At the beginning of my forties, let me point out that I have lived only a third of my life in Bangladesh, a homeland where my pre-university schooling was done, where I made the deepest of friendships, fell in love for the first time, and otherwise marked so many of the teen milestones of life.
It was a land where my grandparents immigrated to in throes of the 1947 Partition, bringing with them their hopes for a better life for themselves and their progeny, hopes which were rekindled with decisiveness 44 years ago as they heard the faint, yet firm, voice declaring the birth of their very own Republic.
It is also the land that seven out of their nine grandchildren have already left, while the remaining two will likely do so soon. The story of these grandchildren is hardly unique; you are unlikely to find too many families like ours who don’t have a significant number of their current and previous generations abroad for the long haul … and I am not referring to the exclusively economic migrants in the Middle Eastern countries.
How can a utopia turn so sour so ironically for so many in the space of just two generations when, by so many economic indicators, Bangladesh has come up in the estimation of its observers?
Man doesn’t live by bread alone, as the ancient proverb goes.
It is not that ours was a destitute family. While hardly rich, we had our own home, came from educated and professional parents who provided well, and went to good schools. We had near relatives who went on to become important members of the government and the professions. My parents were the only two qualified medical technologists in Bangladesh at Independence, and my grandfather’s only brother was a cabinet member in the late 1970s.
And yet here I am … far away from Bangladesh and living a quiet, simple, unremarkable existence likes hundreds of millions others on these shores. But it is an existence where, generally, merit is rewarded, dissenting thoughts not punished with violence, and simple things of civilized life -- security of person, access to basic utilities, equality before the law, and due process–are more the norm than the exception.
My life here, in material terms, is not much more comfortable than that of my peers in Dhaka who have a similar socio-economic background; what is different is that I have the freedom of publicly and harshly criticising President Obama, or doing scholarly research on the most controversial topics of history and religion without fearing for my life or my liberty.
It is a freedom that I, and everyone else, should have had in the country whose freedom was declared on March 26, 1971, a country I called home once upon a time. Along with several other freedoms whose telling absence 44 years after Independence has seen tens of thousands of the best, the brightest, and the most entrepreneurial leave for the shores of England, Canada, the United States, and Australasia.
The exodus is unlikely to stop anytime soon. On the contrary, as more people get more educated and more connected with the world outside, there is likely going to be only an increase in the realization that basic social and civil freedoms that are simple facts of life in the civilized world are barely acknowledged in Bangladesh.
In a free society, it shouldn’t matter to my neighbors or family what faith I profess or which God(s) I worship, and it shouldn’t matter to my government that I disagree with its preferred historical narrative.
For that matter, a woman’s life and limb shouldn’t be in jeopardy because she happens to be in a public place in “western” attire, and a university fresher shouldn’t have to belong to the ruling party’s student wing to get a spot in the residence halls.
Let us not fool ourselves. 44 years after formal political independence, we are about as far from respecting the freedom of the individual as we ever were. The culprit here is both the state as the superstructure and the society underlying it.
Or, put it more simply, we have never progressed beyond the utterly uncivilised thought process which assumes that people, society, and governments have some strange right not to be offended. From this perverse assumption of a phony right flows the mandates, punishments, and violence against the individual whose religion, thoughts, attire, speech, and intellectual pursuits end up upsetting her family, neighbors, coworkers, and government. Tell me, taken in that context, how are we anymore “free” than someone in Pakistan?
I had once written about how we have an obsessive focus on the past, often at the expense of the future. The celebration of the past is important, but that importance would only remain a fleeting feeling unless the future is envisioned correctly.
For Bangladesh’s political independence to go beyond geographical abstractions of a map and a flag, the freedom of the Bangladeshi individual has to be guaranteed as well. The sublime abstraction of a politically independent country means little, in concrete terms, for the social reality of an unfree individual.
