Bangladesh - When State Power Crumbles

The mass uprising in Bangladesh must be viewed as yet another attempt by the people to demonstrate that there is spontaneity in politics. Elite political discourse is afflicted with the disease of negating popular, acephalous uprisings against the establishment and packaging them as a sign of deep conspiracy and manipulated politics.

This elitism emanates from the idea that colonial anthropology sowed in the minds of the ‘educated’ in the 19th and early 20th Centuries that there exists a simple binary of the civilised and the uncivilised, the leader and the led, where every available ‘scientific’ knowledge was the prerogative and the creation of the civilised, and who had the onerous task of carrying the ‘white man’s burden’.

This logic of a binary may be traced to the Christian church, which already had the clergy and the laity, the shepherd and the flock. It was an easy task for the colonial administrator and the missionary to transfer the theological understanding to the politico-administrative considering the growing dominance of Western learning and scholarship.

It is reported that the office of the first President of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, had a huge map of Africa painted on the walls of his office, in which three white men, the capitalist, the missionary and the anthropologist were seen fleeing the continent. A new dawn required the elimination of these agents of oppression but more importantly of breaking the given hierarchy of those who knew and therefore led, and those who were ignorant and therefore were led.

Marxists adopted this knowledgeable-ignorant binary through the conceptualization of a vanguard that like the clergy or the colonial official knew all that there was to know about the nitty gritty of a political movement, from the composition of the people to the ‘right time’ to strike to the ‘manner’ in which the mass movement was required to be conducted.

This knowledge bias sat very well with the logic of the state and consolidation of power but failed the people when it came to providing an analytical framework for spontaneous revolts and rebellions. If there were no delineated leaders it was taken as given that the movement was suspect that the people could not by any stretch of the imagination have the political savvy to understand the gravity and implications of their act.

Social media as well as mainstream media channels have become active in blinding us with this ‘time-tested’ superstition of political analysis. They refuse to tell us about the authoritarian Hasina regime, the dungeons, the incarcerations and the accompanying tortures of political opponents.

There is no mention of the concerns of the average Bangladeshi – Teesta water sharing, the anxiety of the government granting transit rights to Indian Railways but getting ‘nothing in return’, or the rampant corruption and cronyism that further exacerbated the divide between those who were comfortably ensconced in privilege, power and pelf and those who were marginalised.

If these were brought to our notice, then the ‘gonoubhtthan’ (mass uprising) would not seem to be a matter of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) egging on the students or the Islamists brainwashing the gullible to go on the rampage.

Our political analysis would then be firmly rooted in the material conditions of the Bangladesh state and society, of the deprivation of the people and the increasing alienation from the people of a corrupt and some say kleptocratic leadership that was completely out of sync with the woes and aspirations of those that it purportedly represented.

The Indian right has it seems managed through its proxies to create another monster, that of the communal forces taking over the state of Bangladesh and with it the massacre of the minority Hindu community. This is per the manual with which the Indian right operates.

This is a binary that looks different from the binary of the ignorant and knowledgeable but on scrutiny one would find remarkable similarities. This argues along the lines of tolerance versus intolerance, where there are no prizes for guessing who is tolerant!

Again, this posturing takes away agency from the people who fought a long and bitter battle on lines very different from the portrayal in the popular media. It cannot be anybody’s argument that radical Islamism is not present in our neighbouring country.

General Ziaur Rahaman assiduously cultivated them for a variety of reasons prominent among them being the strategy to forge an identity that merged with the pan-Islamic discourses prevalent and to underplay the dominant linguistic assertion in identity creation that made Sheikh Mujib the leader he became.

But to say that corrupt, anti-democratic and authoritarian leadership is the only guarantee against religious fundamentalism is to beg the question. How can a non-democratic regime counter the ideological venom of those whose vision is restricted to their religious affiliation?

Hasina and her advisers must have thought that the way out would be to turn the state into a large prison for those who disagree with her and that the state, with its monopoly of state power, would hold sway in perpetuity.

The political-sociological question of interest is this – when does the fear of the state machinery disappear and when does the state with its arsenal of lethal power start to crumble? That the state is sui generis is a given in politics.

However, what is not stated is that this power can only be exercised when there is legitimacy for the government to run the state. Any beginner’s course in politics would make the distinction between that which is authority and that which is power.

Authority is power plus legitimacy and thus we need to ask this question – when did Sheikh Hasina, riding on the rich political legacy of her father, the legendary Sheikh Mujibur Rahaman, lose her way?

Why did she falter? Why did she have to take recourse to suppression of dissent, of the police to crack down on protesters and the dark state to unleash the deadly power of death?

Like the Arab Spring, this acephalous Autumn Insurrection has many lessons for politics, especially for those politicians who abandon democracy and rely on sheer power to survive. No power in the world could save the Hasina government from the wrath of the people and we can surmise that she had many ‘international friends’ who egged her on the path that she had taken.

We have also got to come to terms with a movement of spontaneity as opposed to structured movements led by those who ‘know’. The Bangladeshi students have democratised the politico-knowledge system and shown that the might of the people is greater than the might of arms.

The fight for the removal of the quotas in jobs was merely the trigger – the flashpoint was buried deeper in the interstices of the collective consciousness of a people who knew that a better world was possible but not without a fight.

SURAJIT C MUKHOPADHYAY is Dean of Social Sciences, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. views expressed are the writer’s own.