Bangladesh and the rise of intolerance

The ugly face of religious extremism has descended on Bangladesh and there is a climate of fear & intolerance

I visited Dhaka in 1970 soon after taking over as the first editor of the monthly journal, The Herald. My mission was to meet Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the popular leader of the Awami League, and to find out more about his politics. His office was on the first floor of a building located in a narrow lane clogged with parked cycle rickshaws. To get to him I had to be cleared by his nephew Moni who sat on the ground floor. I presented a letter of introduction from the prominent Muslim Leaguer Yusuf Haroon, which ensured immediate admission. The greeting by the Awami League chief was warm and friendly. The room which had been full of party members was cleared in 30 seconds. The unmistakable aroma of Erinmore Flake wafted across the room. The chief suddenly removed the Dunhill pipe from his mouth, cut the pleasantries to a minimum and launched into speech. For the next hour between attempts to tamp aromatic tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and to relight it, I was given a point-by-point dissertation of his famous Six Points. “Do I have your assurance that you will print them in your magazine?” I said I would, and I did.

When I got back to the Purbani Hotel where Rahman Sobhan was entertaining some friends, I had a drink with a few European journalists who were on a short visit. They said they were appalled by the poverty and squalor, the malnutrition, the coughing consumptives and the aura of Dickensian gloom that they encountered in the less opulent areas of the city. To complete the dismal portrait, a Dutch lady journalist pointed out that if one wanted to know what a Third World country really looked like, she would tell them to visit East Pakistan. It was an unkind remark for there is more to life than wealth and riches. I bet she hadn’t visited the Hill Tracts or the Tea Gardens, or listened to the melodious ballads of the fishermen singing about the Burhiganga as they eked out a desperate living from the five big rivers and the sea. If I may borrow an adjective from the great Irish poet, Yeats when he was writing about his native land, East Bengal also has a “terrible” beauty, but no Westerner steeped in the tradition of order, method and discipline, and thinking in terms of Gross Domestic Product and purchasing power parity could possibly understand that.



Well, that was 44 years ago. Before the war, there were the horrible rapes of Bengali women, the rise of the Mukti Bahini, the painful separation, the destruction of Mr Jinnah’s Pakistan. I never found out if young girls still rolled cigars on their thighs for tourists or if Zainul Abedin is still regarded as an icon. What I do know is that through sheer determination and single-mindedness, the country progressed, exports increased and the taka was valued higher than the Pakistani rupee. In spite of the rule of two bitter competing dynasties, there was a fierce sense of nationalism.

Over the years, the country developed a tradition of pluralism and interreligious harmony. The country practised secularism. Hindus, Christians and other minorities felt safe. Unfortunately, in recent times, the ugly face of religious extremism has descended on the land and has been installing a climate of fear and intolerance. Bloggers who criticised the action and campaigned against religious extremism were murdered. And last month an obscure group that claimed responsibility for killing the bloggers issued a threat to a news agency that it should stop employing unveiled women or they might meet the same fate as the bloggers. The government appears helpless. The people appear helpless. What makes it so sad is there doesn’t appear to be a solution.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2015.

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