THE recent spate of protests against communal violence and demands for justice are undoubtedly justified and laudable. And, participation in these demonstrations on the streets appears to be significantly higher compared with any mass protests held in the past few years. However, one special feature to be noted here is that all these solidarity against the worst communal violence in the country’s history came too late.
It could be argued that had those political workers, student activists and members of the civil society taken to the street immediately to show the unity against the evil forces, immediately after the incident in Cumilla, some of the spiralling troubles in other parts of the country could have been averted. It is, therefore, a crucial question why the delay and what were the reasons for the hesitancy in social and political activism? Are we becoming less sensitive to human sufferings? Or, have we become too communal? Could the political environment be the reason that makes us worry about potential risks and hazards associated with protests and expressing dissent due to the recent history of brutal crackdown on the opposition? Can it be ruled out that the delayed activism by political and apolitical activists is symptomatic of permissible protests in a hybrid democracy?
There’s another hypothesis. It suggests that the government crackdown on the opposition has left the Bangladesh Nationalist Party so crippled and weakened that it probably does not have the strength or courage to take to the streets. It is also natural for the party people to be afraid of being implicated in false cases in the way they have been the subject of scapegoating for all the incidents and problems in the country. The reaction of other parties, even the leftist parties that claim themselves to be secular, has been slow and compassionate. A plausible explanation of the left’s hesitancy is that they are natural allies of the Awami League and are unwilling to embarrass the ruling party. Hence, the left parties took to the streets only when the ruling party became vocal against this hate crime.
These attacks in 2021 are quite different from the attacks of 2001, for which the BNP has been roundly condemned for two decades. Those attacks were political revenge against minority Hindus for their assumed support for the Awami League and not voting for the BNP. On the other hand, the recent attacks are quite different. The latest episode is an unprecedented attack on the faith itself aimed at denying the Hindu community their constitutional rights to observe their own faith and rituals. Their most important festival was marred by violence. And, ironically it happened at a time when the party in power is the same one for which their support had made them pay dearly 20 years ago.
A similar bias of our civil society towards the ruling Awami League cannot be denied. Perhaps, that is why we found our civil society as vocal as it can be in defending civil rights when the BNP was in power, but maintained a deafening silence during the Awami League rule. It is only natural that one would not want to embarrass one’s party and do anything that may harm the party the individual support.
There is another familiar theme, that is to argue that there is no alternative to the current regime because of the BNP’s alliance with the anti-liberation political force Jamaat-e-Islami although the proponents of this theory conveniently ignore the fact that the Awami League, in the past, also had some degrees of coordination with Jamaat in its agitation against the BNP during the first part of the 1990s for establishing a non-political caretaker system of government for conducting national elections. The selective amnesia, regrettable though, cannot be ignored. These opportunistic and partisan alignment of the dominant section of civil society are nothing new. Had there been unity and resistance of these so-called voices of conscience, our civil liberties and human rights would not have been weakened so much. At the least, people’s right to vote would have been protected. No wonder the minority and marginal groups will become more vulnerable in absence of rule of law and collapse of independent institutions of the state.
In their much-talked about book How Democracies Die, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibalatt wrote, ‘Once the referees are in tow, elected autocrats can turn to their opponents. Most contemporary autocrats do not wipe out all traces of dissent, as Mussolini did in Facist Italy. But many make an effort to ensure that key players — anyone capable of really hurting the government — are sidelined, hobbled, or bribed into throwing the game. Key players might include opposition politicians, business leaders who finance the opposition, major media outlets, and in some cases, religious or other cultural figures who enjoy a certain public moral standing.’ Do we not see too much of the likelihood in the present Bangladesh?
(Published in the New Age on 18 November, 2021.)
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