Four days without internet isn’t necessarily a terrible idea. Unless it is imposed by the state. As the past few days attest to, this tactic utilized to keep rumour mongering at bay and stem panic by controlling information backfired. Instead, it provided the recipe for a nightmare amidst a curfew, sounds of bullets, tear gas, sound grenades (and what else?) in the distance, reports of IDF-style shooting from helicopters, snipers on rooftops, and the military brought in to manage discontent.
How many people were getting killed? Who were getting killed? For what? We had no reliable answers. The image of Abu Sayeed being killed by police as he looked on in disbelief was still fresh in our minds. His mother’s words, too, struck a chord: “You won’t give him a job, fine, why did you have to kill him?”
How many more Abu Sayeeds were there? Reports on TV that there were anarchists, miscreants, and terrorists on the streets unleashing violence against public property signaled the use of more repression to rein them in. It also spoke to how a fairly innocuous student movement over job quotas snowballed into anti-government demonstrations. Even conservative body counts provided by newspapers pointed to unpreceded levels of political violence within a short span of time.
In my class just the week before, we had discussed why students found themselves taking regressive positions regarding quotas in a classroom setting. Do students not think marginalized students need a leg up?
In our conversation, it became clear that the muktijodhha quota was particularly contentious -- first, because not all muktijodhhas are certificate-holding muktijodhhas thanks to the corruption and politics that go into it; and second, they saw no reason why three-to-four generations later, they would still need quotas to get jobs.
The quota system for jobs, as it stood, would not rectify historical disadvantages. Rather it was a way to privilege some. Between the binary of no-quotas and quota-reform, (which replaced the previous binary of quota-no quota), what needed to happen next was deliberation and debate to parse out a progressive way forward.
Instead, the prime minister’s rhetorical question, “Who would get quotas if not the grandchildren of muktijodhhas, the grandchildren of rajakars?” sparked anger that saw thousands take to the streets. Private university students who would perhaps never sit for BCS exams or apply for government jobs joined the public university students. Then parents, friends, neighbours, everyone seemed to be out protesting.
To understand why, we need to understand that the PM’s question relied on the kind of tactics that the ruling party had been using to undermine citizen demands for years -- whether it was safe roads or equitable access to jobs. Her question unleashed all the pent-up anger stemming from the pinch people were feeling. We also must note the declining reserves and high inflation marred by scandals involving looting, money laundering, bank defaulting, and illegal (and legal) capital flight.
After all, this was a movement borne out of unemployment and bleak job prospects for students. The PM’s rhetoric simultaneously trivialized and politicized their concerns by calling them rajakar -- both of which explain the explosion of anger in the following days. Students at the Dhaka University campus brought out chants to directly confront the rajakar identification. “Ami ke, tumi ke? Rajakar, rajakar! Ke bolechhe, ke bolechhe? Shoirachar, shoirachar.”
The muktijudhho-rajakar dichotomy feeds into the current polarization we see in Bangladesh along secular-religion fault lines
The secular-nationalist camp represented by cultural activists (willfully) interpreted the first part as the students’ admission of their rajakar status. We might argue about the time-lag between the first two parts to adjudicate whether they actually wanted to self-identify as rajakar. It is true that hearing the “ami rajakar” chant even for a few minutes can be jarring.
I myself paused for a second to think, what are they saying? But this kind of “taking back the term that is used to oppress/marginalize us” is not uncommon (reclaiming miya identity in Assam, for example). Even if I don’t like their choice of words, it doesn’t mean that I cannot understand that it was meant to undo the rajakar label, not reinforce it.
This is why at the Nipiron Birodhi Shikkhok Shomabesh at Dhaka University campus on Wednesday, I wanted to highlight the anger that made students chant “Ami rajakar” for a few minutes before they realized that they would be misunderstood. Could it be that someone instigated them? Sure? But that wouldn’t undermine the sentiment of the time that rejected the rajakar identity.
I also wanted to caution everyone to not fall prey to identity politics. Politicizing difference can create easily-identifiable groups to create an “other” to be vilified and opposed as necessary, but it is dangerous. The muktijudhho-rajakar dichotomy feeds into the current polarization we see in Bangladesh along secular-religion fault lines. The rajakar invokes the traitors from 1971, Islamists, anti-establishment activists, those against the nation. Muktijodhhar chetona becomes useful to polarize the population and maintain that polarization.
This is not a new strategy. Across the globe, we find political polarization. In Bangladesh, the polarization has meant that the political elite would like to dismember the hyphenated Bengali-Muslim identity to equate Bengali with secular nationalist ideals and Muslim with regressive, Islamist ideals. Both nationalist and Islamist camps benefit from this polarization and as such find it in their interest to turn every movement into one that can be divided on the basis of identity, if only to strengthen their side and mobilize for more support.
This inevitably empowers political entrepreneurs who would like to co-opt these movements to serve their own interests, often turning them violent in the way we are currently seeing. That the state represents one of these sides along party lines opens up the possibility for outright repression -- the fear that many had during what was being termed “blackout.”
When the prime minister invoked the muktijodhha-rajakar divide, I worried that it would empower both sides of this dichotomy to turn the student movement into yet another fight over the spirit of 1971, that it would force extremists out to co-opt the student movement. That it would unleash unprecedented violence was not as clear, but the possibility was there right from the beginning.
Dr Navine Murshid is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Colgate University.
