A rather personal manifesto by Mahfuz Sadique [in 1971 words]

This time around, they will change Bangladesh

I met Abdul Kader Mridha in Joyshara. It was early April. He was sitting on a makeshift bamboo bench, facing the only convenience store of the village, looking up at the early morning sun with his eyes closed. The thick, dark stick gripped firmly in his hand resembled that of an African medicine-man’s than the walking stick of a Bangladeshi village octogenarian. It could have been any Bangladeshi village, but this is how I saw it back then: ‘Joyshara is a typical village. It’s what the Roads and Highways Department lexicon would term ‘remote’. The motorbike taking me had to stop twice, as the resurrected feeder road to the village was having new soil and crushed brick spread over it. The diggers — both men and women with bare rippling muscles — were mostly from in and around the village. The dust rising from the constant thumping of shovels wafted the warm, dry air with a grainy taste, lingering on at the roof of my mouth. Despite all the work on the road which snaked through several villages, and the dust, Joyshara and everything for miles and miles on both sides of the rail track, on which the local train from Shantahar had brought me to Atrai Sadar station in the morning, was stroked with a gentle green. The paddy fields were gestating for their final gradient shift in colour: from green to gold.’

I – the urban, impressionable, twenty-something journalist – was trying to discover the ‘real’ village. With a stereotype sketched in my head, as soon as I saw him, I knew Mridha was going to be my centre-piece. But betraying all my preparatory research on micro credit, hybrid crops, female literacy, with uneasy pauses between phrases and sentences, Mridha told me what he felt was wrong with Bangladesh. It was simple: few had most, while most had few. Without even knowing of me, he spared little subtlety in intuitively pointing out that I was a member of those ‘few’ – education at the best places, enjoying priviledges of a capital where everything is centralized, handed opportunities of a young nation that never really materialized for those others who are members of the ‘most’. While his exact words have slipped my memory, I remember how coiled he made me feel that April morning. Today I have come to understand, and believe, what Abdul Kader Mridha was trying to say. And, in many ways, I speak for him.

To look out into Bangladesh’s horizon, or to conjure up a vision for the future, if one might call it so, first just look at the shoreline of nearly four decades. I see a nation that has failed its majority. Yes, Bangladesh has seen many gains. I see that economic growth has been handsome over a decade, breeding more and more inequality. I have been told by many a ‘realist’ economist, invariably citing their favourite academic icing on the cake – the Kuznet’s curve, that since the country is developing fast there will be economic inequality but after a ‘critical average income’ is reached it will come down. I have read so many reports, and reported on so many studies, which show how social indicators have picked up in Bangladesh much better than most other South Asian countries. I can probably effortlessly recite a long list in my head of the many development ‘interventions’ that have promised, and partially delivered, their ‘prescribed’ goals of uplifting the masses. But looking into the future, into a decade that will see Bangladesh no longer remaining a ‘young’ nation anymore, Bangladesh is showcasing a troubling reality. Each of us might have our own detailed vision for Bangladesh. For me – a chronicler and purveyor of the lives of others – it’s a rather simple, and maybe grand, one: an egalitarian Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is yet to exhibit an equitable system of social, economic and political justice. Evidently, Bangladesh is yet to ensure that its silent majority have real political say, where political power is virtually not held hostage by a class that increasingly resembles an island in the sea of people, and a system where the people are not told upon as to what is the correct way to govern them. A Bangladesh where the economic opportunities created on the hard work of the majority will be enjoyed by the few is counter-intuitive. The possibility that Mridha’s grandsons might not get the chance of the best education that the country has to offer just because they live beside the paddy fields of Joyshara goes against what the common man would expect of their country. And frankly, I would not like to carry the burden that my viral flu will be treated by a specialist taking a fee equivalent to several days income of a labourer, while a young mother helplessly watches her child die in the balcony of a remote Thana Health Complex. The list is too long, and too emotive. While these, and other painful questions, need to be addressed, first and foremost, every Bangladeshi should be shown the simplest of human dignities, which a rickshawpuller is not shown on the streets of Dhaka. He cannot be slapped around by a traffic constable because he pulled into a VIP road. No matter how fast the engines of Bangladesh’s economy grow, or how many ‘good’ laws it makes, I should not have to look into his eyes again and see the bewildered look of not knowing whether we are fellow men of a nation or citizens of two very different states.

But I have seen more than just the misery and bewilderment my cynic lines would suggest. Remember Joyshara? From surrounding fields, men and young boys had gathered around Mridha and me as news spread of a curious ‘city folk’. They had bright stories to tell, and probing questions to ask. They were aware of the state they were in, and the many reasons behind it. And yet, they had plans. Some knew what they were going to do there, while others were looking beyond the fields of the village. Yes, their daughters and sisters were going to school, their sons were learning of the dangers of excessive pesticide and re-learning about local crop varieties, and they were seemingly more confident and self-reliant than I would have perceived. This sense of resilience exudes from everywhere in our tiny land of many. Surprisingly, while the diminishing middle-class, and a few at the top, have many complaints on the state of the state, or its successive governments, recent events have overwhelmingly shown that these supposedly over-arching entities have taken a backseat in the lives of the masses. Brushing aside the helplessness that lingers, they have taken primary charge of their fate. A more confident majority is emerging in Bangladesh. This will, no doubt, bring her into a new decade of prosperity. But to me, looking back from 2020, the most important of Bangladesh’s gains would be to have ensured that unlike the several waves of wealth concentrations that have taken place since 1971, this time it is more equitable.

Nature’s many wraths, the intimidations of the powerful few, the cruel workings of market forces – nothing seems to be restraining them anytime soon. Nowhere is this indomitable spirit more evident than the underbelly of the cities, especially the capital. Many million men, women and children, are making the pilgrimage of fate from villages like Joyshara to the urban centres of our country. It is a tide that’s now irreversible. We are becoming an urban nation. There, behind the super-size billboards screaming of the gloss and grandeur of the unaccounted-for-disposable-income-fuelled-very-urban-consumer-economy, they are setting up home in Dhaka’s answer to the Dharavi slum. And they are thriving – not by taking bribes as they have no power to exercise, not through ‘recycled’ donour-funded projects, rather despite governments which try to get rid of them as they are an eyesore to the ‘image’ of the city, or against the tide of a system that subjects them to the exact opposite treatment as their more affluent city-counterparts. Just like they have survived on the soil over the centuries of adaptation and hard work, these newcomers to the cities of Bangladesh are adapting fast. Their most potent weapon of choice: enterprise. A state that does not try to give them employment, and let’s economic opportunity stay hostage to the few, also tries to take away their ingenious ways of livelihood. They work in homes, garment factories, they clean the floors of they city’s glass facades, they guard the doors of the powerful. They set up roadside shops, sell books that they never had the chance to learn to read, they serve food priced half of their month’s pay. They are evicted, beaten, jailed, humiliated, slapped, and reminded again and again that they are not worthy of the gains of their own nation. But do they just pack their bags and leave? No. They persevere. Such undercurrents suggest that there will be change, or simply change will be forced from below. Even if governments cannot assist them in all their needs, it needs to stop being irreverent to this majority. Bangladesh’s political camps would eventually have to face a growing reality: the majority is learning to rule by their ballot. And this silent majority increasingly brings their agenda to the booth. If governments fail them, it seems the majority will show, again and again, what real agenda needs to be. Having experienced so many variations of ‘democracy’, Bangladesh is exhibiting that democracy bred from the necessity of the many is probably the best form.

Bangladesh’s great economic migration is actually not just to the cities; it’s crossing borders, en masse. Almost like re-enactments from the pages of history of the many economic migrations of the world, hundreds and thousands of men, and even women, equipped with as little as their bare hands and a heart filled with hope are making the unknown voyage to foreign lands in search of the livelihood that their own country could not give. Just the other day, I could not but notice the central bank’s annual projection of something in the range of ten billion dollars in remittance. Almost like honey bees, these faithful citizens send back their hard-earned cash to the queen. And yet these same workers are also subjected to apathy from our own missions abroad when, in most cases, all they seek is guidance. As a nation, Bangladesh would need to start respecting her real ambassadors abroad.

There are too many strands to lay out when it comes to the inequalities between Bangladesh’s intertwined classes. Scribing them all is unnecessary, and rather futile. As a journalist I lay witness, from a peculiar vantage, to the dizzying changes that are blurring the many lines defining the country. Bangladesh has seen such variations as presidential to parliamentary forms of democracy, peppered with prolonged spates of martial interventions. As a nation that has evolved to see the hope of political plurality regularly usurped by the few, a cynic wouldn’t feel that much optimistic that in a decade or so things would change radically and its citizens would be treated differently. But there should be little doubt that the enterprise of many will not be that easy to overturn this time. Maybe my father thought like me during the glory days of the 60s, and look where Bangladesh is now! While Bangladesh as an egalitarian state might be my utopia, I have a hunch: those who were mere witnesses of their fate and fortune till now will not wait for things to change at the top. This time around, Abdul Kader Mirdha’s grandsons, my rickshawpuller, the garment worker, the Bangladeshi building the world’s tallest skyscraper in the deserts of Dubai will change their Bangladesh. This time around, they –the people – will change Bangladesh.

And the rain will come, soon | Photo: Azizur Rahim Peu

Political Islam in Bangladesh: The serpent green rises

by Mahfuz Sadique

<> Probably not conceived as a symbolic move in itself, yet an attempt to remove a few bricks from the main foundation of Aparejeyo Bangla at Dhaka University, the statue erected in remembrance of the Liberation War and its martyrs, was to be first ‘real’ tectonic clash of ideologies to dictate Bangladesh’s polity nearly three decades later. This phenomenon would prove to be true for both state and its thinking organ: the universities. That year was 1978. The remerged and renamed contender was the Islami Chhatra Shibir, as the flag bearing student organisation of its still hidden yet omnipresent ideological mothership, Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh; the defenders: the general students of Dhaka University, eternal bearers of the new flag of Bangladesh and its ideologies. While the Aparejeyo Bangla has come to symbolise the War of Liberation, independent Bangladesh, and in many ways the ideological building blocks that this nation is founded upon, the Jamaat-Shibir camp’s failed yet persistent attempt to dismantle the Aparajeyo is as literal as the story of the clash between theocratic political Islam and secular democratic politics could represent — then and now.
In retrospect, Bangladesh had it coming. With less than a decade gone by, Bangladesh as a state was already diverging and dispersing from its original vision. A flailing state, its band-aided economy and even more bewilderment in the nation’s founding political establishment was taking its toll. The blazing days of the student-mass movement of 1969 fading, gradually, somewhere into the backburners of pre-Liberation history; its ideology being relegated almost to the realm of ‘revolutionary nostalgia’. The new nation, Bangladesh, was barely a decade old. With ‘secularism’ already dropped from the constitution through a decree on April 22, 1977 by General Ziaur Rahman, one of the founding principles of the young nation was already missing. Two assassinated presidents, two successful and a few unsuccessful military coups later, no one was quite sure where Bangladesh was heading. Almost as a precursor to the role-reversal of secularism, on May 4, 1976, a military ordinance by General Zia removed the restriction imposed on religion-based political parties and their activities right after liberation.
Immediately after the ordinance, two Islam-based political parties emerged — the relatively progressive camp of the old Mulsim League reappeared under the same banner, and the theocratic camp formed the Islamic Democratic Party. Yet, the mainstay of the Islam-based politics in the then East Pakistan and later Bangladesh was to wait till 1979 to declare their presence. Through a conference on May 25-27 of that year, ‘Jamaat-e-Islami Bagladesh’ publicly announced their return.
While Jamaat was taking it slow and easy, its student wing Shibir started early, and with a little attempt at secrecy. In 1978 they objected to the construction of Aparajeyo Bangla and even conducted a signature campaign against it at the University of Dhaka. Though their attempt was not successful, they did collect quite a handsome number of signatures. In a last ditch effort, they tried to sabotage the construction by removing a few bricks from the base of the under-construction statue. Their attempts were thwarted by the mainstream student political organisations and the general progressive attitude of the university’s students.
In fact, Shibir’s movements had started becoming public the year before. On February 4, 1977, a few inductees and some old leaders of the Islami Chhatra Shangha, the pre-Liberation name of Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing, gathered unofficially at the Dhaka University Central Mosque. After a short discussion and prayers, the meeting adjourned. They had a new name — the Islami Chhatra Shibir. But student political organisations at universities have a legacy that runs from the Pakistan-era.

Beginnings
The dynamics of student politics, and the role religion has played in it, has changed gradually over the years. Student political organisations based on religious ideologies, just like their mainstream counterparts, have almost always had their origins and visions pegged to their mother-ships, the political parties. Religion-based student politics in our higher educational institutions has its roots from the Pakistan period. Though, in their organisational strength and ideological rigidity they had little resemblance to their present day setup. In the early sixties, three religion-based student organisations operated actively: Pakistan Chhatra Shakti, National Student Federation (later referred to infamously by its abbreviated form: NSF) and Islami Chhatra Sangha.
While Pakistan Chhatra Shakti was relatively obscure, the NSF and the Sangha had political muscle behind them. Established in 1956, as the student wing of the Khelafat-e-Rabbani party and later endorsed by then politically powerful Muslim League, the NSF had always been plagued by internal strife but remained a powerful and ‘bullying’ student organisation with direct backing from the East Pakistan governor Monem Khan. Though referred to as the ‘musclemen on campus’ and also responsible for first bringing violence into the student politics of Dhaka University, the NSF never had a strong footing among general students. And even more significant was their lack of political vision. Worth mentioning is that the cultural front of Khelafat-e-Rabbani, Tamaddun Majlish, played a pivotal role in favour of the language movement, in its early days.
But the Islami Chhatra Sangha, the Bangla name of Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, was a different story. Though, not a front running student organisation at the time, prepared the ground for the Islami Chhatra Shibir of today. Syed Abul Ala Maududi had established the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic political party based on his own ideologies, in 1941. Right after the partition of India and Pakistan, the student wing of the party — the Islami Jamaat-e-Talaba (‘Talaba’ meaning students) — was formed in Lahore on 23 December, 1947. But until 1954 there was virtually no student representation in the organisation from East Pakistan. It was only in 1955 that a full-fledged East Pakistan wing, the Islami Chhatra Sangha, was formed.
Another organisation that played a crucial role in galvanising the Islamic student movement was the Jamiat-e-Talabae-Arabia, though it did not fall under the general fold of student politics. This organisation’s member base were the madrassah-based students in the country. Till the mid-1960s they complemented the powers of the Chhatra Sangha.
The first major clash, in terms of viewpoint and action, between Islamic student bodies and the mainstream surfaced in the 1969 student movement, when countering the 11-point general demanding self-rule from Pakistan, the Islami Chhatra Sangha put forward their own 8-point charter, which favoured the confederation. This resulted in the first visible alternative Islamic student force emerging alongside the majority student factions. There were even some violent clashes between the two opposing camps that left a prominent Chhatra Sangha leader killed.
The beginnings of the Chhatra Sangha in East Pakistan might have been modest but by the late sixties they had mustered considerable clout within the organisation’s All-Pakistan (Nikhil Pakistan) body which culminated in the election of Matiur Rahman Nizami (presently a minister in the four-party alliance government and also the head of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh) as the president of the national committee. This was the first time that an East Pakistani was at the helm of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing for all of Pakistan.
Islamic student organisations, taking their cue from their parent parties, always treaded the line of an Islamic state in direct contradiction to the ideologies of both the mainstream right and left student bodies which centred their actions around the four basic governing political principles of the progressive politics at the time: Bengali nationalism, self-rule, socialism and the most objectionable to the Islamic camp: secularism.

Stepping stones to the mainstream
While the actions of today’s mainstream student political organisations — some originating from the pre-liberation period and some formed later — have shifted from their original political philosophies (few of them consider their political charters as guiding principles) the contradiction between progressive and religious-conservative student politics, set off in the Pakistan period, carried on to the times of Bangladesh.
While in between, Jamaat-e-Islami’s pro-Pakistan stance and its members’ involvement in acts of genocide during the War of Liberation made it the chief hate-target in post-Liberation periods. And as most of Jamaat’s leadership had come through the Shangha (presently Shibir), their slates were certainly not clean. For starters, the central committee of the Islami Chhatra Shangha in 1971 became the de facto committee of the infamous Al-Badar, which was responsible for the killing of intellectuals. Shangha members became members of Al-Badar by default.
What is more disturbing is that, unbeknownst to many, the present highest decision making body, the Central and Working Committee of Jamaat-e-Islami — Majlis-e-Shura — is mostly populated by members of that controversial Shangha executive committee vis-à-vis high-ups of Al-Badr central and district committees. Starting from the present Ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami, the present industries minister Matiur Rahman Nizami, to the founding president of Shibir, Mir Kasem Ali, and the following two presidents — Mohammad Kamruzzaman and Abdul Zahir Muhammad Abu Neser — were all documented office bearers of the Al-Badr. They and many other former members of the Shangha, who later went into Jamaat, are responsible for ‘crimes against humanity’ according to documents at the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum.
With this tainted legacy, Shibir started its new journey. After its re-emergence, it started expanding rapidly but with stealth. For the next few years, the University of Chittagong and University of Rajshahi become hotbeds of Shibir’s activities. The regions — Chittagong and Rajshahi — themselves had strong religious underpinnings, not of a subversive, murderous kind, but more spiritual and conservative than the rest of the country. They also made significant gains at other smaller, yet locally important educational institutions. One of their other major strongholds has been the Islamic University in Kushtia and the BL College in Khulna. Though the Shahjalal University of Science and Technology is a relatively young institute, the Shibir camp has gained considerable clout due to external factors.
The process of Shibir’s recruitment was so discreet that it was hard to assess its total member base, or even supporter base. It was not until Shibir started flexing its muscles for control of the many residential dormitories at those two universities that its real power showed.
Starting from the late seventies till this day, Shibir has kept a stronghold at the universities at Rajshahi and Chittagong through numerous student killings, terrorising general students and a general impression of their vicious political vindication. By the eighties, Shibir started being known as the rog-kata (vein-cutting) party since their most common form of terrorising was cutting the veins and tendons of political opponents. Despite the growing clashes with the mainstream student camps — the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-backed Chhatra Dal and Bangladesh Awami League-backed Chhatra League — Shibir’s overall presence at campuses was never as visible as the other two.
Despite all the claims to violence, Shibir’s eternal quest seems to be that of legitimacy. Since its re-emergence in 1977, it has participated actively in every students’ union election in Bangladesh’s public universities. In 1982 they reaped the crop of that effort. The 1982 elections of Chittagong University Central Students Union saw the Islami Chhatra Shibir winning the entire panel with Jasimuddin Sarkar winning the coveted top post. This was the first time a Shibir panel had official legitimacy. The same year saw the first and only split in Shibir. A faction led by a senior influential leader, Ahmed Abdul Kader, opposing Jamaat’s direct intervention in the student wing formed an alternative Shibir. Though it was short-lived, some leaders of Shibir left around 1983. Most of them joined Chhatra Majlish, the student wing of the Khelafat Majlish party. In fact, the Chhatra Majlish is probably still the only other serious religion-based student political organisation operating at public universities. But their numbers are dwarfed by those of Shibir’s.
After several years of public presence at Dhaka University, Shibir was dealt a blow in 1983. On February 4 of that year, Shibir organised their biggest public programme at the Ramna Battmul on their founding anniversary. The programme was trashed by activists of the Chhatra Sangram Parishad, an alliance of 14 democratic students’ organisations, which was agitating against martial law at that time. In fact, during a procession brought out by Shibir in 1982, a grenade attack injured two of its members. The 1983 incident was in many ways the death of Shibir’s public face at Dhaka University. In fact since, they have not brought out any public procession or held any gathering on the Dhaka University campus.
But to presume that just the resistance from opposing political camps is the only reason Shibir has not come out strong in public would be gross miscalculation of its powers. In fact, Shibir’s ‘real’ presence at Dhaka University is as pervasive, if not more, than the two major political camps. Shibir’s overall strategy over the last two decades has been to lay low and gain ground through one of the systematic recruitment processes of any political party. Since there has been no students’ union election at Dhaka University for nearly a decade and a half, compared to other student political organisations Shibir’s true support base has never clearly shown.
Throughout the eighties, Shibir had shown consistent performance at the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union. Even when they had little visibility on campus due to a combined alliance between the progressive left and the two major political camps, they invariably came third in the students’ poll and secured no less than 1,100 of the registered student votes. The figure is two decades old, but even by that standard a significant one. Another event that had an overall impact on the growth of Islam-based politics, and in its wake abetting Shibir’s growth, was military ruler General Ershad’s constitutional concession to the Islamic camp by making Islam the state religion in 1988.
Probably an outcome of that decision came the same year when Shibir staged a full-fledged attack on the residential halls of Jahangirnagar University, which left a Chhatra Dal leader killed. Following the attack, Shibir faced a countrywide resistance, and the event triggered the eventual formation of the All-Party Students Unity, which led the anti-Ersahd movement at all universities.
No public university charter officially acknowledges any political entity on campus. But while all major student political camps are represented and consulted with regarding major issues, the Dhaka University authorities have kept Shibir out of the fold from the very beginning. While in the beginning it was voluntary, with more and more Jamaat infiltrations into the teachers fold, this moratorium has been maintained by the strong opposition from the two major political camps.
The dynamics of student politics saw a major shift after the 2001 general elections, as Jamaat became an ally in the BNP-led government. Taking queue from national politics, Shibir stepped up its offensive on opposing student organisations. And in perfect cohesion with Jamaat’s growing influence in both state power and its various organs, Shibir started enjoying privileges that were not there before.
One of the first instances of misguided blessing from the main ruling party, the BNP, was during a violent incident at Rajshahi University in 1993. On January 14, a clash between Shibir and a combine Chhatra Dal-Chhatra League led to the death of a student. Instances of Shibir’s killings actually went into overdrive during the early nineties, especially at Rajshahi and Chittagong University. As a backlash of that incident, on February 5, Shibir and the combine ‘Students for the Liberation War’ got into a clash that turned out to be one of the most violent days in student politics’ history in Bangladesh. Five people died. Shibir had used crude weapons, including bows-arrows to attack their opponents. The ruling party’s student wing, Chhatra Dal, also opposed Shibir and was involved in the clash. But in an almost role-reversal, the then Home Minister Matin Chowdhury sided with the Shibir camp and even gave an official statement in parliament for them.
Throughout the nineties Shibir’s clout has increased manifold. And there seems to be a grand strategy in all of its moves. Their recruitment process starts even before the students enter university. Former Shibir high-ups have gone onto set up university admission coaching centres where students with good academic records are taken into the fold. An agency recently reported that ‘Shibir is carrying out its activities through 12 university and medical coaching centres manned by high-level policy makers of the party across the country’.
‘Of the coaching centres conducted by Shibir, Focus for Dhaka University, Concrete for BUET, Index for Chittagong University, Success for Islami University, Songshaptak for Jahangirnagar University and Retina for medical colleges are identified as the main establishments’, states the report. ‘Shibir’s political activities that include new recruitment are carried out at nearly 150 branches of these coaching centres, where the Shibirites are teaching aggressive, vengeful values masquerading as Islamic values.
‘The annual income of these 12 coaching centres is Tk 25 crore, which they are spending for spreading their activities that includes arms training,’ the report quotes a Shibir activist as saying.
The agency report states that Shibir leaders who are directors of these coaching centres include Shishir Monir, the president of the organisation’s Dhaka University unit; Badra Alam Didar, the president of Chittagong University unit; Abdul Hannan, the president of Islamic University unit; Sayed Fayjul Khalil, the president of BUET unit; and Mahbubur Rahman Jewel, former president of Dhaka Medical College unit.
Those coming from rural areas and with financial difficulty are given assistance with subsidised housing and even monetary assistance. Blocks of housing have been rented under Shibir’s direct supervision at Shahbagh, Azimpur and Chankharpul areas of the capital. In addition to being used for housing, it has long been suspected that these are kept as bases for keeping a large of number of Shibir activists and assisting in their activities.
With the strength and spread of Islamic political parties growing with every passing year, and as two Islamic political entities (Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and Islami Oikya Jote) are sharing state power, the underlying conflict between the mainstream and the obscurantists is reaching dizzying heights.
Other Islamic parties which target universities, such as the, Islamic Shashantantra Chhatra Andolan, Islami Chhatra Majlis, Khelafat Chhatra Andolon, and the relatively new start-up Hizb-ut Tahrir, do not have any specific support base. But most activities of these organisations in turn have assisted the growth of the greater movement to legitimise Islam-based politics within the mainstream, or as is the case with such organisations, engage students with their politics.
A sign of the increasing might of the Shibir during the first power-sharing of its parent organisation, Jamaat, came in 2003. That year Shibir demanded its inclusion in Paribesh Parishad, which is the university’s council of top officials and all student bodies to oversee the campus atmosphere. All Paribesh Parishad members in 1992 agreed not to allow any communal activities on the campus, a decision that was a blow for Shibir. The pact remained throughout the nineties, and in 1999, Shibir activists were again driven out of the Dhaka University campus by the Chhatra League when they tried come out publicly.
On the other hand, this decade has turned out to be the rosiest for Shibir. A sampling of its confidence in its power base came in December 2002, when the then president of Shibir declared that no meeting of the Paribesh Parishad could be held without Shibir during the tenure of the present four-party alliance government.
Following the alliance’s landslide victory in the October 1, 2001, general elections, Shibir had started asserting its presence at the Dhaka University campus by putting banners, sticking posters and bringing out processions in disguise on many occasions.
The undeclared moratorium on Shibir at Dhaka University almost seems to be fading as in many other educational institutions. There has been speculation that some rising leaders and members of Shibir had actually crossed over to the mainstream Chhatra Dal and Chhhatra League in an attempt to infiltrate their organisational setup.
As a catalyst for growth, Jamaat’s female students’ wing — Islami Chhatri Sangstha — has also been growing rapidly. It is very active in the female dormitories and common rooms, where they make targeted interferences on girls’ concerning their lifestyle, and in the process coercing them into their fold.
While recruiting fresh members through its no-longer-clandestine activities, the Jamaat lobby among teachers at the universities of Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi, Shahjalal, Khulna is getting ever stronger. In many ways this growing phenomenon could be considered the last hurdle that Shibir needs to cross to make it strong enough to attempt hostile takeover bids.
A significant number of former Shibir leaders have been getting teaching positions at universities. While some positions have been ensured through the Jamaat lobby, the system of recruiting activists among students with good academic backgrounds and assisting them — financially or otherwise — has helped Shibir in this infiltration of the teaching fraternity. Some have taken up resident positions as house-tutors, provosts of several halls. With their growing presence, they are also qualifying for previously-unheard-of privileges. They play a key role in accommodating the Shibir members in residential halls through allotment of seats. Dhaka University sources have repeatedly warned that Shibir has built up its strongholds in Salimullah Hall, Jasimuddin Hall and Haji Muhammad Muhsin Hall.
Nearly thirty years have passed since the re-birth of the Islamic political camp at our higher educational institutions. Combined progressive students’ movements have kept its growth under check, but with stealth and strategy, Islamists have slowly strengthened their foothold.
While Shibir is yet to tap into wider general students’ body, a stagnant ‘depoliticised’ psyche of general students has resulted in their (students) disassociation from any of the other major student bodies of either the right or the left. After the anti-Ershad movement brought together students throughout the eighties, the nineties saw a gradual fallout phase which has resulted in a great vacuum. As the ‘incorruptible purists’ of left student bodies in the 1960s and 1970s become a distant memory, a great intellectual lapse has engulfed the universities, and waits to be filled by a force which sees the gap and decides to fit into it.

Enter Hizb ut-Tahrir
While the country’s progressive thinking organs, the public universities, are being infected by slow encroachment from the Islamic Chhatra Shibir camp, the more socially disconnected and market-driven private universities are seeing green growth of another Islamic political camp: Hizb-ut Tahrir.
‘When the right time comes, we shall achieve our goal,’ said a smiling Mohiuddin Ahmed when I interviewed his last year. As the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Bangladesh, he is an Islamist revolutionary with a twist. Having graduated from Bangladesh’s top business school, the Institute of Business Administration at Dhaka University, with enviable scores, Mohiuddin presently teaches the same corporate strategies at his alma mater. But the number of students attending his business classes are dwarfed by the attendance at the Chhatra Sabha (Students’ Society) sessions of the Hizb ut-Tahrir. He and others like him represent the new face of the Islam-based religious politics that is slipping into the mainstream of Bangladeshi consciousness. Unlike in the past, his foot soldiers are career-oriented, upwardly mobile young men and women, from the country’s public and mushrooming private universities. Almost tip-toeing into the ‘ideological vacuum’ left from the aimless student politics of mainstream student bodies, Hizb ut-Tahrir is, to use his own words, ‘selling the time-proved cocktail of popular discontent and faith.’ And they are selling well.
But there is the catch. What this ever-growing number of ‘modern Muslims’ envision, with intoxicating and chilling precision, contradicts the principles of conventional liberal, democratic and secular society, and nations that abide by it.
For a man who is the chief coordinator and spokesperson of a religion-based political party presently banned in several Middle Eastern states, throughout Central Asia, Germany (the reason cited was anti-Semitism) and Pakistan, Mohiuddin couldn’t appear any less worried. ‘We have done nothing to instigate such a response. We do not believe in any form of violence, or force,’ he explains. When asked about the size of the membership roll, Mohiuddin claims that figure is not compiled. What he does reveal is that attendance in the monthly seminars they hold is in the region of 250-300, and not always the same people.
Hizb ut-Tahrir was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 by an appeals court judge, Taqiuddin al Nabhani. Initially the group’s operations were restricted to the Arab countries. The group first appeared in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Today, Hizb ut-Tahrir claims to be have operations in more than 100 countries.
Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh, the country chapter of the international organisation of the same name, which envisions a Shari’ah-based Khilafah state, has been gaining most momentum through its activities at the country’s private universities. Alongside its national launch in Bangladesh in 17 November, 2001, just weeks after the 9/11, with anti-American sentiment and Islamic fervour peaking, the party started off university chapters at several public and private universities, including Dhaka University and North South University. While Shibir has been the flag bearer of Islam-based student politics at public universities, Hizb ut-Tahrir has their eyes on a strata of students isolated from the mainstream. Non-practicing students, marginalised from mainstream politics, and open to discussions on lifestyle, society and science sprinkled with faith were the party’s first and prime target audience. But why this specific cross-section?

Islam, intellectually speaking
Though, the political ideology they represent is radical in terms of its values and implementation, the approach they have taken is least to say modern, and even appealing to the moderate Muslim, university crowd. Engaging in dialogue with both general students and opposite camps on previously taboo issues among Islamists through numerous seminars, discussion sessions and study circles, they are tactfully using the same political tools that previously worked so well for leftist student bodies during their heydays. The topics covered include ‘Existence of God’, ‘Blind faith of Atheism’ and ‘Cloning’.
While Bangladesh has just seen close to four years of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which renounces all acts of violence even to achieve goals, is fast gaining popularity among a special class — the urban upper- and middle-class.

Green growth
Hizb ut-Tahrir’s activities, as with any rising political organisation, need a constant supply of committed, intelligent and resourceful members. Young men, and women, fit exactly that profile. What better place to recruit such youth than universities? And with a burgeoning private university students’ body filled with ‘disoriented’ youth from well-off backgrounds poised to take up decision making activities of big business, Hizb-ut Tahrir concentrates its most effort into them.
While at Dhaka University, initial successes were thwarted when in late 2003 activists of Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the main opposition party Awami League, chased away several Hizb ut-Tahrir members. Despite the incident, they have splintered support in the Commerce Faculty of the university. Several general students have mentioned being approached by Hizb ut-Tahrir, and some of them have also admitted to attending their seminars.
Along with the one at Dhaka University, one of the first ‘circles’ formed was at one of the leading private universities: North South University. Though this ‘circle’ had no physical infrastructure to show for, they aggressively started preaching their cause through some initial contacts. To put it mildly, they had a field day, everyday. Encouraged by the initial success, Hizb ut-Tahrir started putting in more concerted effort into private universities. At present, they have groups at Independent University Bangladesh, East West University, American International University Bangladesh, BRAC University, City University, Southeast University and Northern University.
An interesting turn of events in recent times makes the private university phenomenon even more lucrative for Islamists. As private university licences from the University Grants Commission have become as abundant as the certificates they give out, opportunist Islamists have acquired quite a few. While some had started quite early, like the International Islamic University-Chittagong, Asian University of Bangladesh and Darul Ihsan University, relatively new Islamic hubs such as Northern University, Manarat University, Bangladesh Islamic University and Green University are also becoming hotbeds for Shibir and Jamaat lobbies. Almost all are owned by Jamaat bigwigs. The recruitments at these universities are done keeping Shibir credentials in consideration. The Asian University of Bangladesh has had phenomenal growth and is planning outer campuses in cities of Saudi Arabia.

‘Guerrilla marketing’
From the very beginning, students started paying attention. At North South University , dozens of members attended their group sessions after prayers at the most convenient location, the prayer room. While not just staying restricted to male members, they started recruiting female members. Within months Hizb ut-Tahrir had become a topic of discussion. Though the number of core members remained low, sympathisers grew rapidly.
‘Their leaflets are minimal but attractive in design and many of them are in English, which conveniently caters to the psyche of private university students. Their members mingle within the general student body. Be it in the canteen, in the student lobby, in the study areas, and mostly in the tea-stalls adjacent the university, they whip up conversations with any student on some topical issue, like the Iraq war or hartal, and eventually bring up their discussion sessions,’ says a final semester student at North South University.
Authorities at the universities observed the activities of Hizb ut-Tahrir with caution. And breaking their self-imposed embargo on student’s engagement with political organizations, they stayed quiet. As prayer rooms, canteens, rest areas, study rooms became the political playing field for Hizb ut-Tahrir, they just overlooked it as general religious practice. Only when their activities became elaborate did the authorities ask Hizb ut-Tahrir to take their activities outside the campus perimeter. While group sessions shifted to local mosques near the university, and restaurants, the political activism of Hizb ut-Tahrir members at private universities has continued.
Though officially denied, insiders within the university administration and several faculty members have indicated that as religion is a sensitive issue, the universities think it better to ignore it. A highly-placed source in North South University said that the US Embassy brought up the issue with the university two years back as many of the universities’ graduates go on to attend graduate schools in the US. Activities of members of the party have been under heightened scrutiny since then though with a spread out member base within the general body, their activities have merely taken a more clandestine nature.

Step aside!
An interesting loophole within the systems of private universities is that student unions, or student political bodies, are not legally prohibited at any private universities as none of the private universities have published ‘statutes’ which legally restrict students from forming student bodies.
While Hizb ut-Tahrir is actively entertaining its political aspirations, it is interesting to observe that other political camps, either from the right or the left, remain completely absent. Ideologically, the left student bodies are the only ones that are directly in clash with Hizb ut-Tahrir. But they seem surprisingly inactive. A little inquiry revealed a classic reasoning; adding to a better understanding of the rise of faith-based student politics. The Student’s Union, the largest leftist student body operating at public universities, do not consider private universities as legitimate educational institutions, and therefore they don’t operate in them.
For what its worth, political Islam’s foray into Bangladesh through capturing the minds of the decision-making future citizens, has both new and old faces. Shibir at public universities and Hizb-ut Tahrir at private universities are gathering clout. The more student activists both Shibir and Hizb-ut Tahrir gain, the closer they get to their ultimate goal — be it a general Islamic theocracy, or a Khilafah state. As faith-based organisations, students have been found to be connected to them even after leaving their student status, and as they are rising through the ranks in Bangladesh’s state machinery, commercial establishments, these two party’s financial and organisational capacity is increasing likewise as all members contribute both compulsorily, and voluntarily. And along with it, as political Islam flexes it’s growing electoral muscle, Shibir and Hizb-ut Tahrir may no longer need to stay a mere phenomenon hidden from view. The trend, at least, shows that a day may actually come when these green brigades of political Islam will stand tall behind their ideological backers, and shout: step aside!

Published: The New Age/ September, 2006

The life and times of a Machiavellian tyrant

HM Ershad is again the talk of the town, and again about to play the power game as he does so well. Will he, won’t he join the ruling alliance? Will they, won’t they withdraw all the corruption cases against him? While everyone is busy trying to guess the answers, Mahfuz Sadique retraces the life and times of the greedy tyrant

The Machiavellian villain of Bangladesh politics is back on centre stage. His moves are well known. For nearly two and a half decades now, HM Ershad aka Bishwa Behaya (he would have preferred ‘Polli Bandhu’ to stick) has remained a regular fixture in the national drama of ‘power’, especially come election season. After taking over power through a ‘bloodless’ coup in March, 1982, following the assassination of another military-turned-civilian ruler — Ziaur Rahman — the year before, and still mentioned in many quarters as the mastermind of the Chittagong carnage itself, this army strongman held an unwilling audience captive for eight years. The black pitch of Dhaka’s boulevards had to be splashed with Nur Hossain’s blood to ‘free Democracy’, to get rid of the junta-syndrome of Bangladesh. In December 1990 as the streets of Dhaka wore the festive mood of freedom on a reinvigorated Victory Day, having ousted the tyrant, few had remembered that politicians were myopic to history. And therefore, three general elections (not counting the ‘general’ nature of the February 1996 election) later, like a trapeze artist, pulled on both sides by the power-hungry two-headed snake that Bangladesh’s political landscape has come to represent, Ershad remains on the rope, still standing. The devil still seems to have a few tricks in his sack.

The late Muhammad Maqbul Hussain’s son Hussain Mohammad Ershad had grown accustomed to authority from an early age. Being the chhawal (son) of Rangpur, the northern district more in the news for monga these days than their ‘son of the soil’, HM Ershad had done his higher secondary studies from the then prestigious Carmichael College in his home town. His civilian life ended, so to speak, after that. He joined the army right after, still in his teens, and received his commission from the Pakistan Army in 1952.

According to the official Curriculum Vitae provided by Ershad’s Jatiya Party, his birth date is February 1, 1930. That makes him 76, but the real age many insiders whisper is 80. Taking the official version, Ershad was commissioned by the army at the age of 22. During the next 18 years, Ershad rose through the ranks. Then came the War of Independence. Ershad was stationed in Pakistan during the entire period of 1971, and like many Bangladeshi military officers stationed there, was never a part of the fight for a new nation.

Political and military experts have opined that this simple fact had a great impact in the history of Bangladesh in later years. As a senior army officer not part of the ‘band of brothers’ who fought for independence, and due to an ‘extra’ two-year default promotion given to all officers who took part in the war, Ershad was left behind. So were many other returnee officers in the army. An inevitable, and unavoidable, conflict of two different hierarchy streams of army personnel with same seniority started surfacing soon. When Ershad eventually became the chief of staff on December 1, 1978, along with a promotion to lieutenant general, it was long overdue. And his true colours started showing soon after.

When the special broadcast of the Bangladesh Betar announced the death of president Ziaur Rahman on May 30, 1981, a new actor in Bangladesh’s power stage was putting on his tyrant’s hat. He was not in Bangladesh during the previous change of power in 1975. Ershad was in New Delhi. This time Ershad was the one preparing the stage of a long one-act play. But as a shrewd and calculative player adept in the many ‘silent acts’, it was not until March 24 of the next year that he had the erstwhile president Justice Abdus Sattar, elected the previous November as Ziaur Rahman-founded Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s candidate, deposed. But political observers have observed that Ershad had already divided the BNP, and also the Awami League, in the interim period between May 1981 and March 1982. Ershad started playing the classic political tool of ‘divide and conquer’ at a dramatic scale. Political observers comment that while Ziaur Rahman first introduced the act of dividing political camps, be it through intimidation or accommodating previous grievances, and eventually moving in for the kill, it was Ershad who perfected the art. His use of the intelligence apparatus of the state, especially the more efficient and clandestine military intelligence wings, in the process of gathering information and intimidation of political opponents was almost indiscriminate — a trend that continued throughout his regime.

In this game of deserters, the first victim was the BNP. A faction of the party broke off with two big leaders — Dr Matin and Shamsul Huda Chowdhury — to form a counter BNP. Under the direct supervision of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence, the thugs of Dhaka University and Jagannath College were brought together to form Notun Bangla Chatra Shomaj. This new entity was to be used to counter the frequently gathering storm of anti-Ershad movements at the university.

Ershad’s first big political breakthrough was bringing the Jatiyo Shamajtantrik Dal to his will. With JSD bigwigs Major Jalil and ASM Rob under his ‘care’, JSD’s spattering of factions and anti-factions went into hyper-drive. Over the next few years, Bangladesh’s politics saw the worst degeneration it has ever witnessed. In fact, it was during this period that the entire political establishment of Bangladesh started becoming a whirlwind of desertion, and with the ‘minister-card’ Ershad almost made a mockery of many leaders of the then 15-party and 7-party opposition alliances. And in a culmination of this game of shame, the mock general elections of 1986 became a grand money-making fiasco for most of the major political parties. In fact, it was the elections of 1986 that saw big money enter the scene. Ershad knew then, and it seems he still does, when and where to push the envelope, or the button, whichever works.

Another major constitutional shift made by Ershad in 1988 was to have far reaching repercussions in the political landscape of Bangladesh. That year with pressure mounting from various radical Islamic groups, who had started gaining ground for the first time after the Liberation War during Ershad’s ‘accommodating’ political strategy, Islam was declared as the state religion of Bangladesh. It was in direct contradiction with one of the four basic pillars of Bangladesh’s founding constitution, and violated the primary premise for the Liberation War. As a result of this constitutional amendment, which was never reversed, gradually various Islamic parties, including the mainstay Jamaat-e-Islami and its cohorts started gaining ground on both political and public spheres at a faster pace. Looking back, today’s problem of militant Islam and the ever-growing power of the Islamic political bloc, has Ershad’s decision for constitutional safeplay to blame to a great extent.

Ershad’s rule of eight years was all about big projects and big money: large infrastructural projects such as roads, bridges, complexes. And the main reason was that it all accommodated his unending desire of more for his personal coffers, and not the peoples’. He had created an intricate network of beneficiaries as any self-respecting dictator does to protect the throne. Starting from his ministers to grassroots sympathisers — all got a ‘cut’. If the time has come to evaluate the effects of his eight-year rule, it can be said that the widespread ‘acceptability’ of corruption in all establishments was his legacy to Bangladesh. Corruption in Bangladesh did not get where it is in one day. We owe it to the Behaya.

While power and politics may have been one of Ershad’s playgrounds, he has another, almost equally intriguing, character trait: he really ‘loves’ women! While his long-term wife, Raushan Ershad, has been by his side when he feels like accommodating her, the tall, ‘handsome’ military dictator had his way with the women he fancied. Starting from the once ‘toast of the town’ Zeenat Mosharraf to Marium Mary Badruddin, who was the reason of the infamous feud between the flamboyant tycoon Aziz Mohammad Bhai and Ershad, the women in his life have come and gone with the same frequency as he changes political alliances these days. His latest adventure — Bidisha — had lasted quite a few years. And what a finale! While most observers say that his divorce- and court-drama with Bidisha last year was due to political pressure from today’s ‘interest groups’, the trend throughout his life had been no different. His future lineage has always been in question of authenticity too. Be it the ‘divine’ intervention of sorts in the sudden appearance of a son on the lap of Raushan Ershad in those BTV-days of the 1980s, or the confusion over why his son with Bidisha, Erik, has his mother’s ex-husband’s title as a last name rather than the once-coveted Ershad at its end.

A close acquaintance of Ershad tells of a very calm man. Ershad the general, the military dictator, has always been calm and reserved in his reactions. His shrewdness comes out in his actions. Ershad has very few public instances of unaccounted for, or rude, behaviour. But his decisions have always been self-interest driven, be it those relating to the state or those pertaining to the women in his life. There have been many instances when he has made public announcements of appointments to a particular public position, only to retract it the next day. From appointing his party’s general secretary, or a new vice chancellor of a public university, Ershad has always played on his gut feeling — a classic survivor’s instinct! His name as Bishwa Behaya, which literally translates to ‘scoundrel of the world’, may have more to it. He rarely keeps promises.

Like a tyrant true to the traditions of indulgence, HM Ershad was also a heavy spender when it came to the arts and culture. The only difference was that he enjoyed indulging in his own work more than those of others. Ershad had used all his eight years of rule to establish himself as an ‘undiscovered genius’ in poetry. While his attempts to lure many of the country’s most gifted poets to ghost write for him had somewhat failed, he still acquired a few fallen angels for his court. With their help he has ‘dozens’ (that is the most appropriate unit to count them) of poetry titles to his credit. For the sake of historical reference only, here are the names of a few: Ek Prithiby Agami Kaler Janney, Judha Ebong Onnannya Kabita, Etihashe Matir Chena Chitra and O’ My Motherland. A thorough review of the last one (which is available on Jatiya Party’s website) might actually give an insight into Ershad’s version of patriotism!

As the general elections of 2007 draw closer, and as soon as the caretaker government takes power, be sure to expect some more of the ‘old magic’ from Ershad the Behaya, back on the political stage. But then again, if Bangladesh’s political establishment has allowed him to muster political leverage and public space to show his magic fifteen years on, the obvious question remains: who is/are the real behaya?

Published: The New Age/ August, 2006

(De)imagining Identity: The ‘real’ Pahela Baishakh in villages

‘Pahela Baishakh has long ceased to be our festival; it’s now a gimmick for you city folks,’ Abdul Kader Mridha had a grin on his face, as the octogenarian of village Joyshara under Atrai upazila in Naogaon sat on the makeshift bamboo bench facing the only convenience store in the vicinity. Calling out to the young men, who had timidly trickled from the surrounding paddy fields to gather around the spot, Kader Mridha pounded the dusty ground devoid of rain for nearly four months with his thick wooden walking stick, and yelled out, ‘So, what do you men say — is Pahela Baishakh our big festival?’
Blank stares at first, and then one of the teenage faces with watermark traces of a juvenile moustache, blurts out: ‘There is a mela near the haat. It goes on for a week. We go there.’ Several sceptical glances from the relatively more wrinkled faces turned towards the boy. ‘What?’ ‘To see those filthy cinemas, and drink “bad liquid”?’ ‘Is that what you call mela?’ The accusations and questions crashed onto the already shrinking young faces in, in what was a small crowd, as the morning sun climbed further up the sky to a blazing mid-afternoon glare.
Joyshara is a typical village. It’s what the Roads and Highways Department lexicon would term ‘remote’. The motorbike taking me had to stop twice, as the resurrected feeder road to the village was having new soil and crushed brick spread over it. The diggers — both men and women with bare rippling muscles — were mostly from in and around the village. The dust rising from the constant thumping of shovels wafted the warm, dry air with a grainy taste, lingering on at the roof of my mouth. Despite all the work on the road which snaked through several villages, and the dust, Joyshara and everything for miles and miles on both sides of the rail track, on which the local train from Shantahar had brought me to Atrai Sadar station in the morning, was stroked with a gentle green. The paddy fields were gestating for their final gradient shift in colour: from green to gold. A sense of trepid excitement was sparkling on the pupils of the rugged faces standing with me at the crowded entrance of one of the train’s eight compartments.
At Raninagar, the station before where I got off, some of the commuters and I had to lend our hands to a man who was trying to pull up a heavy, iron machine with crude blue colour onto the train. ‘What is that?’ Several curious, forgiving glances shifted between those around me. ‘Bought a new thrashing machine for this year’s harvest,’ the man with the machine answered.
As I casually brought up the subject of Pahela Baishkah, the initial blank faces and then meek smiles of recognising an alien idea was a potent nudge to the understanding that Pahela Baishakh was no longer a part of ‘their’ way of life. Someone, somewhere in the cities have been telling them through television, newspapers and the dominant urban popular culture that this — Pahela Baishakh — was a festival they should be calling their own.
***
While Baishakhi offers for cheap mobile lines and opening of glass-rapped shopping malls and swanky cafés crowd airwaves and newspaper pages, and as millions migrate to be part of the great dream of prosperity that has come to represent the ‘elusive’ urban middle-class, through our looking glasses the lives of the other millions in Bangladesh’s villages have somewhat become a ‘fabricated reality’. Monga, flood, micro-credit, fertiliser crisis, diesel prices have become fables many of us read in newspapers and say, ‘Ishh!’
Ananda (Joy), the quintessential Bengali word for happiness, was always there under the waves of sunshine and over the green paddy fields of rural Bengal. Its condensed expressions had been through the many festivals dotting the seasons. But before romanticising over the ‘spontaneity’ of these festivities, it is essential to understand their roots. For many of these celebrations, though expressed through a festive mood, were borne out of feudal, agrarian systems. And Pahela Baishakh is the best example of such festivities.
Like many borrowed traditions, and transposed ideas, during the early rule of the Mughals, the Hijri calendar started being used. But as the Hijri calendar was based on lunar readings, it was in gross mismatch with our native agricultural cycles. This also created a problem for the ruling class: taxes. And in order to streamline agricultural tax collection, a new calendar — a mix between the Hijri and the then existing Bengali Solar calendars — was formulated by a renowned scholar and astronomer of the time, Fatehullah Shirazi, and instituted by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. This new Fasli San (agricultural year) started off on 10/11 March, 1584, and was known as Bangabda or Bengali year (Source: Banglapedia).
It was during Emperor Akbar’s period that saw the first celebrations of Pahela Baishakh. And throughout the British colonial times, though the festivities changed in variation and form, the zamindari system of landlords collecting taxes at the end of the year sustained these celebrations. While the tax was collected on the last day of the Bengali calendar, that is the last day of Chaitra, the celebrations organised by the zaminders — quite logically — started off the next day.
Different localities had their own way of celebrating. But while local forms of celebrations were customised with the climate and topography of the region, the actual formal celebrations were mainly focused around the fairs and other festivities, in the form of entertainment and food, organised by the zamindars.
While today’s popular history mostly projects a time of merriment during the time, this period also culminated in a crude reality: it was the time when farmers had to give away much of their earnings. Of the three crop cycles of the Bengal delta — ayush, aman and boro — the harvest of the last one, which in fact was a leaner season during those periods compared to the other two, coincided with Pahela Baishakh. As a result, after the tax collection and the initial merriment of festivities were over, the farmers of the Bengal delta were hit by poverty in the following months as the remaining meagre crop and other savings started getting eroded. Though this phenomenon has changed in nature, with the abolishment of the permanent landlord, or zamindari, system, today’s monga is just the acute and more complex manifestation of that crack in the system. One of the reasons for this can be attributed to the ever decreasing crop holdings per household.
Another aspect of the festivities of Pahela Baishakh was the opening of a new halkhata at trading establishments. The point to note here is that in Bengal trading and capital-intensive businesses, as in every society, was limited to a certain segment of society, namely those closest to the ruling class. And as the majority of the populace were purely producers, i.e. farmers, Pahela Baishakh manifested itself in a two-prong erosion of savings as they had to part with another large chunk of their seasonal earnings. Therefore, if put together, it is natural that the rentier class, i.e. landlords (zaminders), traders, were the most enthusiastic in organising formal celebrations as their coffers started filling up.
Yet, Pahela Baishakh celebrations in more localised forms have long been around, before the British, or even the Mughals, came. And these celebrations had little connection to the ushering of a new year as a calendar, or cycle. That, unfortunately, is simply the post-modern expression of a colonial tradition. The celebration of Pahela Baishakh as an event ushering the Bengali New Year is, therefore, fundamentally a transposed idea: an urban ‘re-imagining of popular memory’ of sorts. What started in Dhaka in the mid-sixties as a nationalist, cultural movement rooted in urban/semi-urban middle-class values, and centred on the native reinvention of the classical Rabindric mould of the Calcutta intelligentsia, has now manifested itself through ‘a selective post-modern screening of indigenous motifs’ befitting that transformation — or rather metamorphosis — through present day Pahela Baishakh celebrations.
Today’s Pahela Baishakh, dotted with the enveloping grasp of the localised capitalist establishment, is Bangladesh’s latest addition to the never-ending parade of confidence in selling our own culture, but it is albeit not a holistic representation of our present-day rural, agrarian countryside. The urban intelligentsia should be careful in claiming so, as is often the case. For if that claim of origin is made, much larger dilemmas will suddenly surface; probably they already are out. Questions of identity, of coping with the painful transition from a feudal, agrarian system to a winner-take-it-all, predatory capitalist system are looming at the backdrop as we are slowly awakening to the realities of our new-found confidence of ‘re-invention.’
***
The men of Joyshara village have ‘bigger fish to fry’ than Pahela Baishakh, as they laid it out bluntly. For now their vigils, often nightlong, are for the dreaded pangapal, or locust, also known as ‘brown grasshoppers’ among many local insecticide agents of Cyngenta, BAYER. The agents relish like opera conductors at this pregnant pause before imminent catastrophe for they know that the hybrid crop verities are highly prone to those and other insects, and eventually most of these farmers will have to rush to them for the solution.
Apart from the irrigation done through hired shallow tube wells burning over-priced diesel as the Rural Electrification Board’s lines are lacking any of the promised sparks, till the beginning of the IRRI harvesting (which is the main hybrid crop variety of the boro cycle), they are petrified over the idea of current poka, another name for the locusts. This harvesting incidentally is not before or even during Pahela Baishakh — as the logical deduction of a festival supposedly rooted in agricultural harvesting, and tax collecting thereafter, would indicate — but at least two to three weeks beyond that time, at the end of April.
‘And even after I bring the crop home, I immediately have to start selling many maunds of it at painfully low prices. Everyone sells. They have to. For the dozens of creditors — diesel dealers, insecticide agents, the landlord from whom I have taken borga (agricultural land rental system), all start pounding me for their dues,’ Mohammad Saiful was now irritated at any insistence on bringing up the joys of Pahela Baishakh.
‘So, young man, now you understand what is Pahela Baishakh to us!’ a sheepish smile of greater wisdom glowed over the wide-bearded face of Kader Mridha, as he raised his face to the sun with his eyes closed, giving off the impression that he is sunbathing. His hands strongly holding onto the darkened wooden walking stick he was pounding the cracked dirt road of the new road with.
As thousands clad in red, white saris and punjabis throng to Dhaka’s Ramna Batamul to listen to the quintessentially Bengali songs of Rabindranath, on both sides of the newly finished feeder road snaking through Joyshara village under Atrai upazila of Naogaon — incidentally, the district is the source of nearly one-third of the rice brought in for consumption in the capital — men with bare torsos and tucked up lungis will be spraying the highly effective, but toxic, Fedi insecticide over their crops to fend off locusts. It is not a time for celebration in Joyshara; it’s a question of survival.
‘I heard you eat panta and hilsha for hundreds of takas to celebrate Pahela Baishakh. That is sad. We celebrate in more grand ways. We just eat panta with maybe just a green chilli to finish off our leftover rice. But I guess that’s way things are nowadays.’
The wise, old Abdul Kader Mridha had a way of telling things.

Published: Pahela Baishakh Special/ The New Age/ April, 2006