By Aunul Islam
Aunul Islam, read for his PhD at Imperial College, London. He graduated from The University of Manchester. He is a Quality Assurance Specialist in Higher Education and a Technology Consultant. He is an ex-civil servant of the UK government. A keen gardener, he finds solace through nature in this dysfunctional world order.
As I reflect on the July uprising that toppled the long reign of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, I recall the film entitled “Ashani Sanket” (Distant Thunder). It is a 1973 Bengali film directed by the late and legendary director Satyajit Ray. A New York Times critic called it a fable. It is through the prism of this fable that I will revisit some recent historical episodes in Bangladesh and contemporary developments.
The film was based on the Bengal famine during World War II. The irony of this was that the famine was entirely a man-made one. Then-British Prime Minister Churchill’s war effort diverted most of the food crops away from the civilian population. Millions perished, with estimates ranging from 2.5 to more than 3 million.
Ironically 30 years later and a year after ‘Distant Thunder’ was released, famine returned to Bengal (March 1974-December 1974). Geopolitically, the world by then was a different place. It returned to erstwhile East Bengal which emerged as the newly formed nation of Bangladesh. This famine too was a man-made one leading, according to some estimates, to the death of 1.5 million people.
With the failure of American policy in the Indian sub-continent that failed to prevent the emergence of Bangladesh, the US government engaged in the cruel endeavour of making Bangladesh a ‘failed state.’ Hence, it withheld much-needed food aid to Bangladesh despite the prevalence of one of the worst famines in recent history.
Perhaps, now, Bangladesh’s young history (three years after independence) has changed the direction of the nation. The history of a nation was changed because Bangladesh was considered a homogeneous society and the nation speaking one language, Bengali, of course with the variation of dialects. In terms of religion too, it was homogenous, as it was a Muslim population but with a secular disposition. Unlike Pakistan and India that have different ethnicities or groups like the Punjabis, Balochis, Pathans, Gujaratis, as well as many indigenous populations where homogeneity does not exist as such. With diverse ethnicities, socio-political management becomes challenging for some nations in South Asia to have stability. Pakistan is suffering huge instability due to this, and India faces the strain of managing its fractious communities.
Bangladesh should have remained stable in terms of its homogeneity but, alas, USA created a new fault-line. It sought to divide the nation by seeking to create a failed founding leader and establishment of another group, the so- called “saviours” of the nation.
It reminds me something from history. When the British were strategically trying to enter India, one of the observations was the pride of the different languages the people of the subcontinent spoke! Destroy this, the nation will be divided, and the “will” to fight! Introduce English and this will create the fault-line to colonise them.
The 1974 famine was followed in 1975 by the brutal killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (the country’s Prime Minister and founder of the nation) and most of his family members. The country was at that point in time the second poorest in the world (after Burkina Faso). The very fabric of the society was simple and therefore overcoming the shock of Mujib’s assassination was easier than it would have been presently.
In July-August 2024, a so-called “revolution” took place in ousting Sheikh Hasina as the Prime Minister after 16 years of rule, which is the culmination of the venting of pent-up frustration of the way that the country was run at the top. It reminds me also of a book entitled “Prisoners of Geography” and the many geopolitical pressure that impinge on a developing country but a country that was on the way to becoming a middle income economy and trying to free itself from being a prisoner of geography.
One could look at the film “Distant Thunder” either as a commentary on the past or the Thunder that is going to be in the future. Here, I will attempt and to try to understand and narrate what could be a bad omen for the Bangladesh as a nation.
The so-called revolution represents a fault-line that may occur in running a nation where a foreign power takes advantage of it and could easily destabilize it, and this is what seems to have happened in the case of Bangladesh.
To add to the fault-line, it is unique only to Bangladesh that the student community leads political agitations. This happened in the case of the 1952 language movement where students played a crucial role. In 1971, the student community played a significant role along with the mass of the population. However, one of the negative aspects of any student-led revolution is that it could lead to chronic instability and reduce a nation’s prospects to become a prosperous middle-income economy.
At this point, I tried to re-visit the French Revolution and its long-lived impact on the psyche of the French nation. Even today, the most violent riots that takes place is in the French capital Paris. Thousands of cars have been burnt in few days in 2019 and 2021. This is unlike other neighbouring European countries. A prosperous country like France can afford its ‘revolutionary moments,’ but can Bangladesh?
Now let me revisit the situation in Bangladesh. The revolutionary moment was random (or was it “meticulously planned and executed” as maintained by Yunus, the Head of the Interim Government?) Many people lost their lives and thousands were injured at the hands of security forces, but the police also bore the wrath of the protestors when Sheikh Hasina’s regime fell. Many police stations were burnt to ashes and many ancestral homes of Hasina’s political members, and the civil servants were destroyed. Many became victims of mob violence and even as this is being written, the scenario is in a state of flux.
The strange position that the army took as a silent bystander is not helpful to the nation. They have been very selfish because their position as peacekeepers in the United Nations would be jeopardised and lost. They became silent partners and in doing so have really destroyed the very political and social stability of a country and it does not bode very well for the nation and ironically, they have lost the control of the population. On top of that, it has created a deep division with the police.
So, what transpired after three months of the takeover by the interim government is that it did not take a strong decision on the student-led revolution and make the student leaders go back to basics, that is, study first and be nation builders later. One cannot have a situation where self-appointed student leaders are running a nation and seeking to control key policy decisions. This has never been seen anywhere in the world! Ironically too, they want to rewrite history.
Bangladesh can least afford to be running a new experiment in student-led national governance. It is an Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) for the future of Bangladesh!
Reflections on development and governance 