[H]e would not accept ties, even ties of love. His stars had made him a wanderer.
(Tagore 1994:217-8)
I had never been to Bangladesh till 2008 although both my parents and their families were of East Bengali/East Pakistani origin and I too received many an invitation from that country before that year. I grew up hearing stories about the country from them and from others of their generation. These were stories of exceptionally good neighbourliness, of how my mother was saved by one of their Muslim neighbours when as a little child she got swung away from their rooftop while playing with the swinging petiole of a coconut tree and was found dangling dangerously clutching onto the petiole. My father said that all their Muslim neighbours would discourage them to leave their home after Partition (1947). If relations were so hunky-dory then what made them take the painful decision of leaving home in the first place and migrate to an uncertain future? When exactly did they decide to leave? When did that turning point come about? I was of course aware of the disquieting situation across the subcontinent at that time, but was only too inquisitive to understand the nature of the triggering event and how it made them leave the country. “One day”, as my father narrated to me, “one of our close neighbours secretly scaled our boundary wall and without asking for permission (bola nei, kaoa nei) walked straight into the inner sanctum (bhitar bari) of our house. On being challenged politely, he answered in a defiant voice: Now that Pakistan has been declared, there would be no barrier to our movement and we can freely walk into wherever we want to.” They did not wait for another day after this incident. My father’s family did not have to suffer much in terms of human lives or bodily harm although our ancestral home in Dhaka still remains illegally occupied by others. In 2008 when I made the maiden effort of visiting the place and entering its premises, I was not allowed and the doors were shut on my face by the occupiers. My mother’s side had to lose enormously in terms of human casualties and bodily wounds and she would always admonish me: “This is one country in the world you will never visit.” That is the reason, why I could not visit that country till 2008 – the year when I could successfully persuade her and finally obtained her permission to visit Dhaka in connection with one of my projects conducted jointly with Dhaka University, Delhi School of Economics and Hiroshima University.
The reason why I prefer to begin with this anecdote – called fashionably in present-day parlance as ‘auto-ethnography’ – is that the story of East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh I grew up with seems to flow into two registers albeit contradictory to each other. The first is that of good neighbourliness that is believed to have preceded the Partition (1947) and the other of its complete disappearance during or in the aftermath of Partition – that was only surprising at its best and shocking at its worst to us and perhaps to our neighbours. While good neighbourliness was too good to believe, its complete collapse and disappearance were too tragic to lament. This paper reflects more deeply on what appears as the bewildering binary of good neighbourliness versus its sudden disappearance and the implications of this binary for the democratic prospects of the neighbouring countries in general and Bangladesh in particular.
One can doubt if there was ever such good neighbourliness between the two communities of neighbours as some of us have done. As an awardee of Tata Trusts Archive Grant, I was given access to the 1947 Partition Archive storing at that point of time over 10,000 oral accounts of persons displaced by Partition.[1] As one Partition account says: “Muslims would not mix with the Hindus. They were too poor” (recorded on 5.6.2020). “Hindus and Muslims did not have any visible enmity – but it appears that they (the Muslims) would live on their own (Ora oder mato thakto – ora kaj taj korto). Muslims would come to work with us as domestic help and cultivators, although we were never prevented from mixing with them. We would address them as dada (elder brother), mama (maternal uncle), kaka (paternal uncle) etc. They would come to work and go away. They were never allowed inside our home (recorded on 26.2.2018). Yet, another account suggests: “As far as I can remember, Muslims never tortured the Hindus or abducted Hindu women. They would rather address Hindu women as ‘ma’ (mother). They were never allowed to come to our rooms. Even when they are invited to a wedding reception, they would not be offered food. Chhotobelay kashto hoto – I felt sad in my childhood.” In other words, the stories of good neighbourliness would hide many such realities of discrimination, inequality and inequity albeit afflicting the social body. But it is imperative that these realities of discrimination, inequality and inequity would have to be ‘appropriated, controlled and mastered’ if one were to tell the hunky-dory stories of good neighbourliness between the two communities:
… [B]eing at home with oneself (… the other within oneself) supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence,… which come to limit and condition it in its inscription as a law (Derrida 1997a:17).
Good neighbourliness does not exist out there, but needs to be ‘staged in the social and institutional conditions of alterity – the strangeness and foreignness – that shape the alienating real of the migrant, or minority settlement, the habitus of the homeless’ (Bhava 2011:3) and what Bhava calls ‘staging’ is not a simple one-sided (ektarfa) affair as one of my interlocutors contended. “In times of crisis”, she says, “we will save the Muslims by dressing them as Hindus and the Muslims would do the same to us”. The staging through cross-community dressing was a precondition of their existence as good neighbours. Good neighbours in order to become so will have to cease to remain what they are – Muslims and Hindus – but must cross-dress themselves and masquerade as their other in order to become good neighbourly to each other. Hamiruddin Middya’s short story ‘Kalpurush’ in)cluded in Youth Sahitya Akademi-prize-winning collection of short stories Mathrakha (2022), for instance, poignantly shows how the poor Muslim peasants continue to perform a ritual during the harvesting season stealthily – almost by subversion – because the orthodox religious leaders of their community imposed a ban on its performance on the ground that the ritual was believed to be associated with another community. In the words of Derrida: ‘[L]ove for one’s neighbour is the manoeuvring hypocrisy of a perverse seduction, a stratagem to mislead the other to oneself’ (Derrida 1997b:286).
The epigraph of this essay alludes to Tagore’s short story – ‘Guest’ (Atithi). Why did Tarapada (about whom Tagore writes – ‘neighbours doted on him, thief of all hearts in the village’) refuse to be trapped in ‘ties, even ties of love’? Tagore’s commentators would attribute it to his wandering nature. I would rather turn the table around and argue that he found ‘ties including ties of love’ too overpowering to suffer and that explains why he ‘wanders’ from one relationship to another.
But when is the tipping point reached which made it impossible any longer to stage and enact good neighbourliness? As my father told me, the close neighbour suddenly turned rank fugitive, crossed into the compound of their home scaling the boundary wall and came walking straight to the bhitar bari? My father’s description matches with the testimony of a renowned lawyer’s daughter then based in Faridpur:
My father would practise in the district court [of Faridpur]. He was a chain smoker. After the Partition, once he was enjoying his smoke inside the court when his good friend Akbar Khan (not his real name) told him: “You must remember that this country has become ours. Now you cannot do all this [in an obvious reference to his smoking inside the court premises].” He immediately told him: “Porer golami korbo na” (I will not do the slave’s work under others), hailed his personal horse carriage and came back home, caught the next train with his family and came to Calcutta” (recorded on 31.10.2014).
Unlike the unwelcome bursting into a private space like in the case of our ancestral home, that of a cigarette-smoking lawyer into a public space like courtroom was considered an offense. The neighbour’s forcible entry into the compound of our ancestral home in Dhaka and then to its inner sanctum might at first sight look disturbingly momentous to us, but it took decades and centuries for the people like him to make that maiden move and voice the claim to free moment that was hitherto denied to them. As Atin Bandyopadhyay in his Nilkantha Pakhir Khonje observes: “This fire [of rage] as it were was lying hidden for far too long underneath the earth. They have now been taking revenge after digesting the insult for long” (Bandyopadhyay, 1971: 142, italics mine). It really takes long for one to be able to stand up and say to one’s neighbour: “The Hindus spit on us as they see us, we too will [now] spit [back]” (Bandyopadhyay, 1971: 19).
Neighbourhood and Democracy
A section of leaders who are now at the helm of affairs in Bangladesh accuses India of having hitherto confused Awami League with Bangladesh, its members with the Bangladeshi nation and Sk. Hasina’s authoritarian rule with Bangladesh’s democracy. In each instance, India’s closeness and proximity with Bangladesh as one of her neighbours trumped the imperative of democracy in that country. That is why Derrida argues that a close and proximate neighbour is a threat to the functioning of democracy. Democracy is precariously perched in the fragile crevice between its subjects being recognized as ‘countable singularities’ – each irreducibly distinct and countable from the other on the one hand and the universal values of democracy – like ‘equality’, ‘equity’ and the ‘political models of the republic’ on the other. While each subject is countable and distinctive from the other as a tribute to the functioning of democracy, it is also imperative that their distinctiveness should not be the reason for us to stop being neighbourly towards them because these values being universal do not remain restricted only to “us”, but ought to be spread among the people across the world.
There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ …, without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. Tragically irreconcilable and forever wounding. The wound itself opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other (Derrida 1997a: 22).
Too much proximity and closeness freeze us into the ‘we-group’ of neighbours – or to borrow a metaphor from Homi K Bhava – ‘the sovereignty of the nation-form’ (Bhava 2011:3) – as much as they pull us away from democracy. The recent uprising in Bangladesh aptly brings into focus the dilemma of good neighbourliness between India and Bangladesh and Bangladesh’s authoritarian transformation. In this paper, I propose to raise a few questions on the complicated relationship between neighbourhood and democracy: Is there any connection between them? While the Bengali linguistic nationalism of Bangladesh drew our two communities of Bengalis closer together, the deeper question remains – is nationalism necessarily authoritarian? Or is this variety of nationalism which was demonstrated in Bangladesh during the time of Sk. Mujibur Rahman and Sk. Hasina authoritarian? Or to turn the question around, could democracy in Bangladesh, if established with the alteration of political parties in quinquennial elections during the last 15 years, have taken a toll on our neighbourly relations?
Nationalism and Authoritarianism
We remember the black-and-white picture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman delivering his address in Dhaka on 7 March 1971. This is where he addressed the audience in front of him as “Bhayera amar” (“my dear brothers”). And his closing sentences were “Rokto jokhon diyechhi, rokto aro debo. E desher manush ke mukto kore chharbo. Inshallah!” (“Since we have already given blood, we will give more. We will set the people of this country free, God willing”). It was the call for armed struggle for the liberation of Bangladesh. On the other hand, on 5 August 2024, we saw his statue being brutally hammered in front of a jubilant audience. So, the crucial question is: are these two Mujibs? Or is there a connection between them? We think that there is indeed a connection between them, because the former is the nationalist Mujib and authoritarianism was implicit in the kind of nationalism Mujibur Rahaman espoused. And one can argue that it is for this reason that he was punished and his head was being hammered. For reasons of space, we refer to only two examples.
One, all of us know that Bangladesh is called a monolingual country and the official language of Bangladesh is Bangla. While Muslims constitute the overwhelming majority, the percentage of Hindus – though declining consistently over the years – account for about 7 percent of the population in Bangladesh. After Bangladesh gained independence in 1971, the Mujib government declared the new country’s citizens “Bengalees,” which created resentment among other ethnic groups, including the tribal people of Chittagong Hill Tracts, sexual and religious minorities and Sufi minority sects. After a number of constitutional amendments, the term for a national/citizen of the country was changed to “Bangladeshi,” which remained in force for good 35 years. The reversion to “Bangalee” is likely to refuel resentment among the country’s non-Bengali-speaking ethnic groups, especially among the tribal people of Chittagong Hill Tracts. Most of them have Buddhism as their religion. And amongst them, the Chakmas constitute the dominant ethnic community. Once Bangladesh became independent, Chakmas were very upbeat that their language, which is certainly not Bangla, would also be recognized by this new government. So, a delegation of Chakma leaders reportedly met Sk. Mujibur Rahman to inquire about the future of their language and what would happen to them in newly independent Bangladesh. They wanted to ensure that their language was recognized by the Bangladesh Government. This was during the time of the making of the Constitution. And Mujib’s response was: “Apnera sob Bangali hoya jan.” (“Let all of you become Bangalis.”[2]) This sounded terrible to the tribal leaders because they wanted their language to be recognized by the Constitution. It triggered the saga of Chakma insurgency in Bangladesh. So, here is a nationalism which bulldozes other ethnicities, other tribal communities and minorities and minority sects like the Hijras, the followers of Lalan and other Sufi sects, religious minorities and so forth These discriminations are built in Bangladeshi nationhood.
The second example alludes to the ban that Mujibur Rahman imposed on the functioning of all political parties except BaKSAL in January 1975, a few months before he died. He said that all political parties of all hues were required to merge into what he described as ‘BaKSAL’ (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League).
As the country was tattered by lingering genocide and war of 1971, the already poor communications and infrastructure in Bangladesh shredded into ruins with more than 100 bridges destroyed, roads cut, and the only major port of the country, i.e., Chittagong, heavily mined. Food production was declining low and the country was face to face with a famine in 1974 famine and about 3 million (30,00,000) people died of starvation as per unofficial reports. The government estimate of mortality was, not surprisingly, kept at a meagre 26,000. Opposition forces started stepping up the pressure on the government while the government’s response was exceptionally strong. Prominent opposition leaders were either exterminated or went into hiding. Mujib did not want a national Bangladeshi army, for, he found it too disloyal, as it had served Pakistan. He wanted a personal militia (Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini) which would be loyal to him and his family. The militia unleashed a reign of terror on opposition forces including the Awami League members. By the end of 1974, 4000 Awami Leaguers were believed to have been murdered, including five ministers. Mujib’s Rakhi Bahini and Awami-BKSALists, and many other private militia groups belonging to the opposition forces like Lal Bahini, Sheccha Shebok Bahini allegedly killed over 40,000 people without any trial.
On 25 January, 1975, a few months before his assassination, the fourth amendment was enacted and Bangladesh adopted a presidential system. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman imposed on the nation the yoke of one party rule of BaKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Shramik Awami League). With this amendment a ban was enforced against all other political parties. Therefore, all other political parties were required to merge into what Mujib described as ‘one national party’, i.e., BaKSAL. Besides, Mujib banned all national dailies and periodicals except four government-controlled ones.
Mujib’s authoritarian rule assumed a paternalistic form that lent to it its informality and distinctiveness. This is excellently illustrated by Anthony Mascarenhas in his famous book Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood (1986):
The scene in Gonobaban in the early days of Mujib’s rule was a 20th century parody of a Moghul court. Mujib had an office in the secretariat but he spent only a minimum amount of time there, preferring to function from his official residence which he used as a private office. Its relaxed atmosphere was more to his taste. There he would hold court for his cronies, for party men and petitioners who like bees to a honey pot gravitated to Dhaka with outstretched hands. They would descend on him in big groups and small. When ushered into the presence they would garland Bangabandhu, touch his feet, weep loudly. Some would burst into song – some well-known Bengali folksong – and Mujib eyes opaque with emotion, would join in. In between he would have a quiet word with one of his ministers, instruct a civil servant about some urgent matter of state, and receive visiting reporters and VIPs who came to see the uncrowned king of the world’s newest state… Everyone went away with a promise of action. Mujib would grab the paper from the outstretched hands of a petitioner, pat him on the cheek, then wave him on. ‘Go, I will see to it.’ That was the last the petitioner, or Mujib, would hear about it. Later, when commenting on Mujib’s assassination, my friend, Abu Musa, a perceptive but disillusioned journalist, would tell me: ‘He promised everything and he betrayed everyone (Mascarenhas 1986:11).
Mascarenhas’ illustration shows that Mujib used to run the country like a durbar (the word was used by Nayantara Sahgal to describe the nature of South Asian leadership). Mascarenhas’ words make the following things clear: first, Mujib would prefer to run the administration from his house rather than from Gana Bhaban. His reluctance to run the State from office reflects his penchant for informality. Second, people would come with lots of gifts to him. An eminent journalist of Bangladesh narrated to me that if anyone came from Bogura, the first question that Mujib would ask was, “Where is the curd?” So, each place is known for the delicacy that makes it famous (like the curd of Bogura) and Mujib would always expect that people would carry those delicacies as gifts to him. And thirdly, whoever came to him, he (Mujib) would immediately grant his wish. And as Mascarenhas reported, “He promised everything, and he betrayed everyone”; his words were not followed up and he had very little knowledge of how his government was being run. This was best exemplified by the Adamjee Jute Mill case. Situated in Narayanganj, it was then the world’s largest jute mill in terms of workers being employed in it. In 1972, the jute mill was shut down because the owners had abandoned the mill after the Independence of Bangladesh. On the eve of Eid-ul-Adha in that year, Mujib visited the jute mill and met the striking workers and he assured them that the mill would be opened and all arrears would be cleared within a day. The next day 3000 workers assembled in front of the gate hoping that they would be given the arrears which were due to them. But nothing of that happened. In fact, Mujib assured them without knowing that his treasury was empty. No bureaucrat could further follow it up by way of calling him, apprehending that he would feel disturbed. In other words, this was a paternalistic authoritarianism which he established in the name of democracy. Borrowing from Bodin, one may say that the ‘government of all commonwealths, colleges, corporate bodies, or households, whatever, rests on the right to command on one side the other members [by being a member of the family without offering any reason] and the obligation to obey on the other (Bodin:1955:9).
Needless to say, the personal rule of ‘Bangabandhu’ was promoted through public media; his statues and photographs were omnipresent in streetside hoardings and graffities in a way that he seemed to embody Bangladeshi nationalism in his person. This also meant that the contributions of many of his trusted Awami Leaguers to the liberation movement were eventually erased from public memory. That is why, Meghamallar Basu, the present president of Dhaka University Students’ Union, recently pointed out in a TV interview: Being too neighbourly to Bangladesh and to Mujib in particular, Indians would never understand what he was to the people of Bangladesh, his undemocratic and authoritarian character, and what he had done to them and their country.
When Mujib’s statue was beheaded on that fateful day, it was meant for denouncing the authoritarian rule of Mujib as much as that of Sheikh Hasina, for, Mujib is believed to have been the source of her legitimacy. The July Proclamation published on 16 January 2025 is a document prepared mainly by Mahfuz Alam on behalf of the Anti-Discrimination Students’ Movement. The document makes a thoroughgoing critique of the ‘fascist’ rule of Sk. Hasina, which, according to the student leaders, has its origins in the Mujib era. It elaborately illustrates the background in which the August uprising had taken place and how the abject authoritarianism of Sk. Hasina that it describes as ‘fascism’ was responsible for the uprising by the student-public (chhatra-janata):
- The 1972 Constitution itself failed in giving expression to the “opinions and expectations” of the people participating in the freedom struggle;
- As a result, the failure quickened the decay of democracy and State institutions;
- As a result, it conspiratorially paved the way to the exercise of monopoly power and dominance by Sk. Hasina;
- The fascist rule was accompanied by bad governance, secret killings, extrajudicial murders, violation of freedom of expression, amendment to and change of the Constitution in the interest of a single party;
- All this has tarnished Bangladesh’s image before the international community;
- ‘Hasina family’s’ indiscriminate loot and plundering of banks, siphoning off of money and decimation of institutions – ‘in the name of development’ have destroyed Bangladesh’s future prospects and have threatened the environment, biodiversity and climate of the country;
- Cruel repression of the young men and women, students of colleges and universities was intended to silence the opposition forces and the introduction of quota for the freedom fighters created extreme inequality amongst the students, job seekers and citizens;
- People were deprived of their voting rights and representation during Hasina’s time. It may be noted that Sk. Hasina consecutively held the last three elections without the participation of Bangladesh Nationalist Paty (BNP).
All the above points are adapted and paraphrased from the July Proclamation. Ironically, the more India wanted to be good-neighbourly towards Bangladesh, the more Sk. Hasina’s moves were read as ‘unjust dominance, exploitation and dictation’ of foreign power (The July Proclamation). Take the Liberation War of 1971 as an example. While Bangabir Kader Siddiqui – the freedom fighter and the respected Awami League veteran – still gratefully acknowledges Bangladesh’s debt to India and maintains that there is no other instance of such sacrifice a country has made for its neighbour in world history, what was hitherto celebrated as ‘liberation’ in Bangladesh, according to the present dispensation of advisors and coordinators, only amounted to the replacement of one ‘subjection’ by that of another. Bangladesh’s closeness and proximity to India as her neighbour are cited as the stumbling block to the realization of her democratic promises and aspirations.
While the government of India’s response to the uprising in Bangladesh continues to be both professional and muted, it prefers to wait till an elected government comes to power in Dhaka and the dust storm eventually settles down. By contrast, people-to-people relations are perhaps at their worst in present times. There have been clashes reported between the groups of villagers in the bordering areas particularly along the districts of Nadia and Cooch Behar in India. The Ministry of External Affairs reportedly came out with the clarification that the comments and remarks by villagers, politicians and free citizens of the country are made in their individual capacity and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Government of India. By contrast, the young leadership’s diplomatic inability to keep the distinction is tell-tale in Bangladesh. Mahfuz Alam – an advisor himself and popularly known as the ‘Socrates’ of July uprising – committed a serious faux pas as he released a map of Bangladesh with parts of India included in it and kept it on display in his X-handle for more than two hours. This is just one of many such instances.
On the other hand, a section of Indians – particularly from West Bengal – would like to see the status quo ante to be restored. On the one hand, there is a deep sense of loss, of losing a trusted neighbour, for whom so much sacrifice was made back in 1971. In the words of Maj. General G. D. Baxi, a retired army general who participated in the liberation war: “It is tragic that this ungrateful nation has forgotten the sacrifice of 3870 Indian brave hearts and also that of thousands of Mukti Bahini Jodhas (fighters).” But, on the other hand, there is also the raging anger that the Government must take proactive steps to bring back the status quo ante by dislodging the ‘Jamat-e-Islami bastion of Razakars’ from power: “If this jamat-e Islami bastion of Razakars decides to do genocide … it could have hell to pay.” The rising incidents of direct confrontation of groups of villagers are only indicative of the rapidly worsening of people-to-people relations.
The violent bipolarity of a tragic loss and raging anger marks the utopia of today’s neighbourliness. It only reminds us of Bhava who cautioned:
It is the power of the proleptic to “retrieve” into the “present” what has been excised, excluded or the oppressed … as if it ensured and protected the ‘future’ of those whose pasts have been traumatized or terrorized (Bhava 2011:4).
The once-close and proximate neighbour of ours has already gone too far from us. If they are to be brought back, what toll will it take on the prospects of their democracy? I have no answer. Derrida once called it ‘yet another ruse’ (Derrida 1997a: 65).
References:
Bandyopadhyay, Atin (1971): Nilkantha Pakhit Khonje (in Bengali) [In search of the blue-throated bird]. Kolkata: Karuna.
Bhava, Homi (2011): Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival, Hegel Lectures, Eds. Eva Canschik-Kirchbaum, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Klaus W. Hempfer, Joachim Kupper. Berlin: De Gruyter. P. 1-19.
Bodin, Jean (1955): Six Books of the Commonwealth, abridged and translated by M. L. Tooley, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Chakma, Siddhartha (1992): Prasanga Parbatya Chattagram. Calcutta: Nath Brothers.
Derrida, Jacques (1997a): On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1997b) : The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso.
Mascarenhas, Anthony (2006): Bangladesh: The Legacy of Blood. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Middya, Hamiruddin (2022): Mathrakha (in Bengali). Kolkata: Sopan.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1887): ‘Guest’ in Selected Short Stories, trans. with an Introduction by William Radice. London: Penguin.
[1] I am thankful to 1947 Partition Archive although I am obliged not to disclose the names of the interviewees, nor their location and other coordinates as per my fellowship protocol. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.
[2] Chakma (1996) has narrated this account.