Instead of holding the authoritarian regime accountable, two echelons of Bangladeshi society — the obscenely wealthy elite and the intellectual vanguard — have been its silent partners and absolvers.
In the frenzy of bashing Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League and celebrating the downfall of their rule by shedding light on their crimes, I can’t help but be guarded in my hope for the future of this fierce and long-overdue demand to hold power to account. While this is much-needed, and must be a part of Bangladesh’s future, I want to see powers being checked and held to account when they’re in power, when their actions have immediate consequences and should be questioned, resisted if needed, and subjected to scrutiny.
The examples of exposing deposed tyrants and their ship-jumping minions are easy to find. Holding their feet to the fire during their regimes, not so much, and never in the case of Bangladesh.
I trust Awami League or BNP or Jamaat as I do, in Hamlet’s analogy, adders fanged. I fail to see the BNP and Jamaat’s calls for reform, democracy, unity, and an end to the politics of retribution as anything other than cynical and opportunistic. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, my hackles will be up, my wariness on high alert, and even then, I’ll be averse to being gulled by whatever they’re peddling. In fact, nothing they can say will ever put them back in my good graces.
Having said this, my focus here is not the political parties and their all too well-known and far too numerous depraved contributions. I’m looking at their powerful civilian enablers, namely, the two echelons of Bangladeshi society who not only have done nothing to hold power to account but, to boot, have been its silent partners and absolvers: they are the obscenely wealthy elite and the intellectual vanguard.
I won’t spill too much ink on the wealthy. Their actions speak for themselves loud enough. Their fortunes, quite literally, are tied to the winds of power regardless of which party is in office, and they blow with those winds as, and as long as, they keep them safe, with an exit plan in place for when the winds shift. They are the quintessence of what in US political parlance is labeled as “Conservative.”
Their sole interest is to conserve their wealth and status, not disturb the powers, much less call out its corruptions, from which they might even benefit, and keep their heads down, and voices mute and complicit. One autocrat to them is the same as the other. At worst, depending on their party affiliation, they’ll quake for a while when their party falls. If they were too close to the rulers or served in their regime, they’ll skip the country.
If they don’t, depending on their closeness, they’ll either be arrested or lie as low as they can get. In time, they’ll hope the dust will settle, and they can either keep lying low, see the return of their party, or, with any luck, align with the opposition’s regime. In Bangladesh’s short history, this has been a tried and tested method, and for those that it has worked, it has worked very well and is still working.
Bangladesh’s intellectual life suffered irreplaceable losses due to the Pakistan army’s genocide in 1971. The following generations didn’t step up with a fraction of their courage in the face of injustices, this time carried out by their own government.
Even as the protests were unfolding, Sheikh Hasina’s acolytes in the elite and intellectual circles were doing her dirty work, maligning the students and spreading disinformation. Some of them haven’t stopped. Reliable sources have shared their posts on social media with me. What they come across as doing, besides hawking lies, is covering their tracks: just in case Sheikh Hasina were to return and her party retake power, they have the receipts to prove their fealty and save their skins. They will be happy to kiss the tyrant’s ring again.
It’s this failure of the intellectual class in standing up to power, of their mendacious exploitation of their position to add to harm than do good, that I find unforgivable. Not only have they failed in championing true freedom of expression, they’ve worked hand in glove with autocratic regimes in stifling dissent, when not overtly, then with their acquiescent silence for fear of retribution. Their methods have borne the same markings as the wealthy elites’: be quiet, keep your head down, and don’t jeopardize your own situation. And while they’re at it, they’ll go the length and ostracize any voice that dares to challenge the status quo.
I speak from some experience. When I spent a year in Bangladesh in 2017-2018, in those still-heydays of the Sheikh Hasina-Awami League regime, I was hard-pressed to find a single academic who was willing to rock the proverbial boat. What I received when I brought up any systemic issues was a well-rehearsed and deployed line of thinking: you don’t live here, it’s easy for you to say what you want, you’ve been away too long, this is not America. This was as difficult and insufferable a response to combat as having a conversation about facts and truth with a MAGA or QAnon supporter.
A major part of the problem is Bangladesh’s post-independence story itself. In whatever form Bangladesh was a democratic people’s republic at its emergence and in its newborn stages, that memory is long gone. It was stamped out first by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with his BAKSAL debacle, destruction of a free press, and setting in motion the highly undemocratic one-party precedent.
As someone who was born five years after independence, in my lifetime alone, there have only been one-party regimes, another assassination of a president, another military coup and regime, and the so-called Battle of Begums, down to the present moment. Nothing that can be called “free” has been known to Bangladeshis — from elections to expression to peaceful protest — as ever being their constitutional right.
The only assured freedom was to parrot the ruling party’s line, its insipid polemics steeped in hagiographic trite, its history of erasure, its worshipping at the feet of its figures, and gratefully paying the price of suppressed civil liberties in exchange for “economic progress,” a progress very clearly benefitting some and passing over others.
This downward spiral has reached such nether levels that rising up from it feels like a second liberation, in Dr. Yunus’ words.
But how will we use this new beginning? It’s easy to rejoice the fall of an autocrat, to expose their dirty laundry, slap them with charges of corruption and murder once they’re gone. If they’re not held to the same standards while they’re in power, while they’re running amok with their crimes, what’s the point? Is holding power accountable always going to be an after-the-fact template for Bangladesh?
And will those elites and intellectuals, who have thrown their support overtly behind the student protests, crawl back into their quaking safe spaces if the next administration reverts to autocratic business as usual? Will the intellectual class of the coming years bear themselves with more integrity than their predecessors, or take a page from their playbook and quietly protect their precious reputations and positions?
I understand people’s real and genuine fear for their safety and the safety of their loved ones. I understand the trauma of having only known corruption, fear, and threats to one’s life when it comes to their government. One after another, Bangladeshi heads of state have given their citizens no opportunity of knowing otherwise.
If anything, they’ve outdone each other with increasingly repressive and violent measures. And they’ve gotten away with it because no united voice able to muster the power to stand up to them dared defy them — until it was convenient. If, in this newly liberated Bangladesh, this one fundamental change doesn’t happen, isn’t forced into being, we’ll be waiting again for the fall of yet another tyrant and then make new pledges to do better.
Autocrats and fascists are not natural phenomena. They are not inevitable or unstoppable, to be expected and accepted like laws of nature. They’re human-made, put in place and motion by human actions and inaction. People allow their rise and enable their existence. Only people can take the fight to them. It’s when they fight the fight that matters in the end.
Bangladesh’s intellectual life suffered irreplaceable losses due to the Pakistan army’s genocide in 1971. The following generations didn’t step up with a fraction of their courage in the face of injustices, this time carried out by their own government.
Their continued dereliction as keepers and protectors of knowledge and enlightenment has led them so far astray that somewhere along the way, they stopped completely being intellectuals in all but name and became shills to power. They don’t deserve to claim or carry the torch of intellectual pursuit. Their actions and (mis)deeds have richly demonstrated and go on demonstrating what they’d much rather uphold.
