“You must be the son of a war criminal or razakar!”
Thus went the last line of a social media exchange early this month on the pages of a Washington-based broadcaster between two people who didn’t know each other from Adam. The recipient of this rather highly defamatory (and laughable) post is an NRB gentleman well acquainted with me who was making the point, albeit rather strenuously, that one of the premier and pioneering online news organisations of the country was editorially biased in favour of the current regime.
A few posts back and forth into the debate, the other individual -- a senior employee of the online portal under discussion -- reached the limit of his patience and behaved in a manner all too familiar, sadly, in public discourse in Bangladesh these days. That such boorish behaviour is found in almost every society, Eastern and Western, is a given, especially in these days of instant social media communications.
What is disappointing, however, is that such déclassé utterances seem to be no longer limited to the lower strata of society; indeed, the online portal employee making this comment is a modestly well-known literary personality with his forte in translating Latin American literary works into Bengali.
The litterateur is hardly alone in getting into the proverbial gutters during public discourse. Not too long ago, I was horrified -- but perhaps not shocked -- to see the Facebook post of another author and lecturer at a rather prominent private university in Dhaka reacting to some Israeli policy move by bellowing “Hitler left his job undone!” Yet another individual, a former flag officer of the air force who was trained in the United States on American taxpayer expense, responded to my own critique of Shariah law by concluding decisively that I must be a “Zionist agent paid by American Jews.” For the record, I am yet to see a dime of that money.
Such examples can be given aplenty by people who are much better than I. While these few instances of intolerance do not represent (hopefully) the urbane layers of aspiring Bangladeshi society, they do indicate a discomfort with intellectual diversity that, heretofore, was thought to be limited to the so-called unwashed masses. That a traditional South Asian society is steeped in a desire for conformity is understandable; what is frightening is that those who are supposed to have led the charge for the steady increase in the space for dissent have been closing their minds more often than is salutary.
It is said that people eventually get the government that they deserve. Given the continuously rising level of concern at the crackdown on dissent that the current Dhaka regime has been engaging in, should we really blame just the government of the day? When the most educated segments of a society display a rank intolerance for countervailing thoughts in public forums so proudly and loudly, is it fair to charge it all to a government which is, with much merit, looked upon as one without electoral legitimacy?
What this government lacks in terms of voter consent, insofar as political intolerance goes, seems to be made up by its synchronisation with the narrow-minded social mores of the educated class.
It matters. My grandfather spent his first years of adulthood and professional career in Kolkata where the instinctive boisterousness of the Bengali intellect was expected to be tempered by the decency of the quintessential bhodrolok. He reveled in the parliamentary debates and public speeches of his idols, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq, men whose loquacious pronouncements were rarely marred by low-class epithets towards their adversaries in discourse.
Men of class simply did not go into the gutters of street parlance if they could help it. Bengalis of culture and education coined and epitomised the very meaning of the bhodrolok all over the sub-continent. That was then, it appears.
There is not much ordinary men and women can do about a government whose intolerance of dissent is underlined by the full power of a modern state’s security apparatus, pliant electoral adjudicators, admiring judiciary, or pragmatic media. But what does it say about those same men and women who, even with the benefit of education and worldliness, reflect the same intolerance towards their fellow citizens in the most basic aspects of public discourse?
The answer to that question may contain some truths that we may yet be uncomfortable in answering.