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The battle for Bangladesh has begun. What started as a country with a secular constitution in 1971 is now under siege from Islamic fundamentalists. I recently visited Bangladesh to do research on the mass killing of 1.5 million people in the Independence struggle of 1971 and found myself unwittingly in the company of communist rabble-rousers, and whisky-swilling opposition politicians.

Bangladesh seems a country of sour provenance – the grind of desperate poverty periodically interrupted by cataclysmic disaster. It is a small country packed with a hundred fifty million people. These are largely the same people as in Calcutta (Bengalis) but these ones drink even less. In fact, Bangladesh is in a state of national prohibition. On Eid (the most important Islamic holiday of the year) I sat in the office of a prominent Awami League poobah and sipped aged scotch (which he slid into his desk every time someone came into the room).

Fundamentalism is no doubt the ideology that fun forgot[1] and all of this can be really traced back to 1971 when East Pakistan (Bangladesh) decided to leave behind the neo-colonial domination of West Pakistan (Pakistan). The West Pakistanis didn’t much like this idea and a massive killing of Bengalis in East Pakistan begun. All told about one and a half million people were murdered, largely in the name of fundamentalist Islam – a worldview originating in the Middle East that fetishises a fantastical version of medieval Islam where women are chattel and the rule of law is vengeful divinity. In search of identity, West Pakistanis increasingly gravitated towards Islamic fundamentalism while the Bengalis in East Pakistan were the same mellow Bengalis they had always been. When Bangladesh struggled to separate from Pakistan the fundamentalists sided with the West Pakistanis in the slaughter. It was literally a slaughter as scores of (mostly Muslim) Bengalis had their throats slit in a perverse twist on Halal butchery. I met one such man at a killing site sinisterly known as the “butcher’s den”. His tormentors held him over a cess pool and tried to cut his throat but the blade was miraculously dull (from over-use) and he was able to escape.

The Bengalis won that battle but it seems they are losing the war. Those very same fanatics that brought innocents to their knees are now running the country, radicalising the madrasas, and pushing for Wahabi-style sharia law. The perpetrators of the 1971 genocide were never prosecuted and the result is that now Bangladesh is no longer in the vanguard of secular Islam (like Turkey).

Dhaka itself is a vast city – a developing world metropolis filled with garment factories (a polite word for sweat-shops). The rural poor make the journey to the big city to scrape together a few Thakas to survive. You can find reborn rural villages in the heart of Dhaka with houses built on stilts, a dirty reservoir acting as stand-in for the mighty, mystical Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka is noticeably poorer than Calcutta and even main thoroughfares are filled with bicycle rickshaws with their brilliantly decorated canopies and sinewy drivers. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the rickshaw was surrounded by beggars in myriad forms: men with deformed legs scampering crab-like across the pavement, women holding their babies with imploring eyes, well-rehearsed children tugging at your pangs of guilt. I never know whether I should give money to beggars. I have been warned by several people not to give money to children as sometimes you are feeding a drug habit (glue-sniffing) or worse perpetuating a begging bondage system where children are sent out to beg by ‘pimps’ and are held as virtual slaves by these pimps in service of profit. I take it on a case by case basis but I’m not really sure what the right thing to do is.

I don’t want to paint an overly negative picture of Bangladesh. Bangladeshis themselves are boundlessly friendly and generous. They are the inheritors of a richly cosmopolitan and humanist cultural tradition. This is a country that definitely has something useful to offer to the world if it is allowed to stay worldly. It must not be hijacked by those who render divinity divisive.


[1] I thought regrowing my beard might have won them over but no such luck. I guess my short shorts threw them off. I borrowed them from Axl Rose.