Give
Me Back My Country
By Tahmima Anam
26 January, 2007
The New Statesman
On
10 January 1972, my father came home to his country for the first time.
It was three weeks after the end of the Bangladesh war, and he was making
his way back from India, where he had enlisted with the newly formed
Bangladesh army. When I think about that day, I always wonder what country
my father thought he was returning to. Surely it was a thing of his
imagination, born out of the years marching against the Pakistani occupation,
the months touring India to gain support for the war, the gruelling
training at the officers' camp in West Bengal. I can picture the shock
that he and his fellow freedom fighters must have felt when they finally
did cross that border, seeing their imagined country and their real
country meet for the first time.
The Bengali phrase desh-prem
means "love for the country". Like many expatriate Bangladeshis,
my desh-prem makes me believe there will come a day when I pack my bags
and leave London for good. My desh-prem is a long-distance affair, full
of passion and misunderstanding; often, my heart is broken. Many Bangladeshis
never actually return home; it is more of an idea, something to turn
over in our hearts before we go to sleep, but for me the prospect of
returning is real. In 1990, after 14 years abroad, my parents left their
jobs with the United Nations and moved back to Bangladesh. So many of
their friends told them they were foolish to return to a country that
had so little to offer, but in the latter months of that year, Hossain
Mohammad Ershad's military dictatorship was toppled by massive public
action of a kind not seen since the days of the independence movement.
So the country my family returned to was bathed in hope, and, almost
two decades after the birth of Bangladesh, we finally seemed on the
brink of becoming a functioning democracy.
Sixteen years after Ershad's
dramatic fall, Bangladesh is a very different place. We have had three
national elections, and our two main political parties, the Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League, have handed power back
and forth to each other like a baton in a relay, each election becoming
successively more bitter, and each five-year term bringing dramatic
increases in corruption and partisan politics. Amazingly, when the Awami
League was in power, the BNP refused to attend parliament; when the
BNP was in power, the Awami League refused to attend. As a result, the
people we mandated to represent us in government failed to discharge
their responsibilities, instead taking to the streets and announcing
that their defeat was engineered and not willed by the voting public.
In Bangladesh, elections
come hand in hand with claims of vote-rigging. Where there is an election
and a transfer of power, there will inevitably be rumours of conspiracy,
of stolen ballot boxes and hijacked polling stations. Whether and to
what degree these rumours are true is almost less important than the
assumption that a sitting government cannot hold a fair election. Therefore,
in 1995, the constitution was amended to include a peculiar and rather
clever system of handing power to a caretaker government that is responsible
for holding a fair election. According to the constitution, the last
retired chief justice of the Bangladesh Supreme Court becomes chief
adviser to the caretaker government. He has the authority of a prime
minister, and is given the responsibility of appointing a cabinet, together
with which he will govern the country for no more than 90 days. During
this time his main tasks will be to oversee fair and
non-partisan elections and to hand over power to the newly elected government.
So far, so good. But as plans
go, this one is not foolproof. Although the arrangement worked on the
first two occasions, this time around the BNP felt it could not afford
to lose the election. All the signs indicated that if the election was
free and fair, the BNP would be defeated by the Awami League. After
five years of alleged corruption, theft and autocracy, it was faced
with the possibility that it would actually have to be accountable for
the crimes it had committed during its tenure. The excesses of previous
regimes were mild compared with those perpetrated during those five
years, which saw an alliance between the BNP and the most powerful of
the Islamic parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami. The BNP formed this strategic
partnership in 2001, and over the past five years the Jamaat's influence
has spread throughout the bureaucracy and district governments, enabling
the party to build grass-roots support and gain crucial political and
public recognition.
As well as giving power and
legitimacy to the Islamic right, the BNP alliance committed severe abuses
of power. It politicised the police force and formed the Rapid Action
Battalion (RAB), a special branch that was responsible for hundreds
of killings in the name of "law and order". This force signed
contracts for bridges that were never built, bought television channels,
appointed biased judges, jailed and harassed the opposition, and placed
RAB people into every post that might influence the election. The alliance
invented 14 million false voters. By the same stroke, it wiped most
Bangladeshis from a religious or ethnic minority from the electoral
register.
Popular opposition to the
BNP's blatant attempts at manipulating the election has made it terrified
of losing power, and so, instead of allowing the caretaker government
to fall into the hands of a neutral chief adviser, it encouraged the
BNP-appointed president, Iajuddin Ahmed, to take the post. When we first
saw the ageing Iajuddin taking the oath to become chief adviser, he
appeared harmless enough. People, including the opposition, decided
to give him a chance to show his neutrality - his desh-prem. But he
proved to be easily manipulated, and after a few weeks he became a hated
figure.
In the meantime, the beleaguered
Awami League has committed its fair share of mistakes. In order to press
its demands it called an indefinite series of strikes, bringing the
economy to a halt while it conducted its campaigns of civil disobedience.
No one went to work; the classrooms emptied out, the ships were marooned
at Chittagong port, and the price of dhal tripled in a matter of months.
But by far the most un forgivable blunder it committed was to sign a
deal with the far-right Khilafat-e-Majlish. The Awami League has long
claimed an ideological advantage over the BNP, branding itself the more
secular, progressive party, so for those of us who believed there was
a significant difference between the two parties, this was a cynical
and heartbreaking manoeuvre. Under the terms of the deal, the Awami
League will assist the Khilafat-e-Majlish in legalising fatwas and challenging
any laws that contradict "Koranic values". Whether the Islamic
right will really gain a foothold in mainstream politics - and the hearts
of the public - in Bangladesh remains to be seen; however, that both
parties believe they cannot win an election without the endorsement
of the right is sign enough that Bangladesh's identity as a moderate
Muslim country is under threat.
When I landed in Dhaka a
few days ago, the city looked as it so often does in January. The fog
was low and woolly on the ground; people were huddled under their shawls;
the smell of oranges and roasted peanuts lingered in the air. But, of
course, I knew that all was not as it seemed. In these past few months
my desh-prem has been under siege, and this time, I arrived in Dhaka
in bitter spirits. I had planned this trip so that I would be able to
vote; I had spent months looking forward to returning to Bangladesh
to exercise my democratic right. Yet as the day drew near, I realised
I wouldn't be going home to vote, but rather to witness a sham election.
With the Awami League boycotting the elections, and talk of a constitutional
crisis, we all began to worry that this year could mark the death of
democracy in Bangladesh. The mood was sombre and people seemed resigned;
it appeared there was nothing anyone could do to prevent this political
charade from going ahead.
But then, just as it appeared
there was no solution in sight, the president suddenly declared a state
of emergency and postponed the elections indefinitely. He resigned as
chief adviser and dissolved the caretaker cabinet. The exact reasons
for his about-face are still opaque, but we do know that it happened
through a combination of international pressure and army intervention.
To what degree the army is now running things is unclear; vague and
ominous ordinances have been proposed, some of which hint at restrictions
on personal freedom and on the media.
Walter Benjamin famously
said that a state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.
Can we take this literally in Bangladesh? Will the emergency see us
through to a fair election, or will the army consolidate its power and
wrest democracy from us indefinitely? And what would happen to my desh-prem
then? Could it survive another onslaught?
Whenever I imagine returning
to Bangladesh for good, I wonder what kind of country I want to return
to. I want, more than anything, to have that feeling of protean possibility
that my father must have had when he crossed the border into his new
country. I want a country where my gender does not preclude me from
being an equal citizen. Where corruption has not touched every facet
of public life. Where the children don't sell popcorn on street corners
or work in matchstick factories. I want to know that I'm going to show
up on polling day and see my name on the voter registration list. I
want to stand in a queue, press my thumb into a pad of ink, and put
my mark wherever I like. I want my politicians to stop courting the
Islamic right. I want the water table to stop rising. I want the government
to stop driving the Hindus and the Chakmas and the Santals out of this
country. I want someone to count my vote. I want a halt to the steady
erosion of civil liberties. I want a country where the army cannot arrest
anyone without a warrant. I want our political parties to be democratic,
transparent and accountable. I want fair and neutral judges. I want
the right to vote. I want there to be no such thing as a legal fatwa.
I want the war criminals of the 1971 genocide to be tried, condemned
and jailed. I want to vote. I want a country worthy of my desh-prem.
I want a country.
Tahmima Anam's debut novel,
"A Golden Age", set during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence,
will be published in March by John Murray (£14.99)
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