I live in a weird country.
Millions died in the war of independence of 1971, hundreds of thousands were brutally raped, kept under servitude for the pleasures of the marauding army from a thousand miles away; millions were displaced, made to flee their homesteads, made to lose their valuables, their memories. Some never recovered all that they had lost. But lo and behold, the history of that glorious victory of our independent nation lies in tatters almost four-and-a-half decades after the events of 1971.
I remember with solemn pride the history of the war of our liberation. How much liberated we are from the tyranny of a few is today an academic debate into which I don’t want to delve. But I wish the “history” of the most crucial events of 1971 and, thereafter, the singularly momentous events of our collective life as a nation, were well and truly representative of the “real” and not the self-serving drivel we find in many accounts today.
Who made the declaration of independence? Who was a freedom fighter? Who was a collaborator? Who were oppressed? Who were the oppressors? What was the chetona that guided that war? Many questions, but no definitive answers.
Some people write books on it and the country parts like the Red Sea. One side lifts the writer up on their shoulders while the others cry foul. Children learn the history from their parents or from their family members. Parents with partisan views on the true history impart tainted knowledge to kids -- history presented as fiction with some touch of the real. One man’s hero is another’s retrograde; no one remains above party bias. History has become soft putty, to be given shape at anyone’s whim.
Democracy of some kind or other has been practiced for 25 years now, with a small two-year hiccup of quasi-military, quasi-civilian rule, but we have had a parliament full of elected members. Nobody but a politician can be free of cynicism about the goings-on inside that hallowed, red-brick work of architecture. One group sits in the air-conditioned interior dozing, while another is always out catering to panderers and earning big bucks. The opposition cries foul at everything, but takes all the privileges.
People with falsified certifications of freedom fighter status hold big government posts; the gold medals for the war have no value, while collaborators continue to become ministers and have the flag, earned from that bloodied war, flap in the breeze as it hangs from their official cars. People who practiced Marxism-Leninism or screamed for socialism have become the owners of “private property,” which used to be a poisonous phrase for them, once upon a time. They don skull caps and go for pilgrimages while redolent of holy ator. Government officials with meagre salaries are rich beyond any possible imagination. And we have learned to live with all of that.
The revenue people want millions in taxes from the students while hundreds of millions more pillaged from the banks seem chicken-feed to the finance minister. The stock market became a place to cut the pockets of the unsuspecting and the gullible, and the same finance minister says that the cut purses are “too big” to bring to book.
People sweat sitting in traffic jams as the “very important persons” break the rules and go through the wrong side. Only their time is precious. Education is in shambles with question papers becoming available at the vendors’ -- God save us from the doctors of the future! The Anti-Corruption Commission, a “toothless tiger,” sits comfortably in air-cooled rooms and gives clearance to red-hot thieves.
Politicians are divorced from the masses. It seems, like sperm, millions and millions of politicians are produced but only a few go on to become humans.
And the general masses? For them, democracy comes once every five years for a single day when they keep turning up in hordes to elect their “representative” in the big red-brick house. It will be a miracle if they see the elected person again for the next five years, but they sure do meet the political goons every day. Goons collect subscriptions, goons dictate terms, goons are the law until that day comes again, when the old goons are on the run -- nature does not allow vacuums, and new goons surface overnight.
People struggle on in spite, and till the land, grow crops to make the surplus food; workers work and increase exports; the entrepreneurs, forever enterprising, create new industries; the foreign currency reserve swells. Millions work overseas and remit money to the country, only for the country to give them a hard time at the airport when they come home for a visit.
It’s the people who are driving Bangladesh to become a middle-income country, but they are not getting the service they deserve from the nation, and what they get is mostly threadbare. The upper tier eats the cream and goes to Singapore for treatment after a few sneezes on a rainy morning; the general hospitals have cold dirty floors for the poor. The rich also have second homes, and why not? Dhaka is a nasty place to call home.
Four decades after independence, we now have a few thousand ruling the country with a democracy that is more crony capitalism and oligarchy.
How have things changed then? It’s just old wine in a new bottle.