South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. xiii, 245 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0947-1.
From the secession of East Pakistan from its overbearing West Pakistan partner in 1971 to the military/technocratic coup d’état in 2007, Bangladesh experienced a succession of assassinations of political leaders and coups. By the mid-1990s, the country’s political institutions degenerated into two bitterly opposed coalitions, each with its 1971 liberation war hero: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, first president of Bangladesh from 1972 until his assassination in 1975; and Ziaur Rahman, a major located in Chittagong in 1971, a leader of the guerrilla forces, and president from 1976 until his assassination in 1981. In late 2008, Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikh Mujib and leader of her father’s party, won a reasonably credible election. Since 2008, she has created a measure of political stability—but she has done so by effectively imposing one-party rule.
Usually, the Western media limit coverage of Bangladesh to casualties from collapsed buildings, factory fires, cyclones, and capsized ferries. In the last several years, coverage has extended to brutal assassinations of “atheist bloggers” and to the murder of 18 foreigners and two locals in a Dhaka restaurant by Islamist terrorists inspired by ISIS. In late 2018, Sheikh Hasina won re-election for a third term. There followed some critical media comment on the intimidation and vote rigging that enabled her party’s alliance to win 288 of 300 seats.
Bangladesh is a country of 170 million. It deserves more than media discussion. Chowdhury has made a contribution, by insisting on the importance of “crowd politics” in Bangladesh. In brutal summary, her thesis is that “we need to view crowds as political actors who are self-consciously shaped through mass publicity while also recognizing that it is in the tangle of representations and practices that one must always come to the political” (20).
Chowdhury’s intellectual roots are in early twentieth-century analysis of group behaviour by writers such as Le Bon and Freud, conservatives who emphasized that crowds typically adopt oversimplified ideas, which may contain truths but also falsehoods. Crowds are prone to polarize: a virtuous “us” versus an excluded “them.” However, Chowdhury’s interpretation is not that of a conservative; she leans toward Marxist interpretations of crowd behaviour.
Her foil is Muhammad Yunus, successful founder of a large NGO, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize, and “failed politician.” Yunus offered qualified endorsement to the 2007 coup on grounds that, “Bangladeshi politicians are all for money. It’s about power, power to make money. There is no ideological thing, simply who gets the bigger booty” (36). This is a conclusion with which few, outside militant supporters of the major political parties, would disagree, either in 2007 or in 2020. (In the 2000s, Transparency International ranked Bangladesh, several years running, as the world’s most corrupt country.)
At the time, Yunus wrote several public letters requesting advice as to whether he should form a political party, engage in electoral politics, and attempt to defeat the two well-established parties in a future election. Chowdhury doesn’t deny Yunus’s characterization of Bangladeshi politicians. Instead, she criticizes his faith in liberal individualism. His failure as a politician, she concludes, arose from his inability to appreciate the centrality of crowds.
Her first case study is the peasant revolt in 2006 in northern Bangladesh against the proposal of a UK mining company, supported by the Bangladesh government of the day, to develop a large open-pit coal mine in a remote northern district. The coal would fuel much-needed extra power capacity. Peasant opposition took the form of crowd politics: violent demonstrations against the company offices and the police. In this case, the crowd’s rhetoric contained a fundamental truth. Given rampant political corruption, it was very likely that peasants would not be adequately compensated for expropriation of their land and destruction of village institutions. Ultimately, however, the mine was built.
To her credit, Chowdhury introduces a second, far more complex case—hence “paradoxes” in the book’s title. Sheikh Hasina interpreted her election in 2008 as a mandate to organize a tribunal to prosecute those who had supported West Pakistan in the 1971 civil war. It was convenient for Hasina that many prosecuted razakar (collaborators with the West Pakistani occupying forces in 1971) were now, as old men, prominent opposition political leaders. In one of the early tribunal decisions, a razakar received a life sentence in prison. More-or-less spontaneously, students at the University of Dhaka formed a crowd to defend national ideals of democracy and secularism, and called for more severe punishment meted out to the razakar. The crowd, associated with the Shahbag district in central Dhaka, insisted on a change in law enabling the tribunal to hear appeals on the sentence. Hasina obliged, amended the law, enabled an appeal, and the court duly imposed a death penalty.
Initially, the government was supportive of the Shahbag movement and, although the evidence is fragmentary, it almost certainly financed Shahbag activities throughout Dhaka. Social media played a prominent role among supporters, and some of the student bloggers were explicit in their opposition to Islam as a state religion. Hefazet-e-Islam, a militant Islamic organization, successfully mobilized a counter-crowd intent on defence of Islam and denunciation of students as “atheist bloggers.” The government promptly abandoned support of the Shahbag demonstrators and enabled Hefazet-e-Islam in organizing a “long march” of the faithful to Dhaka. In the summer of 2013, the two crowds entered into violent confrontation. Subsequently, militants among the Islamists identified a dozen bloggers, and undertook brutal executions with machetes.
The above summary is my conclusion from many conversations at the time with friends and colleagues in Dhaka. Chowdhury’s conclusion roughly coincides with mine. My major critique is her lack of a serious analysis of elite manipulation of crowds. Perhaps, the fault lies not in her but in the limits of her discipline, ethnographic anthropology. Her first case conforms reasonably closely to a Marxist interpretation of corporate dominance, supplemented by complicit Bangladesh politicians. Peasant leaders were locals who proved themselves as orators and organizers. In the second case, a spontaneous student crowd arose, but many of the subsequent activities, both those of the Shahbag activists and Hefazet supporters, were directed by respective elites. At various points, Chowdhury hints at manipulation, but she never proceeds to a political analysis of the respective elites.
John Richards
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver