The news of the Australian Cricket team delaying its scheduled tour to Bangladesh on security grounds came as a surprise to many.
For the past few years, a plethora of writings and commentaries on Bangladesh politics published worldwide have argued that the threat of “militant Islamists” in Bangladesh is real. The unfortunate grisly murders of atheist bloggers, allegedly by militant Islamists, too have contributed to this fear-mongering narrative.
Even though, in recent years, more Bangladeshis have died in road accidents, in shootings by law enforcers or through political violence, in a world where the war on terror is very much real, unfortunate murders of bloggers in Bangladesh have caught the imagination of the Western world. The reason is that we live in a world where some deaths are more important than others. Any narrative that poses Islamists as threats seems to feed world imagination faster than any other issue.
There should be no denial that militancy is a threat to Bangladesh, but one should also ask how much this threat to Bangladesh is different from the threat posed to Australia, the USA, or the UK. The fact of the matter is every country in the world is now under the threat of militancy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that national teams and people do not visit these countries.
What this recent decision of the Australian Cricket Board may do is to reinforce an unnecessary stigmatisation of a Muslim country like Bangladesh. This stigmatisation flourishes on the assumption that Muslims are anti-Western and anti-liberal. Western conservative scholars such as Samuel Huntington, Paul Berman, and Bernard Lewis have championed this narrative.
At the same time, it is plausible to argue that the decision to delay the tour to Bangladesh is not totally unsubstantiated, since Australia recently joined the fight against the Islamic State, whose global capacity to assert an attack in Bangladesh is not beyond imagination. Besides, in recent years, the link between Australia-based radical Muslim outfits and Bangladeshi outfits has come into public discourse.
Bangladesh should take two immediate measures to assure Australians. First, our security and diplomatic establishments should make it absolutely clear to the Australians that people of Bangladesh love Australia. Many Bangladeshis live in Australia, who are contributing actively into the development of their society and they are sending money back to Bangladesh to improve their own homesteads. Therefore, people of Bangladesh in general would not tolerate any sort of agitation against Australians.
Secondly, Bangladesh and Bangladeshis need to be cautious about playing the “militant Islamists” card. On global platforms, or in civil society, the favourite topic of discussion is “militant Islamism” in Bangladesh. At times, some of these discussions remind us of bashing a strawman without ample proof.
What these unsophisticated discussions have done is that it has put Bangladesh into the global discourse that does not reject the idea that militancy in Bangladesh is on the rise. However, how much this rising threat of militancy in Bangladesh is different than the threat of a militant attack in America or Australia is unclear, and we need to debate this seriously and set the parameters of threat objectively.
Otherwise, these discussions, most of which are rather sweeping commentaries, are proving detrimental to the image of Bangladesh. We should remember that our country’s image is important, not just for hosting a cricket series, but also to attract foreign investment. It needs further explanation.
The world we live in today is governed by a global political order embalming sovereign nation states. This global political order is majorly based upon capitalist models which culminate in producing a globalised world where the distance between here and there gets blurred, considering the technological diffusion, media coverage, and financial liberalisation.
Within this set-up, “the image of a country” is important more than ever before. The image of a country is an important informational cue to businesses and foreign governments. The example of Danish companies losing business worth millions of dollars in the Middle East as a repercussion of the publication of a derogatory cartoon of the Muslims’ respected Prophet Muhammad is worth mentioning here in order to depict the political relevance and economic consequences of a country’s image in the world today.
Therefore, we should use the militant Islamist card very cautiously and our security establishment should make sure that they will provide the highest security to the Australian team. The hope is still there, the tour is on hold, not cancelled. We need to ensure that the tour takes place. Otherwise, the gravity of a cancelled tour on security grounds will have ramifications beyond cricket.
