THE HORROR! THE HORROR! An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Horrors of Bangladesh

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. 

2000)
YEAR	STUDENT KILLED	POLITICAL AFFILIATION	MURDERED AT	AGE
2000	Zahid	Leader, Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL)	Hostel	Students  graduate  at the age of  18
1999	Sohel	Elected general secretary of students’ union in 1997	Near hostel
1998	Sajal	President, BCL unit	Campus
1996	Riyad	Convener, BCL unit of institute	In front of hostel
1995	Mizanur Rahman	Convener, Jatiyabadi Chatra Dal (JCD)	Within 200 yards of hostel
1992	Shakil Ahmed	General Secretary, JCD unit	Dormitory
1992	Rab	JCD leader	Campus
1992	Shahabuddin	JCD leader	Campus
1987	Sharif Hossain	General secretary, student union	In front of hostel
1985	Miniruzzaman Munir and 5 other activists	Leader and members of Jatiya Chatra Samaj	Campus
Figure 7

The Father Figure

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.