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| Bangladesh |
| State under siege |
| 2013-04-06 |
| [Bangla Daily Star] A beleaguered government has made its first concession to its detractors. With the law enforcers now going after some bloggers and taking them into custody, the government has made two things clear, one openly and the other indirectly. The first is that it is quite desperate about preventing the extreme rightwing political and religious groups from creating a situation that could only worsen matters for itself. The second is that by clamping down on the bloggers and therefore on the Projonmo Chattar movement, it has disappointed the nation's secular forces hugely. The disappointment could not have been expressed better than what Rashed Khan Menon had to say in his reaction. For him, there is an inherent contradiction in the government's prosecuting the war crimes trial and at the same time caving in to the bigots' demand that "atheists" be dealt with firmly. Unsurprisingly, a very large number of secular-oriented citizens agree with Menon. A particular difficulty with a besieged government handing out concessions to the opposition is that there is hardly any end to such slipping away of moral authority. One concession leads to another, and then another. And so it goes on. Some recent instances of concessions not really helping governments in distress, despite the conditions being at quite a variance with those pertaining in Bangladesh today, might come in handy. In 1977, having triumphed (with a good deal of rigging thrown into a process he would have won anyway) at the elections, Pakistain's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ...9th PM of Pakistain from 1973 to 1977, and 4th President of Pakistain from 1971 to 1973. He was the founder of the Pakistain Peoples Party (PPP). His eldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto, would also serve as hereditary PM. In a coup led by General Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto was removed from office and was executed in 1979 for authorizing the murder of a political opponent... was swamped with demands that fresh elections be called. He eventually reached a deal with the rightwing Pakistain National Alliance on the evening of 4 July that year. At dawn the next day, the army overthrew his government. Earlier, in 1974, Pakistain's Jamaat-e-Islami ... The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores... and other fanatical groups pushed the Ahmadiyya community into a corner and loudly demanded that the Bhutto government declare the community as non-Moslem. Bhutto did as asked. And then came other demands, all of which the Bhutto administration acquiesced in. Those concessions did not help Bhutto survive. An embattled Shah of Iran, in his final year as monarch, went on a spree of concessions to the holy mans. He dismissed his ministers, tossed in the calaboose Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! his respected Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and installed his long-time critic Shahpour Bakhtiar as head of a new government. Such a retreat only emboldened Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers, who made it clear their goal was a capture of power in Tehran. The monarchy collapsed, secular Iran passed into history and the country turned into a closed society. Today, in Bangladesh, the great danger is that the agitation spearheaded by the holy mans and publicly supported by the opposition BNP has pushed the war crimes trials into the background. Into that suddenly empty space has come an assortment of demands that patently militate against constitutional politics and democratic order. Organisations like Hefajat-e-Islam have vowed to bring the country to a standstill. The Jamaat remains conditioned to demonstrations of violence. The BNP, trying to derive as much advantage as possible from the holy mans' agitation, now has a single demand -- the overthrow of the legally established government. Meanwhile, ...back at the Council of Boskone, Helmuth had turned a paler shade of blue. Star-A-Star had struck again... demands have begun to arise from the fundamentalists that secularism be done away with and replaced by invocations to Allah. The fundamentalist assault has cleverly moved from condemnation of the government to an assault on the principles and values of the War of Liberation. The state of Bangladesh is now under threat from those who have already forced one concession from a nervous government. Any more concessions could clear the path to even bigger danger. Where does Bangladesh go from here? The BNP's Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain has spoken of a government conspiracy to impose a state of emergency in the country. The past comes in here again. Indira Gandhi clamped emergency in India in June 1975 when Jayaprakash Narayan asked the military to act against the government. The move discredited her, but it restored order in the state. In December 1974, the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, confronted with demands for a "Moslem Bangla", extreme leftwing lawlessness, creeping rightwing-engineered chaos and rising crime, imposed a state of emergency in Bangladesh. Disorder was rolled back, until conspiracy overturned the state in August 1975. Circumstances today call for a firm yet humane handling of the opposition agitation. The government must not be seen to be caving in to the forces of bigotry and extra-constitutionalism. Preserving the state, with all its original principles intact, must be the priority. The job can be done in line with the constitution. |
| Posted by:Fred |