THE HORROR! THE HORROR! An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Horrors of Bangladesh
(click above for article)
The article is dedicated to the memory of two-year-old Meem, who was burnt alive in a hartal, along with
four passengers on a bus.
Private armies - student thugs and the Rapid Action Battalion - have been responsible for the violence: The state with its monopoly of legitimate violence has ceased to exist. Behind the violence and erosion of rights lie the two ideologies of democracy and “it’s poisonous fruit”, nationalism, that excuse and encourage every iniquity.
Words from a tortured activist follow:
On September 7 1989, thirty-three-year-old AS (his initials) was picked up from in front of the High Court at 10 am. He belonged to the Chatra Shibir, the student wing of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami. His captors were from the Jatiyatabadi Chatra Dal (JCD), the student wing of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The current leader of the opposition, Khaleda Zia, played Bandit Queen to the armed ruffians.
They took him to Science Bhavan (Science Building) where he was tortured till 1:45. Additional thugs joined the sport.
Golam Farouk Ovi, a student of International Relations and Central Committee Member of JCD, acted as emcee at the Mohsin Hall guest room, scanting on traditional Islamic hospitality.
A monsoon of GI pipes and hockey sticks rained: But the coup de grace was the dismemberment of the nerves on his right ankle, and on his left knee. He would be paralysed seven years later.
A torrent of chapatti, bricks, blades, blood, broken fingers, amputated earlobe, mouth stoppered with sand, head covered with his Punjabi….testified to the modus operandi of this, and, as we shall see, twenty-eight years later in Hafez’s case, to the secular Inquisition. 10,000 hours of practice have predictably produced prodigies.
From
Mohsin Hall, the cortège proceeded to the venerable TSC (the hallowed
Teacher-Student Centre). Suitably enough - with X marks the spot, no
doubt - an overgrown vegetable structure prepared him for his quietus.
Leaving him for dead, they celebrated their gladiatorial barbarity at
Aparajeyo Bangla.
Bleeding heavily, consciousness came and left. A police car moseyed down to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) - the fuzz knew he had been beaten, dilly dallying to allow the great escape. At DMCH, he wasn’t treated until a journalist gave 50 takas for the first bandages; he was at DMCH for two to three hours; from there he was taken to Ibn Sina in Dhanmandi.
He was there for two months; for nine months he had no bowel movement; he had to be operated on. Catheter was removed after nine months; doctors celebrated when he was able to sit after sixty days; then they celebrated his first urination…
According to a psychiatrist interviewed for this article, human cruelty surfaces when it is permitted and encouraged. The violence depicted throughout the piece constitutes an indictment, not of the perpetrators alone, but of our society.
Philosophically disinclined leaders may skip the more abstruse sections of the article. A philosophical analysis was felt essential for what a nation considers good and evil is a philosophical question. Nationalism, for instance, is a nineteenth century philosophical idea. Today, here, it assumes the guise of Bengalism.
Nationalism - right-wing totalitarianism - has employed the personality cult, from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco and Hirohito; left-wing totalitarianism employed Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. The Kims of North Korea are in their third generation.
Patriotism - “My country, right or wrong” - requires enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial as well as judicial murders.
Every institution has been politicised: Thus it is in a totalitarian society, both of the left and the right. When the Chief Justice of Bangladesh did a runner, what was appalling was not so much his dash for life, but the utter indifference of the chatterati.
Nationalism, with its emphasis on emotion at the expense of reason, requires music and song and dance. Artistic people have become part of the government: this is most in evidence in the case of Chayyanaut. The Padma Bridge opening saw an outpouring of musical endorsement from eminent singers. Plays are performed to recall the events of 1971, but none on the famine of 1974 when 1.5 million people starved to death even though there was food in the country and it was hoarded and smuggled to India. The faculty at the Oxford of the Eas backed the government to the hilt when two human rights activists were imprisoned to universal condemnation. Totalitarian tyranny requires the active participation of the intelligentsia, of civil society.
The susceptible foot soldiers of democracy and nationalism have paid for their enthusiasm with their lives - exploited teens unmourned and unnoticed by our society.
