Author: Sunanda K Datta-Ray
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December, 9, 2005
As the region's biggest power, "larger
than all the rest combined" as Junius R Jayewardene reminded the South
Asian Association for Regional Cooperation's inaugural conference in Dhaka
20 years ago, India might expect to enjoy the same authority vis-à-vis
its neighbours as the United States does in the Americas.
That would enable it to exercise a soothing influence on Bangladesh where
the admission by Lutfuzzaman Baba, the Home Minister, that the two outlawed
fundamentalist groups, Jagrata Muslim Janata and Jamat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh,
have set up a 2,000-strong suicide squad concerns the entire region.
But by consistently propping up Pakistan, the US has helped to neutralise
India's advantages of size, population, resources, democratic stability and
economic and military capability. It is barely even primus inter pares in
SAARC. Moreover, as in Soviet occupied Afghanistan, Bangladesh's obscurantist
forces appear to be on the best terms with the US.
Yet, India, inextricably linked by history and geography, alone can alleviate
the fears of a people whose deep-seated sense of insecurity tinges private
conversation and influences public thinking.
Islam is Bangladesh's psychological support rather like some north-eastern
tribes see Christianity as differentiating them from mainstream India. For
many Bangladeshis, the militant chant "We will be the Taliban, and Bangladesh
will be Afghanistan" when the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom
outlined a vision that promised liberation from a past that they see as dominated
by India and Hindus.
As Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto observed in 1971, a
secular "Muslim Bangla" would have no option but to merge with West
Bengal. That fear threatens the post-partition elite's wealth and power. Saudi
largesse makes the Organisation of Islamic Conference additionally attractive.
Apparently, more than 40 fundamentalist organisations from Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Sudan and Algeria indoctrinate 500,000 Bangladeshi students in 50,000 madarsas,
and plans to infiltrate Malaysia and Indonesia were finalised during a Muslim
gathering last December. But improbable as it may seem, foreign mischief is
less the cause than the effect of Bangladesh's siege complex.
The subcontinent lives on memory. No Urdu-speaking
Muslim forgets that the people he considers his progenitors ruled India for
700 years. Few Bengali Muslims forget that only the prefix Syed or claims
of Afghan or Arab descent save them from being taken for converts from Hinduism's
lower rungs.
Scholars like AK Nazmul Karim, author of The Dynamics of Bangladesh Society,
agree that the bhadralok (gentlemen) definition did not originally include
Bengali Muslims. One of East Pakistan's first post-partition actions was to
abolish zamindari - West Bengal took years to do so in spite of the Congress
commitment to land reform - because most zamindars were Hindu while most Muslims
were ryots.
Prof Muzaffar Ahmed, head of East Pakistan's National Awami Party, used to
speak of the two-hookah culture: Hindu lawyers and landowners had one hookah
for Hindu guests and another, inferior, one for Muslims. Today, Bangladeshis
look on the impoverished boatmen and cultivators who comprise the majority
of the 10 per cent Hindus as heirs of this dispossessed elite.
They are also suspect as the Trojan Horse
of the nation that overpoweringly surrounds Bangladesh on all sides except
where mangrove swamps run into the sea. Hence Hindu appeals to Bangladeshi
courts for "protection from terrorist attacks and harassment".
Finding it galling to owe independence to
"Hindu India" and rejecting the Mukti Bahini as the secular socialist
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Indian-trained force, Bangladeshis have invented their
own fiction. According to this version, Ziaur Rahman gave the call and his
men fought for freedom. India intervened in the last stages and only because
of its animosity towards Pakistan.
Realising that independence did not create a national identity, Zia coined
the term "Bangladeshi" to stress his people's distance from Bengalis,
who were Hindu Indians. Still trying to repudiate the common Bengali heritage,
he sought (unsuccessfully) to replace Rabindranath Tagore's Sonar Bangla with
the local Prothom Bangladesh, as the national anthem.
}My one formal meeting with Zia in Dhaka's presidential palace, Banga Bhaban,
exploded into acrimony because forgetting that he was a head of state whom
I had gone to interview, Zia touchily railed against Kolkata's "convent-educated
English-speaking" sahibs. Hankering to visit Delhi as President, he insisted
on prior guarantees of exactly the same ceremonial honours as Mujib had enjoyed.
Indian-trained Hussain Mohammed Ershad was equally sensitive to India and
what he called Bangladesh's "India lobby", meaning Mujib's daughter,
Sheikh Hasina Wazed, and the Awami League. It was his pride in 1985 that Rajiv
Gandhi had promised - which External Affairs Ministry officials later scuttled
- to associate Nepal with India-Bangladesh river-sharing talks.
"I have got from India what the India lobby could not!" he exulted
over tea in the cantonment bungalow in whose cramped informality he felt more
secure than in Banga Bhaban's marbled spaces. Apologising to my wife for appearing
regressive, he argued that Ms Wazed would never be elected because a woman
could not lead a Muslim nation in prayer.
That conviction, and the desire to woo voters, led Gen Ershad in 1988 into
making Islam the state religion without realising what a Pandora's Box he
was opening. Neither can Ms Khaleda Zia have grasped the danger of allying
her Bangladesh National Party with the Islami Oikya Jote and Jamaat-e-Islami.
By punishing the BNP's Abu Hena for accusing some of her colleagues of being
in league with extremists, she gives the impression of condoning fundamentalism.
The JMJ's shadowy leader, Siddiqul Islam or "Bangla Bhai", who claims
to have fought in Afghanistan and promises to "Talibanise" Bangladesh,
remains at large. There is also Fazlul Rahman, associated with the Harkat-ul-Jihad
al-Islami, who signed, with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the notorious
1998 "Kill Americans Everywhere" declaration endorsing coordinated
international jihad.
Their obsessions have taken Bangladeshis far into turbulent waters. No responsible
Government in Dhaka can stand by while thugs and terrorists overwhelm a small
country that has suffered more than its share of revolution, rebellion, murder
and natural disasters since the agony of Pakistani repression. Neither can
India, SAARC or, indeed, the world.
However, a military response would be ineffective as in Afghanistan or Iraq
unless Bangladeshis learn to live with their history and geography. Their
traditionally liberal Sufi-inspired Islam could then be of international service.
As Ahmad Karim, a former Ambassador to the US, says, religious moderation
makes Bangladesh a "front-line state in the battle for the hearts and
minds of the Islamic world."
Secular India with its own large Muslim population
could help Bangladesh reap that reward. But only if forces that do not want
South Asia to achieve the natural equilibrium that the Americas enjoy do not
constantly suborn India's regional pre-eminence.
