BD secularists in Islamic cloak

‘UNPRECEDENTED election!’ The headline in the Bengali-language newspaper Jugantar aptly described Bangladesh’s parliamentary election.

Thanks largely to the deployment of 600,000 security personnel, the voting passed off without violence, which had marred most of the previous elections.

Unprecedented, too, was the level of political consciousness revealed by the Dec 29 event. The voter turnout was a record 87 per cent. In my otherwise blissfully quiet home in the northeastern district of Sylhet, deafening campaign vows, attacks, counterattacks and songs carried over microphones kept me awake until midnight. The Awami League party’s victory was also very impressive. It has captured three-fourths of the 300 parliamentary seats.

And never before in this South Asian nation were women so excited about an election. In many polling stations in Sylhet, male voters were outnumbered by females, who made up 51 per cent of the country’s 81 million registered voters.

Because of the League’s secular tradition, the party is being courted by the US and India. In return, the League has vowed to fight terrorism in Bangladesh. The League leader Sheikh Hasina, the new prime minister, also has called for an “Asian task force” to combat terrorism throughout the region. One wonders what all this would actually mean for America.

But the most intriguing question of this election was why a society witnessing an Islamic upsurge handed a huge electoral victory to the once staunchly secularist League, while dealing a humiliating defeat to the Jamaat-i-Islami party, which bagged only three seats.

The vote cast by Zulekha, who works for me as a maid, gave a clue. She voted for my old friend A.M. Abdul Muhith, a former finance minister who ran as a League candidate. I asked the mother of seven children why she had preferred the League candidate to his rival, the nominee of the centre-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is allied with the Jamaat. The illiterate woman said she liked seeing the League leader Hasina on TV “praying at the dargah, the shrine, of the local Muslim saint Shah Jalal. “They are saying,” she added, “Hasina will also give us rice for 10 taka per kilo” — seven cents, instead of the current 19 cents per kilogram.

Hasina had kicked off the League’s election campaign on Dec 11 with prayers at the shrines of three Islamic saints. Earlier, she had performed the Haj pilgrimage. A picture, widely publicised by the League, showed her returning from the Haj in head-to-toe veils and praying with a rosary of big, glittery beads. The League’s election manifesto proposes legislation to bring any “anti-Islamic” laws into conformity with Islam. And most of the party’s candidates appeared to be competing with the Jamaat in using Islamic symbols. One League poster pasted on a tree in my village, Polashpur, warned that those who would vote for “looters, extremists”, meaning candidates from the BNP and Jamaat, “will have to answer to Allah”.

That reminded me of my interview with Hasina’s father, then League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 15 months before Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in December 1971. Mujib was also facing Islam-oriented parties in an election that would lead to the birth of Bangladesh. “Mind you,” said the would-be father of the nation, reclining on his bed with his head held up awkwardly by his right palm, “Our people are not foolish. They will not trust Islam merchants with government. They are good Muslims … but they don’t want their country and society to be wearing a sherwani.”

Mujib’s first point has been proven true. In Bangladesh, as in many other countries, Muslims prefer not to vote diehard Islamists to power. But he was wrong in assuming that Bangladeshis, 90 per cent of them Muslim, would want Islamic values and idiom rinsed out of their social and political life. Based on his belief in European-style secularism, Mujib gave a constitution that enunciated “secularism, socialism, nationalism and democracy” as Bangladesh’s foundational principles. League leaders’ robustly secularist rhetoric and policies, coupled with the Mujib government’s misrule and corruption, rapidly alienated Bangladeshis. They plunged into a breathtaking campaign to build Islamic institutions: mosques; madressahs; Islamic charities, endowments, banks and insurance companies; Islamic publications; and myriad Islamic outreach (da’wa’) campaigns, public forums, retreats and Internet sites.

Between 1975, when the Mujib regime was overthrown in a military coup, and 2000, 13 mosques and five madressahs were built in my native union, or county, against only two new secular high schools. Responding to this surging Islamic tide, the governments that succeeded Mujib’s amended the constitution to drop “secularism” and “socialism” as state principles and declare Bangladesh an “Islamic state.”

Having languished in the political wilderness for two decades, the post-Mujib League realised that adaptation to Islamic culture was a precondition for success in Bangladeshi politics. More and more League leaders and activists began attending prayer congregations, performing pilgrimage to Islamic shrines, supporting Islamic institutions and couching their public rhetoric with Islamic phrases and idiom. The League’s acculturation to Bangladesh’s Islamic values and lifestyle reached a new peak during this election, enabling the party to earn the trust of the largest percentage of voters since Mujib.

Islam wasn’t an issue in this election. Good government, corruption and price hikes were. The BNP, which had formed the last elected government, had become embroiled in a string of high-profile corruption cases involving, among others, two sons of the party chief, Khaleda Zia. The League ran an effective campaign hammering on BNP corruption and pledging low food prices, adequate power supply, trial of the opponents of Bangladesh’s independence and so forth. These were widely popular, if hard to fulfill, promises, and they have catapulted the party to power.

The Hasina government is likely to go through the motion of an anti-terror campaign, mainly to placate America and India. Bangladesh has long been plagued by Islamist and secularist violence directed against domestic, and occasionally, Indian forces. Even though anti-American sentiments are widespread in this country because of America’s support for Israel and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and other reasons, Muslim militants have rarely attacked American targets inside Bangladesh. They could be doing so if America gets involved in a League government campaign against “terrorism”, a label the League often uses to describe its legitimate opposition.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.

Where is the government?

‘WHERE is the government?’ This is the cry that is reverberating throughout the country these days. At many places the shouting is a mixture of despair and anger and is accompanied by, or results in, violence.

In most cases, the call to the government is born out of the ordinary citizens’ incontrovertible plight while the government dismisses it as the work of professional malcontents or political rivals. There certainly are elements in the opposition ready to seize any opportunity to embarrass and weaken the present set-up. But they can succeed in stirring trouble only if public grievance has a basis in fact.

Of course, the question is not based on ignorance of the existence of the nine-month old government headed by a unanimously elected prime minister. It only reflects public anguish and frustration at this government’s failure to do what is expected of it. So far the people have not blamed the government for not doing something that is admittedly beyond its capacity and resources. It is the lack of effort to accomplish what is possible that is hurting ordinary Pakistanis.

The visual media is concentrating on the hardships of urban traders, workers and housewives hit by electricity/gas load-shedding or automobile-owners’ difficulties in meeting their oil/gas needs. But it is the large population of Fata and a greater part of the Frontier province that is the worst affected by the absence of firm and benevolent hands that good governance in its eyes means.

The Pakhtuns feel abandoned because they are caught in a high-cost civil war they do not expect to be over soon. They are mortally afraid of the militants who are apparently enjoying unhindered freedom to decide who will be allowed to live and on what terms and who will be exterminated and in what manner. The thousands of girls who cannot go to school because many educational institutions have been burnt down and the display of school bags in public has become hazardous, and the large number of people forced to abandon their homes want to know what has happened to the government that is charged with protecting their life and liberty.

These people are not unmindful of what the security forces are doing in their fight against terrorists/militants. Many are conscious of the constraints under which they are operating and sympathise with them over their casualties that are believed to be higher in number than officially admitted figures. But they are extremely unhappy at finding that more innocent people are dying than militants and that the people are under heavier restrictions on freedom of movement and vocation than the armed brigands. A large segment of the population finds itself trapped in the crossfire.

The situation in the northern parts is dangerously straining the patriotism of the people, gravely undermining the morale and solidarity of the security forces, and indeed posing a serious threat to the integrity of the state. A vast majority of the population is not convinced that everything that needs to be done is actually being attempted.

The public was aggrieved by the legislators’ lack of due interest in the joint parliamentary session. The resolution it adopted was full of platitudes with only a few operative sentences and even these remain unimplemented. Nobody expects a quick end to the militancy that Pakistan itself had, in its infinite foolishness, nourished but the harried Pakhtuns do have a right to demand the beginning of a process that offers reasonable guarantees of a peaceful future for them and the rest of Pakistan’s population.

Then the country’s entire population is howling in pain and anger at the cuts in energy/fuel supplies. For a long time the authorities merely trotted out figures of shortfall in electricity generation. Now they say the situation has improved because some payments have been made to the IPPs and oil has been supplied to power-generation units. The scandal of non-payment of the independent power producers’ dues was known to everybody from the very beginning. Why was this question not addressed earlier? Why was oil not supplied to power-generating units earlier? Shortage of funds? The extravagance of the satraps has not been affected by any shortage of funds.

No explanation has been offered for the scarcity of petrol and CNG nor any idea of relief to the multitude deprived of the daily wage.

The end of what is described as unannounced load-shedding is attributed to President Zardari’s personal intervention and he has asked the people not to lose patience as he is personally watching the situation. If everything is to be done by the hard-pressed head of the state, who should normally let everything be done by the ever-expanding legion of overpaid functionaries, then the entire government paraphernalia stands condemned as a horde of parasites.

The people are sick of being told of chief ministers’ and police chiefs’ orders to law and order personnel to arrest killers and thieves as if without their intervention nobody would do his duty. Headlines based on X meeting Y to review the situation or to discuss matters of mutual interest are beginning to offend common sense and good taste. This is not governance, it is only a simulation of the real thing and that too rather poorly done.

Despite all that has been done in Pakistan to downgrade and trivialise the art of governance a majority of the people expect the government to be a benign agency capable of safeguarding their interests, promoting the welfare of the weak and the voiceless, and extending them succour at the first sign of distress. It is also expected to ensure justice for all citizens and between them. Thus, the cry ‘where is the government’ goes up not only when authority is found absent or unable to get its writ honoured but also when its abuse of power is so blatant that even unlettered villagers cannot condone it.

One hopes that the present regime is aware of the consequences of the manipulation of the judiciary (through acts of commission and omission), questionable appointments and a disgusting scramble for spoils, or such unmitigated follies as the incarceration of harmless politicians. The state is no longer healthy enough to survive the obliteration of the fine line separating representative government from autocracy. All people of goodwill, and they still constitute a majority, earnestly want the democratic system to endure, but they need strong enough reason to sustain their hopes and aspirations.

Gaza’s shell-shocked children

THE bombing, shelling and shooting will stop one day. The electricity and water will be restored. And the windows of the Mousa family’s flat, every one of them blown out by Israeli air force strikes on the Palestinian president’s palace next door, will be replaced.

But the trauma of the four Mousa children, aged three to nine years old, will not so easily be erased. For nearly two weeks now they have endured a constant barrage of shells from navy ships they can see through the plastic now covering the windows of their seafront flat in Gaza city, as well as the air force strikes on buildings nearby.

“The children scream and cry when there’s shelling. It goes on all night,” said their father, Raed, 35. “Every night, all night. The building shakes. We moved into the kitchen and sleep there. It’s the safest place in the house. But my children are very scared, their faces turn yellow. The sound of the guns is very loud. We try to keep them busy playing and with their toys.”

Their mother, Ahlan, is pregnant. “I look at them at night when they are sleeping and they are dreaming bad dreams. Safud (aged four) jumps from her bed screaming and crying,” she said. “All the time they are shelling. It’s terrifying. I don’t know what to tell the children. I say the sound is loud but it is still far away. But I can see they are afraid and that makes me afraid.”

That trauma may last a lifetime, with devastating consequences for Palestinian society, according to psychologists who have studied the impact of two decades of bloody conflict in the Gaza Strip on children who have grown up under army watchtowers, dodging bullets, seeing classmates shot as they sat at the next desk, watching tanks and bulldozers destroy thousands of homes.

Even after the Israelis pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, children and their parents have had to endure regular rocket attacks and punishing sonic booms when Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over the territory. Now there is the bombing and fighting that has left more than 600 Palestinians dead in less than a fortnight.

Gaza’s leading child psychiatrist, Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, who has studied the effects of violence and trauma on children for 20 years, said about 65 per cent of young people in the enclave suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There are many other traumatic symptoms, like headaches and abdominal pain and vomiting. There’s an inability to concentrate, panic, anxiety, irritability,” he said. “I’ve observed much change in the children. They are more anxious, more fearful. Children are panicky because of the explosions. Children want to leave. You hear it. They feel there is no hope, that the world can’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for themselves.”

Thabet says the impact of trauma on older children combines with other experiences to push them to extremes.

The image of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Gaza boy shot dead as his father vainly tried to protect him from Israeli gunfire at the beginning of the second Intifada, is seared on the Palestinian consciousness. To many Palestinian adults it symbolises Israeli indifference to the lives of their children. But psychologists say that to many children its principal impact is to see a father who cannot protect his son.

With that — and humiliations such as Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian men in front of their children — has come a collapse in respect for the regular systems of authority.

The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the “martyr” and led them to expect an early death.

Thabet said the traumatising of children was having a profound effect on Gaza’s future. The children he studied in the early 1990s are now adults.

“They become fighters. I warned about this 15 years ago, that in 15 years these traumatised children will be more aggressive, they will want to fight, there will be more violence in the community. You saw it in the factional fighting in Gaza in 2007,” he said.

“So now we will have another generation of more aggressive behaviour. They will go to more extremes because they have no future. This is a problem. I’ve been warning people of this but nobody was listening. It’s a cycle of aggression.

“Children see their parents killed in front of them. What do you expect?”

— The Guardian, London