To write for this Special Issue in celebration of Dhaka Tribune’s ninth anniversary is both an honour and a challenge. It is an honour because I have cherished the forum the editors have provided me these past several years. But it is also a challenge, for to prognosticate 20 years into the future is no easy task, made harder still when one has to do it for a country not one’s own. I once attempted the exercise for India but ended up being miserably off the mark.
Remember that in spite of the billions of dollars spent on research and espionage, the Americans were unable to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and found themselves embarrassed when it did actually happen. Similarly, in spite of the billions of dollars pumped into medical research, the global community was caught unawares when the Covid pandemic struck, devastating lives and livelihoods everywhere. Closer home, even such eminent economists like Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze could not foresee the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy.
Only a decade ago, they had drawn a rosy picture for the island and compared it favourably with most of its South Asian neighbours, including India. The same India has today dispatched huge shipments of emergency relief to save Sri Lanka from imminent starvation. Of course, Indian aid does not mean that the Indian economy is in great shape, nor does it mean that the monumental scholarship of Sen and Dreze is no longer to be trusted.
But it does serve as a reminder that even the predictable can be so unpredictable.
Given that a George Orwell is not born every day and that a Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot so easily be written, all I can try and do is to visualize the future of Bangladesh as an ordinary South Asia watcher.
By dint of my training, that visualization hovers around five perspectives: Bangladesh in relation to India, West Bengal, China, the Islamic world, and, most importantly, in relation to the idea of democracy and its challengers.
For paucity of space, however, I will say just a few words about the last of these.
Having emerged from the ashes of a brutal anti-liberation pogrom and having endured years of ridicule as a “basket case” doomed to remain in the gutter, Bangladesh is now touted as the most happening place in South Asia. In spite of being a predominantly Muslim country with a reasonably large Hindu minority, it is still both democratic and “secular,” no small achievement for a Third World nation.
The spirit of the liberation moment, though under serious threat from time to time, has proven seemingly powerful enough to withstand these assaults.
In my review of Mohammad Ayoob’s popular and otherwise excellent textbook The Many Faces of Political Islam (2020), I had noted how Bangladesh continues to be denied serious consideration:
“While the book has addressed almost all the possible categories of Muslim politics, starting from eastern Africa (Nigeria) and spanning across northern Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Jordon, Palestine and Syria), South Asia (Pakistan), to South East Asia (Indonesia), one is left intrigued by one conspicuous omission. The politics of Bangladesh, which has a population of about 200 million, 90% of whom are Sunni Muslims, and who play a significant role in the nation’s hide and seek with secularism, does not figure at all. To my reckoning, Bangladesh by itself should form a category.”
Every 21st of February, Bangladesh celebrates its Martyr’s Day (Ekushe). Bangladeshis across the country commemorate the movement that took place this day in 1952 against the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language. To the best of my knowledge, Ekushe is the only secular festival of this magnitude in our entire region, one in which both Muslims and Hindus participate with equal fervour and commitment.
This secular mass participation can overwhelm any visitor from a neighbouring South Asian nation; especially today, when almost the entire region is in the grip of religious fanaticism.
A fuller appreciation of the intrinsic democratic spirit of Bangladeshis is perhaps only possible through personal experience. I got a taste of it during my first sojourn in the country in 1989. The dictatorship of Hussain Mohammad Ershad was at its zenith. And yet, to my surprise, I noticed the common man on the street openly criticising Ershad’s government.
Having lived through the oppression, pervasive fear, and self-censorship of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the mid-seventies, such frank and fearless criticism made a deep impression on me. I can still recall vividly the public meeting organized by the Bangladesh Ain Parishad (Law Council). In front of an audience of about 600 people, one speaker after another openly attacked the Ershad government in the harshest Bengali possible.
Consider another example. In India these days there is a great deal of political bickering over the question of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). The Hindu right has long championed a UCC, but the BJP, which has been in power at the Centre for eight years, has yet to produce a draft code for a meaningful debate. Here too Bangladesh had led the way. Faced with similar calls for a UCC (in Bangladeshi parlance Uniform Family Code) spearheaded by a number of progressive women, it was the Bangladesh Mohila Porishad (BMP) that prepared a draft as early as the nineties.
What is important here is not that it was rejected outright by conservative Muslim and Hindu sections within Bangladesh, which was only to be expected. Rather, it is the fact that a draft for debate was indeed produced. Bangladesh had shown the way. If the drafting of a UCC is ever undertaken in India, this Bangladeshi draft will surely serve as a useful cornerstone (although I suspect many will find it too progressive and gender just!).
Let me end this piece with a diary entry from early May 2013. I was in the midst of a short academic tour of Bangladesh. The Shahbag protests were still raging, though they were by then on their last legs. After visiting other parts of the country, I arrived in Dhaka only to discover that the city was in the midst of an indefinite hartal (strike). Realizing that the rest of my trip was bound to be unproductive, I decided to enjoy the remaining days by visiting Cox’s Bazar as a tourist.
On my return, I had to spend a night in transit in Dhaka. All I could afford was a budget hotel. But the kiosks at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport all belonged to five-star hotels. Undeterred, I approached the kiosk of one such hotel and made the rather strange request that the desk manager help me find a budget hotel for the night. Not exactly to my surprise as I am well-travelled in the region, the manager did indeed oblige me.
His comment still rings in my ears: “Sir, if my boss ever comes to know that by using my company phone I have found another hotel for a potential customer, I will lose my job.”
This is Bangladesh, and this is South Asia. Why should not one be proud of this basic human element which is the USP of the region? SAARC is seemingly dead but not the spirit of South Asianism, as I have written repeatedly.
Let us remind ourselves that it was Bangladesh which had sowed the idea of South Asian regionalism which blossomed into SAARC in due course. Ever since it is Bangladesh which has remained its most enthusiastic champion.
I wish Bangladesh all success in its mission. Long live Bangladesh, long live South Asianism.
Partha S Ghosh is Senior Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. Formerly, ICSSR National Fellow, and Professor of South Asian Studies at JNU. E-mail: [email protected].
