limited than previously expected. Certainly, the country’s economic modernization, which seems necessary to pull tens of millions out of destitution, seems to be proceeding much too slowly.

India is building a security fence on its border with Bangladesh, ostensibly to keep out Bangladeshi immigrants whose presence provides fodder to Indian demagogues. Meanwhile, a weakened state has ceded, often opportunistically, its responsibility to mitigate poverty and improve social infrastructure to such non-state actors as aid organizations, corporations, security companies, consultants, and various domestic and international non-governmental organizations. Bangladesh is one of the most NGO-ized countries in the world.

What happens next? Can Bangladesh join the modern world with its weakened governance, dysfunctional political system and uneven economic growth? An absorbing new book, “Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border,” seeks some answers in Bangladesh’s earliest attempt at modernization.

The author, a Bangladesh-born social anthropologist named Delwar Hussain, describes the strange aftermath of the Khonighat Limestone Mining Project. Situated near the Bangladeshi district of Sylhet and the Indian state of Meghalaya, Khonighat was one of the spectacular projects of national modernization that every postcolonial country once boasted of. India, for instance, had the Soviet-built Bhilai township -- designed, as one early resident, the poet and essayist Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, wrote, “by a pencil stub and a six-inch plastic ruler.”

The grids were no accident. They spoke of the rationalization and bureaucratization -- two crucial aspects of modernity -- that were supposed to weaken the hold of religion and custom. The worship of older authorities was to be discarded in a projected future full of plentiful modern goods and pleasures. In the postcolonial imagination of progress, projects such as big dams, factories and roads were expected to bring the backward masses out of the rural hinterlands and propel them into first-world prosperity.

Main Patron

Many of the new citizens of Pakistan, and then Bangladesh after 1971, eagerly participated in these public works, largely because employees were offered, as Hussain writes, “progress, status and prestige” through a range of welfare provisions: skills training, set wages, fixed working hours, health and safety regulations, pensions. The state, in turn, enjoyed its greatest legitimacy as the main patron of economic development.

But state-led projects such as Khonighat mostly helped people who were within its ambit; the majority of the country’s population remained trapped in poverty. Khonighat was closed down in 1993 after it became cheaper to import limestone from an economically liberalized India, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund put greater pressure on Bangladesh to shut down its state-owned enterprises.

With its rusting machinery, unused cranes and half-torn railway tracks, Khonighat is now a ruin -- of the kind that, in Walter Benjamin’s vision, piles up as the storm of progress blows through the world. Meanwhile, the adjacent village of Borapani, which has become the center of an unorganized and semi-illicit coal mining industry, showcases the new forms of progress in many globalized economies.

Feeding the demands of Bangladesh’s coal-fired factories, the cashiered laborers of Khonighat have transformed themselves into traders. This impromptu and unusual elite is made more diverse by people previously relegated to the margins by Khonighat’s top-down modernization project, such as women and transgender hijras, who have achieved prominence by fulfilling local needs, economic as well as sexual: The cover photo on “Boundaries Undermined,” of a hand with brightly painted nails and a steel bracelet engraved with the word “Nike” grasping a coal sack, hints at the new ideas of work and pleasure that have emerged in the era of liberalization.

Subsidiary Professions

Religious practices suppressed by the secular ethos of Khonighat have also emerged. The coal business has generated some semi-illegal subsidiary professions, such as the trade in SIM cards in an area where both Indian and Bangladeshi governments have banned the use of mobile phones. Many of the older beneficiaries of the welfare and developmental state are now in retreat; they wallow in nostalgia for the good times of state-backed modernization and lament the new culture of greed and selfishness, while entrepreneurs who walk a fine line between criminality and legality flourish.

What does the creation of a new unsupervised social order with its multiple actors portend for Bangladesh? Here, Hussain’s answers are disconcertingly tentative. NGOs have not managed to reduce poverty; they may even have helped the middle class more than the poor and the marginalized. Short-term microfinancing by local and international NGOs has replaced long-term issues of infrastructure. According to Hussain, “there are no public health facilities, sanitation or even electricity” in Borapani. Residents who once had running water and even baths in the old quarters of Khonighat have to make do with rainwater in its abandoned limestone quarries.

There are other, less tangible losses in this brave new world: Garment workers in Dhaka pleading for better work conditions after an April factory collapse killed more than 1,000 people are asking for things that the employees of Khonighat effortlessly possessed.

Hussain’s mood is not all bleak. He points to “creative potentialities and possibilities” in the assertion of formerly excluded communities. Noting their record of religious tolerance, he hails the “disorganized cosmopolitanism” of Borapani. But he seems aware, too, of simmering frustrations among the “floating mass” of workers in unregulated zones. Much of today’s social and religious violence in India, for instance, is caused by the disempowering and degradation of men employed, if at all, in the vast “informal sector.”

Above all, millions of South Asians suffer from a general loss of national direction in an age when every man seems to be out for himself. In Bangladesh, as in India and Pakistan, the collapse of old nation-building projects of modernization has deprived most citizens of the stories and images through which they imagined themselves to be part of a larger whole.

For them, the disenchantment of the world feared by Max Weber has happened even while they await, seemingly forever, the next step into consoling prosperity and leisure. Meanwhile, ethnic and religious sectarians stand ready to channel their rage over being cheated. In that sense, Bangladesh, with its already antique modernity, illuminates South Asia’s troubled present as vividly as it does its past.

First published in Bloomberg.com, December 2, 2013

Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a Bloomberg View columnist. For comments: pmashobra@gmail.com

Religion and after: Bangladeshi identity since 1971

Angry Islamist demand for Islamic state governed by controversial Sharia law, which subjugates women

LAILUFAR YASMIN

Secularism was one of the cornerstones of Bengali nationalism, but its spirit was enforced only by pen and paper. How can demands to ban religion from politics be satisfied?

The United Nations categorizes Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim democracy. Meanwhile, the current Foreign Minister called Bangladesh a secular country. She defined Bangladesh to be a "non-communal country” with a “Muslim majority population”. The Foreign Minister further added that the concept of a moderate Muslim democracy cannot be applied in the case of Bangladesh because it fought its war of independence on basis of the ideal of secularism. For Bangladesh, embracing religion or creating a secular identity has been a major contestation in the creation of its national identity. Identity questions for Bangladesh still stand: is it a country of secular Bengalis or Muslim Bangladeshis?

This split personality of Bangladesh confounds the international observer. For an outsider, it makes perfect sense to call it a moderate Muslim democracy as a Muslim majority population lives in a country that recognizes Islam as the state religion. Since the Shahbag movement has erupted with the demands of the death penalty for the war criminals, international media remains substantially silent about it. Perhaps one of the reasons could be their inability to comprehend why a population of Muslim origin are angered over using religion (read Islam) for political purposes? As we look at the issues brought forward by the Shahbag movement, we need to analyse it from a historical perspective. We are not talking about redressing the wound that was created 42 years back; rather how it was ‘silenced’ to maximize narrow political gains for the major political parties of the country.

'Secularism' in independent Bangladesh

Many point to the 1947 division of the subcontinent on the basis of the Two Nation theory with ‘religion’ at its core as the principle factor that tied religion to politics in this region. It was primarily the overwhelming support of the Muslims of Bengal in the 1946 election that decided the fate of the Two Nation theory. But does this mean that people of East Bengal supported the Two Nations theory with a religious fervour? The answer is quite the opposite. Historians have shown that support in East Bengal was mobilized with the aim of economic emancipation from West Bengal. The people of East Bengal gathered under the umbrella of Fazlul Haque’s leadership, who provided a non-communal approach to the issue of Hindu-Muslim relations and brought the economic issues to the forefront. As research shows, the massive support coming from the rural areas of Bengal for the dream of Pakistan was aimed at resolving their basic ‘dal-bhat’ (rice-lentil: considered Bengali people’s basic food at that period) problem. Islam was not the primary political mode of thought in Bengal nor was able to present itself as an ‘ideological’ alternative to the existing political thoughts.

However, the Two Nation Theory, formulated on the basis of Hindu-Muslim division, turned out to truly be a theory of two nations as it depicted East and West Pakistan as inherently different from each other. They do not understand why we subaltern Muslims do not agree to speak Urdu. They do not understand why we Muslims are mesmerized with the Hindu poet Tagore. While students protested Jinnah’s proclamation that, “Urdu, and only Urdu shall be the national language of Pakistan”, the seed of a new nation was sown as early as 1948 on the campus of the University of Dhaka. The Bengali Language Movement gave birth to the idea of a new nation, within the geographic border of former East Pakistan.

While secularism was one of the cornerstones of Bengali nationalism, its spirit was enforced only by pen and paper but not in practice - apprehension that secularism could be easily misinterpreted as atheism. Even while secularism was preached in the pre-1971 period, Article 2 of the Awami League’s election manifesto in 1970 stated that no law would be enacted against the dictums of the Quran and the Sunnah. Similarly, political leader Maulana Bhashani declared, “we want food and we want clothes but we do not want them excluding Allah”. Such contradictions extended far. Upon his return from Pakistan via London in 1972, at the one hand, Sheikh Mujib declared himself as a Muslim and Bangladesh as the second largest Muslim country as secularism was embedded as one of the four principles of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

Secularism versus religiosity

History shows that there was a public fear and rejection of secularism back in 1972. A public procession was carried out against it on the streets of Dhaka that chanted “Joy Bangla joy-heen, Lungi chere dhuti pin” on the day of the formal acceptance of the constitution. This particular slogan stated that the traditional Awami League slogan of Joy Bangla, i.e., victory to Bangladesh, became meaningless in independent Bangladesh and would be devoid of ‘victory’. Moreover, the traditional Bengali Muslim men’s attire lungi would be replaced by traditional Hindu men’s attire dhuti due to adoption of secularism as a state principle. The ultimate failure of the government, alongside rampant corruption, was to give in to these Islamic emphases by the regime of the Awami League in an attempt to regain its lost popularity. Simultaneously, as a reaction to the Awami League’s pen and paper commitment to ‘secularism’, the alternative was to embrace ‘religion’ in its fullest form and was manifested in Bangladeshi nationalism.

While the Shahbag movement is asking for a fair trial of war criminals, it cannot remain confined by only banning Jamaat-e-Islami’s politics or overall politics based on religion. Rather, the whole issue of secularism versus religiosity has to be taken into consideration to redress the way politicians have misused religion. We have not forgotten the electoral slogan of the Awami League, BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami during the 1996 election: La ilaha illallha, Naukar malik tui Allah (There is no God but Allah, and Allah is the Owner of boat); La ilaha illalha, Dhaner shishe Bismillah (There is no God but Allah, and Allah willing, vote for the paddy sheaf); Vote diley pallay, Khushi hobe Allah (Allah would be pleased if you vote for scale). It is a country where an electoral campaign still starts from Sylhet, by visiting Islamic shrines and seeking blessings of the Pirsfor a good result in election.

We have changed our traditional age-old greetings from ‘Khuda Hafiz’ to ‘Allah Hafiz’ with the excuse that ‘Allah’ is Arabic while ‘Khuda’ originates from Persian. We do not even know or probably do not even care about the fact that ‘hafiz’, an original Persian word and etymologically derived from Arabic ‘hifz’, remains attached with the phrase. But we are happy to replace Khuda with Allah with an aim to prove ourselves as true Muslims. Is that a true representation of Bangladesh, of our national culture? On a similar note, in any public gathering, it is excruciating to see how the sari, the traditional Bengali attire for women, is disappearing and is being increasingly replaced by salwar-kamiz. While the younger generation have embraced the latter with the excuse of it being more manageable and convenient, the older generation is much more direct in expressing how the sari is ‘unIslamic’ dress that reveals significant female body parts while salwar-kamiz does not.

Our whole national culture is in transition. Otherwise why is YouTube still banned in Bangladesh? Why is it necessary for the editor of a renowned newspaper to apologize to the Khatib of Baitul Mukarram over the publication of a cartoon that allegedly insulted religious sentiments? Not so long ago, Facebook was also banned in the country under the same accusation. Scholar Rafiuddin Ahmed indeed pointed it out very succinctly, “a Bengali Muslim may have seen himself primarily as a ‘Muslim’ the other day, as a ‘Bengali’ yesterday, and a ‘Bengali Muslim’ today, depending on objective conditions, but on none of these occasions did his thoughts and his idea of destiny become separated from his territorial identity”.

Secularism as a top-down approach

The fact remains that secularism cannot be imposed from the top, merely as a state directive. The term secularism itself was coined and introduced in the English vocabulary in 1851 by George Jacob Hollyake in order to create a conscious difference between secularism and atheism. It is the same tension that we face in our country right now. Moreover when secularism is imposed as a top-down approach, it looks like nothing short of an attempt to ‘catch up’ with the West or try to prove to the West that “look, we have denounced religion; we are modern too!” This is a typical crisis that non-Western societies face: how to define themselves as modern so the West understands. But what is overlooked here is that secularism cannot just be imposed as an ‘add and stir’ method, for non-Western societies have their own uniqueness to add both to the concepts of modernity and secularism.

There is no singular way to be modern; there is no singular way to be secular, especially not by incorporating it into the Constitution while ignoring the drastic changes in the social fabric of a country. Moreover, countless research shows that while a non-Western society is being modernized, it does not shake off its religious legacies and historical experiences. Rather its own values, culture and religion formulate the core of a resistance identity in response to the intrusion of Westernization. Secularism therefore cannot be perceived from only mainstream and liberal conceptions as it is presented through the Western lens.

As one scholar has put it, 1971 shows that Bangladesh rejected the Pakistani interpretation of fundamentalist Islam but this did not mean that Bangladesh has rejected Islam from its own identity. The inability of the elites to understand this fact has trapped them into the secular-religious divide. Schendel has rightly pointed out that the post-independent, or first leaders of Bangladesh failed to deliver the dreams of nationalism, secularism, socialism and democracy based on a vernacular cultural model. Such failure essentially led towards creating the dichotomy between the religious and the secular and between anti-1971 and pro-1971.

There is no legal way to tackle the rise of religiosity in Bangladesh. Instead, the failure to acknowledge these silent ‘religious’ transitions, where political parties are interested only in the bigger share of the pie using religion, will only add to the existing tension and divide the unity of the country further between the religious and the secular. Instead we must continue to implore why we are rapidly turning more religious than before, and why consider it a solemn duty to continuously project this religious identity.

First published in Open Democracy, 19 April 2013

Lailufar Yasmin is a doctoral student at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and teaches in International Relations at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her research interest includes secularism, IR theory and Islam

Too Little, Too Late For Bangladesh Democratic Roadmap

SALEEM SAMAD

On the eve of the military-installed interim government’s chief adviser Dr. Fakhruddin Ahmed’s crucial address to the nation [http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=36326] was interpreted in a first-page commentary in a Bangladesh newspaper that it would be a “landmark speech” and believes it would be a “Magna Carta” for the Bangalee nation.

In January 2007 the over-zealous military generals bulldozed the constitutional means for a transition to democracy, fired the caretaker government, declared a state of emergency and of course installed an interim government with hand-picked advisers they hire and fire.

Well, the much ado about Monday's speech to the nation was too little and too late for the restoration of democracy. Though the election has been planned days after the Victory Day celebration in mid-December, the chief adviser deliberately avoided any commitment about the deadline to withdraw the dreaded emergency rules.

It seems that the chief adviser was cruel about the aspiration of the people at large and instead advised the political parties not to question the results of the general elections. This statement came, when the “Election Commission, which has already made itself controversial through various actions and inactions and whose credibility remains eminently questionable,” remarks an editorial in New Age.

Despite passionate requests to withdraw Emergency Power Rules by the political parties, the interim government’s chief made it clear that the emergency has come to stay. But was too benevolent to relax or suspend certain provisions of the Emergency Powers Rules as and when his government deemed it fit.

Aptly said by a university teacher that the withdrawal of emergency is a prerequisite for dialogue, which has disappointed the nation. The political concession laid out to the nation is a political farce.

1. The long-running ban on indoor politics all across the country will ease from May 13.

2. The government will start a dialogue with political parties, starting on May 22. The Chief Adviser's Office will send out invitation letters to political parties from Tuesday.

3. The government will either relax or suspend certain provisions in the emergency powers rules to facilitate electioneering and create a proper context for the polls.

4. Ahead of elections, the government will form a national charter with the opinions of all related parties, which is meant to bring a qualitative change to government and politics.

In a bid to create a “congenial atmosphere” for elections, the indoor politics would continue to be “indoors”. With conditions attached there are half a dozen do’s and don’ts which flouts the constitutional provision of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. The bindings include that political parties cannot assemble more than 50 people during indoor activities. The meeting agenda will discuss organisational matters only. They cannot use a public address system during the meeting. Media cannot broadcast live of political events. The meeting venues are limited to designated places. Lastly, the party has to inform the nearest police station at least 48 hours before the event. Possibly to ensure transparency of indoor politics!

He did not mention the names, nor indirectly referred to the two women leaders Khaleda Zia and Shiekh Hasina presently languishing in special prisons. Well, he also did not hint whether the interim government has dropped the “minus-two” formula which was meant to banish them from politics forever. He failed to mention their status of standing trial for corruption and extortions. Even he did not indicate whether they could be invited for the political dialogue. Also, it is not clear whether they can participate in the planned election at the end of this year.

Fakhruddin said, "The precondition of a meaningful, free, fair and acceptable election was checking black money and muscle power, establishing the rule of law, conducting an anti-corruption drive, improving law and order and, above all, making state institutions effective and dynamic."

Whereas, the Brussels based International Crisis Group recent report in April 2008 states: The caretaker government, along with the international community, must take credible steps to restore democracy to Bangladesh ahead of the December 2008 general elections.

His dramatic words “golden opportunity” and “golden future” for the nation has been marred in the wake of series of failure to break the cycle of criminalisation of politics, institutionalised corruption, organised crime, money laundering, accumulation of black money, and punish profiteering traders.

Dr. Ahmed for obvious reasons avoided whether the dialogue would have an open-ended agenda to ensure a guaranteed transition to democracy.

Political watchers explain that the “National Charter” to negotiate the election agenda would be the guideline for dialogue with the mainstream political parties and allies. Failure to comply with the charter, the political parties, and party leaders would be punished, banished or barred. It seems like a snake and ladder game!

Instead of the so-called National Charter, the authority could have developed a Commission for Integrity and Accountability of the Democratically Elected Public Representatives, which could be the bible for politicians and elected leaders in public offices. Thus they could refrain from exercising threats and coercion for political reforms of the parties.

From Dr. Ahmed’s words, it is understood that the authorities have ceased “implementation of internal reform of the political parties voluntarily.” He further said that the nation expects implementation of the expected reform for providing the nation with democratic behaviour, honest, efficient and dynamic leadership.

When the international watchdogs and donor consortiums are demanding for a credible election, the caretaker government's prime objectives, according to the chief adviser, was to hold a "free, fair, neutral and acceptable election and start a post-election healthy democratic system".

The piece de resistance of his speech came when he claimed that his government was committed to establishing the rule of law. With the people’s fundamental rights suspended under a state of emergency, complaints galore of the judiciary not being allowed to function freely, mass media forced to work in a suffocating environment created by illegal interference almost on a routine basis by a security intelligence agency, such talks surely come as empty rhetoric, writes an editorial in New Age, an English language daily published from capital Dhaka.

Meanwhile, the editors and journalist’s professional bodies demanded immediate withdrawal of emergency rules which has immensely curtailed press freedom. Journalists also underlined red area in exercising their profession and remarked "invisible, unwritten pressure and control over the media".

Dr. Ahmed hoped that after his address all questions, suspicious and speculations centering election will be buried. But observers understand that the real motive and intention of the military-backed authorities will further deepen. The political parties are pushed into a corner, like a whisker-cat trapping a mouse, with the delimitation drawn for the political bout. The road to democracy, in fact, has come to a difficult crossroads of military rule, emergency, and economic stagnation. The speculation and suspicions will obviously gather moss, which will turn into a political crisis.

First published in the CounterCurrents,org, 21 May 2008

Saleem Samad, an Ashoka Fellow is a Bangladesh born journalist presently living in exile in Canada. He edits www.DurDesh.net streaming from Toronto and specialises in conflict, terrorism, security and intelligence issues in South Asia. He could be reached by email saleemsamad@hotmail.com