Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister of Bangladesh, was charged with murder under the caretaker government (2007 - 2008). The charge was entirely justified: the workers of her party killed several opposition activists in broad daylight during a riot witnessed by the entire nation. Of course, she never killed anyone with her own hands: neither, presumably, did Al Capone. But the authorities couldn't get her even for tax evasion, although several cases of extortion were lodged against here. The dirty nature of politics in Bangladesh was underscored by the release of Sheikh Hasina from a makeshift jail - to become the prime minister once again. And this wasn't the first time that her henchmen had committed murder. Yet the loyalty of her supporters - which included my parents and my wider family - never diminished, never wavered.
Why?
Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first member of the dynasty, was a murderer on an even greater scale. He is also known as the father of the nation, and it is true that his demagoguery created the conditions for a civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh. A detailed record of the murders and the deliberate famine that led to his killing by the army appears here.
The paradox that needs to be explained is the continuing loyalty towards the dead monster on the part of a section of the educated of Bangladesh (the uneducated never count in this country: as a writer put it, Bangladesh never represents Bangladeshis). That immoral loyalty has been transferred to his living daughter, as we saw above.
How do we explain this phenomenon?
I was baffled by this question for years until I began to study anthropological psychology, especially the role of anxiety in national culture.
What is the biggest anxiety of middle class persons? That they would cease to be middle class, and fall below their station - or, more accurately, that their children will. For the parents have struggled towards a certain elevation, and can see their way clear for some distance in time. Still, even they might slip....But they don't want their children to struggle...and slip.
Now, the working classes have their ability to labour, as Marx astutely pointed out, so their dread is of a different calibre - the dread of illness, and injury. In fact, anthropological studies have revealed that in Bangladesh, the working class define health in terms of the ability to work. This has unnerving implications: infections like HYV would not be regarded as a threat so long as full-blown AIDS did not occur. Also, doctors know that the poor suffer from chronic depression and ulcers through worry.
But the middle class is a class-unto-itself. They are highly articulate, clubby and ambitious. They can make and break nations. When Bangladesh was East Pakistan, the eastern wing of Pakistan, with the western king a thousand miles away, known as West Pakistan, the middle classes had just emerged from two hundred years of British rule. They had seen what the Indian middle class achieved - independence for India, and the devil take the poor. Today, 800 million Indians labour for a minority of 200 million of the middle class. This was to be their paradigm for Bangladesh.
A full-blown mythology was created - that the West Pakistanis spoke Urdu, and the East Pakistanis Bengali, when in fact Urdu was the language of a minuscule minority of the polyglot West Pakistanis. But the trick worked: the Urdu-speakers were exploiting the Bengali-speakers.
And the man who delivered the message on behalf of the middle class was Sheikh Mujib, rabble-rouser extraordinaire. His speeches remind one a great deal of the speeches of Hitler, the leader who led a ruined middle-class to horror.
Thus, the Bengali-speaking intelligentsia identified completely with Sheikh Mujib, who was to relieve them of their anxiety. Psychiatrists have long known that patients tend to identify them as father figures: indeed, Freud spoke of the need to transfer feeling to the pseudo-father figure to cure neurosis.
Freud observed: "It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against outsiders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestation of their aggressiveness (Civilisation and Its Discontents,tr. James Strachey, W.W.Norton & Co: New York, p 61). Recent research has confirmed this to be true of chimpanzees as well.
What Freud has to say about the father in the same book is most illuminating: "In my Future of an Illusion" I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion - with the systems of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father." One doesn't have to agree with Freud here: current research has shown that identification with a father figure is important for a child's emotional well-being. Infantile powerlessness clearly has a great deal to do with it.
However, Freud is completely wrong in his definition of religion: there are religions which have no transcendent father figure, such as Confucianism (Confucius was an earthly father figure). And that modern religion - nationalism - needs no father figure at all. Nevertheless, Sheikh Mujib was a father figure of the Mosaic type: he led the chosen people - the Bengalis - against the West Pakistanis, the Canaanite equivalent, promising the former a land of milk and honey. Sheikh Mujib was the prophet of Bengali Nationalism - perhaps even the God. There are many young kids among the foot-soldiers of the Awami League, the party he led, who reject their own fathers for Sheikh Mujib: I have done a systematic study of the subject.
Hence, Sheikh Mujib's infallibility: he assuaged a terrible anxiety, delivered the land of milk and honey for narrow, corrupt elite, and drove out the Canaanites. His lineage must equally be infallible: hence the idolatry of the Mujib family against Islam, the religion of Pakistan. Awami Leaguers favourite - intramural - pastime is ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed
Naturally, the middle class are a bookish people, like all scribes: their only source of success was through education. These were the people Mujib led. Consequently, the Awami League's biggest supporters are to be found among the university teachers, and the intelligentsia. They are in a position to refute history and sanction murder.
Showing posts with label West Pakistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Pakistan. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
Friday, June 19, 2009
People power in Iran?
"Iran’s rural population has historically been very deeply apolitical". This, according to the Economist, is wrong: 66% of poor and rural voters vote as against 33% of the urbanised middle class. But never mind that.
A 'class' analysis doesn't take that modern fact into account: the agent provocateur. In this brilliantly researched article by Seymour Hersh, he shows in vivid detail how America has been priming the pump in Iran:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all
Also try : Iran mosque blast plotters admit Israeli, US links: report:
They also admitted carrying out "one or two minor operations," the agency said, without providing further details except to say the group launched military operations a year ago.
http://tinyurl.com/5row5r
Besides, we know that people are dumb: they must and will be led and manipulated. Leo Strauss's Iron Law of Oligarchy has always held true.
"They are openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, have moved beyond Mousavi". Millions of people out of a population of 70 million, most of whom are above 15? That doesn't sound like "the people" to me: it sounds like the impressionistic and ill-educated Gucci class of Iran.
I have seen it happen time and again in Bangladesh: a couple of people take to the streets, and they call it a revolution, when the vast majority is farming or fishing.
The writer mentions the misery index: inflation plus unemployment. Inflation has always done nutty things to people, especially the middle class because they see their savings eroded; unemployment creates the hooligans who take to the streets.
What the writer failed to mention was the multiplication of the number of university students: whenever this happens, society becomes unstable. An educated middle class is the worst calamity that can befall a nation: it led to the violent break-away of East Pakistan from West Pakistan in 1971, to the anti-British attacks of the Bengal terrorists earlier.
A wise government, like Malaysia's and Indonesia's, would have kept tertiary education down to a minimum and maximised primary education. However, sooner or later, tertiary education becomes necessary, and then you have lunatic movements like 'reformasi' and Tiananmen.
A 'class' analysis doesn't take that modern fact into account: the agent provocateur. In this brilliantly researched article by Seymour Hersh, he shows in vivid detail how America has been priming the pump in Iran:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all
Also try : Iran mosque blast plotters admit Israeli, US links: report:
They also admitted carrying out "one or two minor operations," the agency said, without providing further details except to say the group launched military operations a year ago.
http://tinyurl.com/5row5r
Besides, we know that people are dumb: they must and will be led and manipulated. Leo Strauss's Iron Law of Oligarchy has always held true.
"They are openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, have moved beyond Mousavi". Millions of people out of a population of 70 million, most of whom are above 15? That doesn't sound like "the people" to me: it sounds like the impressionistic and ill-educated Gucci class of Iran.
I have seen it happen time and again in Bangladesh: a couple of people take to the streets, and they call it a revolution, when the vast majority is farming or fishing.
The writer mentions the misery index: inflation plus unemployment. Inflation has always done nutty things to people, especially the middle class because they see their savings eroded; unemployment creates the hooligans who take to the streets.
What the writer failed to mention was the multiplication of the number of university students: whenever this happens, society becomes unstable. An educated middle class is the worst calamity that can befall a nation: it led to the violent break-away of East Pakistan from West Pakistan in 1971, to the anti-British attacks of the Bengal terrorists earlier.
A wise government, like Malaysia's and Indonesia's, would have kept tertiary education down to a minimum and maximised primary education. However, sooner or later, tertiary education becomes necessary, and then you have lunatic movements like 'reformasi' and Tiananmen.
Monday, January 26, 2009
The Logos of Bangladesh
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Logos-of-Bangladesh-by-Iftekhar-Sayeed-090123-803.html
(click above to read article)
Two things conspire to multiply falsehood about Bangladesh: an ersatz nationalism, and a very real domination by western donor governments. The culture of lies that these have created robs even everyday life of its dignity, and sustains a noxious elite that thrives like a parasite on the backs of 'the people'.
EXCERPT:
Bangladesh's elite claim that the West wing tried to impose 'their' language, Urdu, on 'us'. It is repeated ad nauseum that Jinnah said that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan; but Jinnah couldn't speak a word of Urdu! "The man who could not speak Urdu could move the Muslim multitude. [35]" According to Stephens, Pakistan experienced none of the language-based upheavals of South Asia. The only fracas he notes was the attempt by Prime Minster Nazimuddin to rank Bengali below Urdu in 1952 [36]. That produced our 'language martyrs' or 'language shaheed', the latter a curiously Muslim word used to denote those who die for Islam. The event was, compared to other South Asian movements, so trivial that Stephens mentions only "some students among the casualties [37]". And under the 1956 constitution, Urdu and Bengali got equal rank, a status confirmed in the constitution of 1962. But 21st February 1952 has lodged permanently in the elite psyche of Bangladesh. It was essential to define the demon 'Other', West Pakistan, though Nazimuddin himself was Bengali.
It is ironic to note that Bengali literature flourished under British rule – when the state language was English. In 1835, Lord William Bentinck had effectively replaced Persian with English, which Muslims refused to learn, and Hindus, who had learnt Persian under the Mughals, quickly adopted [38]. "During this period, Bengali literature produced a spate of novels—satiric, social, and picaresque. [39]" Bankim Chandra Chaterjee's infamous anti-Muslim novel Anandamath appeared in 1881: "a patriotic tale of the revolt of the sannyasis against the Muslim forces of the East India company. [40] "
"To his contemporaries his voice was that of a prophet; his valiant Hindu heroes aroused their patriotism and pride of race. In him nationalism and Hinduism merged as one; and his creed was epitomized in the song 'Bande Mātaram' ('Hail to thee, Mother')—from his novel Ānandamaṭh—which later became the mantra ('hymn') and slogan of Hindu India in its struggle for independence." Of course, the crowning achievement was that of Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize.
That is to say, the official English language, far from muting indigenous literary output, actually stimulated it. If Bengalis were willing to put up with English then, why not with Urdu later? Not because Urdu would have killed off Bengali – but because, as the violent linguistic movements throughout South Asia in the '50s attest, nationalism was on the ascendant, ironically infected by English jingoism. But we shall see the pharisaical nature of our attachment to Bengali.
Besides, whatever the economic differences between West and East Pakistan, ultimately nationalism knows no rationality. The Quebec elite still wish to separate from Canada; the Basques and Catalans want autonomy verging on – if not actual – independence. To claim that nationalism is a rational response to perceived economic inequality would be to assign rationality to a lunatic aspiration. Income inequality has existed in every country – witness Italy's and England's south and north....The latter can argue that the former grew rich on the industrial might of the northern English towns, now blighted through deindustrialization. Therefore, the north should secede from England! Scotland gets a handsome amount of dosh from England, yet the Scottish Nationalist Party wants to secede. It is remarkable that the cinema 'Braveheart' could reignite Scottish nationalism.
"Their victimhood is an invention," observed The Economist of the Scots in a disturbing article [41].It observed that Tony Blair, Helen Liddell, Robin Cook, Derry Irvine and John Reid were all Scots – and Scotland had its own parliament and executive. During the World Cup, the bestselling newspaper The Daily Record urged the Scots to cheer on every opponent of the English team. And, more frighteningly, incidents of bullying of English children at school rose alarmingly; ChildLine Scotland recorded a sudden surge in calls from hapless English children. "Scots seem to have an enormous chip on their shoulder," observed the head of the Confederation of British Industry who blamed Scotland's weak economy on its failure to attract English investment. Ross Finnie, a Liberal democrat minister, retorted eloquently with "English prat".
Consider the career of Slobodan Milosevich. As leader of the Serbian communist party in 1986, he turned Kosovo into a crusade – merely to advance his political career. He revived the cult of Prince Lazar, who had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks six hundred years ago – and on June 28 1989, he turned the anniversary into a national event [42]. Who was the victim here? Was any rational calculation at work? Yes, from Milosevic's point of view – he advanced his career. But what about the people whose emotions he stirred? Were they behaving rationally? Nationalism brooks no reason.
Nationalism, of course, was a West European, Franco-German, idea: it spread to Asia by means of conquest and subsequent reeducation of the natives. That the experiment of the nation-state was bound to fail seems, in retrospect, obvious. And fail it did, throughout South Asia, according to Tambiah. "In India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, the attempt to realise the nation-state on a Western European model has virtually failed. The nation-state conception has not taken deep roots in South Asia or generated a wide-spread and robust participatory ‘public culture’ that celebrates it in widely meaningful ceremonies, festivals, and rituals [43]."
(click above to read article)
Two things conspire to multiply falsehood about Bangladesh: an ersatz nationalism, and a very real domination by western donor governments. The culture of lies that these have created robs even everyday life of its dignity, and sustains a noxious elite that thrives like a parasite on the backs of 'the people'.
EXCERPT:
Bangladesh's elite claim that the West wing tried to impose 'their' language, Urdu, on 'us'. It is repeated ad nauseum that Jinnah said that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan; but Jinnah couldn't speak a word of Urdu! "The man who could not speak Urdu could move the Muslim multitude. [35]" According to Stephens, Pakistan experienced none of the language-based upheavals of South Asia. The only fracas he notes was the attempt by Prime Minster Nazimuddin to rank Bengali below Urdu in 1952 [36]. That produced our 'language martyrs' or 'language shaheed', the latter a curiously Muslim word used to denote those who die for Islam. The event was, compared to other South Asian movements, so trivial that Stephens mentions only "some students among the casualties [37]". And under the 1956 constitution, Urdu and Bengali got equal rank, a status confirmed in the constitution of 1962. But 21st February 1952 has lodged permanently in the elite psyche of Bangladesh. It was essential to define the demon 'Other', West Pakistan, though Nazimuddin himself was Bengali.
It is ironic to note that Bengali literature flourished under British rule – when the state language was English. In 1835, Lord William Bentinck had effectively replaced Persian with English, which Muslims refused to learn, and Hindus, who had learnt Persian under the Mughals, quickly adopted [38]. "During this period, Bengali literature produced a spate of novels—satiric, social, and picaresque. [39]" Bankim Chandra Chaterjee's infamous anti-Muslim novel Anandamath appeared in 1881: "a patriotic tale of the revolt of the sannyasis against the Muslim forces of the East India company. [40] "
"To his contemporaries his voice was that of a prophet; his valiant Hindu heroes aroused their patriotism and pride of race. In him nationalism and Hinduism merged as one; and his creed was epitomized in the song 'Bande Mātaram' ('Hail to thee, Mother')—from his novel Ānandamaṭh—which later became the mantra ('hymn') and slogan of Hindu India in its struggle for independence." Of course, the crowning achievement was that of Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize.
That is to say, the official English language, far from muting indigenous literary output, actually stimulated it. If Bengalis were willing to put up with English then, why not with Urdu later? Not because Urdu would have killed off Bengali – but because, as the violent linguistic movements throughout South Asia in the '50s attest, nationalism was on the ascendant, ironically infected by English jingoism. But we shall see the pharisaical nature of our attachment to Bengali.
Besides, whatever the economic differences between West and East Pakistan, ultimately nationalism knows no rationality. The Quebec elite still wish to separate from Canada; the Basques and Catalans want autonomy verging on – if not actual – independence. To claim that nationalism is a rational response to perceived economic inequality would be to assign rationality to a lunatic aspiration. Income inequality has existed in every country – witness Italy's and England's south and north....The latter can argue that the former grew rich on the industrial might of the northern English towns, now blighted through deindustrialization. Therefore, the north should secede from England! Scotland gets a handsome amount of dosh from England, yet the Scottish Nationalist Party wants to secede. It is remarkable that the cinema 'Braveheart' could reignite Scottish nationalism.
"Their victimhood is an invention," observed The Economist of the Scots in a disturbing article [41].It observed that Tony Blair, Helen Liddell, Robin Cook, Derry Irvine and John Reid were all Scots – and Scotland had its own parliament and executive. During the World Cup, the bestselling newspaper The Daily Record urged the Scots to cheer on every opponent of the English team. And, more frighteningly, incidents of bullying of English children at school rose alarmingly; ChildLine Scotland recorded a sudden surge in calls from hapless English children. "Scots seem to have an enormous chip on their shoulder," observed the head of the Confederation of British Industry who blamed Scotland's weak economy on its failure to attract English investment. Ross Finnie, a Liberal democrat minister, retorted eloquently with "English prat".
Consider the career of Slobodan Milosevich. As leader of the Serbian communist party in 1986, he turned Kosovo into a crusade – merely to advance his political career. He revived the cult of Prince Lazar, who had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks six hundred years ago – and on June 28 1989, he turned the anniversary into a national event [42]. Who was the victim here? Was any rational calculation at work? Yes, from Milosevic's point of view – he advanced his career. But what about the people whose emotions he stirred? Were they behaving rationally? Nationalism brooks no reason.
Nationalism, of course, was a West European, Franco-German, idea: it spread to Asia by means of conquest and subsequent reeducation of the natives. That the experiment of the nation-state was bound to fail seems, in retrospect, obvious. And fail it did, throughout South Asia, according to Tambiah. "In India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, the attempt to realise the nation-state on a Western European model has virtually failed. The nation-state conception has not taken deep roots in South Asia or generated a wide-spread and robust participatory ‘public culture’ that celebrates it in widely meaningful ceremonies, festivals, and rituals [43]."
Monday, November 17, 2008
a demagogue delivers - destruction and death
"First he [Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman] opposed British rule in India. After the subcontinent's partition in 1947, he denounced West Pakistan's dominance of East Pakistan with every bit as much vehemence. "Brothers," he would say to his Bengali followers, "do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that gold? Then raise your hands and join me."
TIME Magazine, Monday, Apr. 05, 1971
"And one of the worst clusters of grossly overcrowded shacks and hovels, unfit for animals to live in, lay beside the main route from one of the airports to the rich centre of the city. Visiting foreigners were appalled, not merely by what they saw and smelt, but by the apparent helpless apathy of successive political Cabinets towards this mass of human misery unmitigated on their doorstep. Probably nothing so discredited Pakistan internationally, during the confused years before the military coup, as the persisting shameful squalor along the pavements of her capital."
(Ian Stephens, Pakistan, Old Country, New Nation, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1964, p 309)"
1) Sheikh Mujib campaigned against the British: no Muslim wanted that the British should leave. The 'Quit India' movement was an entirely Hindu movement. The terror that had driven men like Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan was the terror of democracy where the Hindus would be the majority. Since 1947, these terrors have been amply well-founded. Apart from the violence against Muslims, Muslims' job prospects are worse than that for Dalits.
2) After 1947, West Pakistan could hardly dominate anyone – never mind the far more populous East Pakistan. Indeed, Jinnah's energies were consumed by the Kashmir struggle.
3) According to my late, lamented friend, Omar Ali Chowdhury, who was personal secretary to Hussein Shahrawardy, the only reason that Shahrawardy picked Mujib to run the Awami League was because he was rabble-rouser par excellence.
4) Shahrawardy and protégé were both inimical to the Pakistan concept. The former was hobnobbing with Nehru and Gandhi while Jinnah was trying to forge a state single-handedly. When the new Indian government taxed his property away from him, he emerged in East Pakistan to revive his fortune – a carpetbagger.
5) Mujib, therefore, brought to East Pakistan, the same nationalism that had enthused the Hindus. The distance between West and East Pakistan, and the linguistic majority of the Bengali Muslims, were fertile soil for the ambitions of a demagogue to reap a bitter harvest. We in the East tended to believe everything we were told about the West because we couldn't go there – it required an expensive plane ride, or a prolonged sea voyage. Whether the streets of Karachi were paved with gold or cobble-stones was something we couldn't verify.
6) The distance between East and West also helped Mujib and others to recreate the metropolis-colony, or Britain-India, dichotomy. The psychology was powerful since so fresh, and succeeding economics, Marxists to the last man (some of them were my teachers at Dhaka University in the '80s), provided 'facts' to back up this dichotomy.
7) Furthermore, we were told that 'they' spoke Urdu, while 'we' spoke Bengali. In fact, Urdu is the mother tongue of a fraction of the people of Pakistan even today. Contemporary Pakistan is a polyglot nation.
8) Democracy produces demagogues and the last straw was the election of 1970 – the most terrible event to befall the country – one in which our servant voted seven times.
TIME Magazine, Monday, Apr. 05, 1971
"And one of the worst clusters of grossly overcrowded shacks and hovels, unfit for animals to live in, lay beside the main route from one of the airports to the rich centre of the city. Visiting foreigners were appalled, not merely by what they saw and smelt, but by the apparent helpless apathy of successive political Cabinets towards this mass of human misery unmitigated on their doorstep. Probably nothing so discredited Pakistan internationally, during the confused years before the military coup, as the persisting shameful squalor along the pavements of her capital."
(Ian Stephens, Pakistan, Old Country, New Nation, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1964, p 309)"
1) Sheikh Mujib campaigned against the British: no Muslim wanted that the British should leave. The 'Quit India' movement was an entirely Hindu movement. The terror that had driven men like Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan was the terror of democracy where the Hindus would be the majority. Since 1947, these terrors have been amply well-founded. Apart from the violence against Muslims, Muslims' job prospects are worse than that for Dalits.
2) After 1947, West Pakistan could hardly dominate anyone – never mind the far more populous East Pakistan. Indeed, Jinnah's energies were consumed by the Kashmir struggle.
3) According to my late, lamented friend, Omar Ali Chowdhury, who was personal secretary to Hussein Shahrawardy, the only reason that Shahrawardy picked Mujib to run the Awami League was because he was rabble-rouser par excellence.
4) Shahrawardy and protégé were both inimical to the Pakistan concept. The former was hobnobbing with Nehru and Gandhi while Jinnah was trying to forge a state single-handedly. When the new Indian government taxed his property away from him, he emerged in East Pakistan to revive his fortune – a carpetbagger.
5) Mujib, therefore, brought to East Pakistan, the same nationalism that had enthused the Hindus. The distance between West and East Pakistan, and the linguistic majority of the Bengali Muslims, were fertile soil for the ambitions of a demagogue to reap a bitter harvest. We in the East tended to believe everything we were told about the West because we couldn't go there – it required an expensive plane ride, or a prolonged sea voyage. Whether the streets of Karachi were paved with gold or cobble-stones was something we couldn't verify.
6) The distance between East and West also helped Mujib and others to recreate the metropolis-colony, or Britain-India, dichotomy. The psychology was powerful since so fresh, and succeeding economics, Marxists to the last man (some of them were my teachers at Dhaka University in the '80s), provided 'facts' to back up this dichotomy.
7) Furthermore, we were told that 'they' spoke Urdu, while 'we' spoke Bengali. In fact, Urdu is the mother tongue of a fraction of the people of Pakistan even today. Contemporary Pakistan is a polyglot nation.
8) Democracy produces demagogues and the last straw was the election of 1970 – the most terrible event to befall the country – one in which our servant voted seven times.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
a demagogue delivers
"First he [Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman] opposed British rule in India. After the subcontinent's partition in 1947, he denounced West Pakistan's dominance of East Pakistan with every bit as much vehemence. "Brothers," he would say to his Bengali followers, "do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that gold? Then raise your hands and join me."
TIME Magazine, Monday, Apr. 05, 1971
"And one of the worst clusters of grossly overcrowded shacks and hovels, unfit for animals to live in, lay beside the main route from one of the airports to the rich centre of the city. Visiting foreigners were appalled, not merely by what they saw and smelt, but by the apparent helpless apathy of successive political Cabinets towards this mass of human misery unmitigated on their doorstep. Probably nothing so discredited Pakistan internationally, during the confused years before the military coup, as the persisting shameful squalor along the pavements of her capital."
(Ian Stephens, Pakistan, Old Country, New Nation, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1964, p 309)"
TIME Magazine, Monday, Apr. 05, 1971
"And one of the worst clusters of grossly overcrowded shacks and hovels, unfit for animals to live in, lay beside the main route from one of the airports to the rich centre of the city. Visiting foreigners were appalled, not merely by what they saw and smelt, but by the apparent helpless apathy of successive political Cabinets towards this mass of human misery unmitigated on their doorstep. Probably nothing so discredited Pakistan internationally, during the confused years before the military coup, as the persisting shameful squalor along the pavements of her capital."
(Ian Stephens, Pakistan, Old Country, New Nation, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1964, p 309)"
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