Politics -- here and over there

And let no one miss either the point that it was precisely a hundred years ago that the All-India Muslim League was given shape in Dhaka, a political move that was to have pretty negative consequences, not only for the whole of India, but, and especially, for Bengal as well.

Overall, the impact of Muslim League politics on the psyche of Bengali Muslims was terrible, a malady which not many who form part of the independent People's Republic of Bangladesh are yet to turn their backs on. History, it cannot but be acknowledged, has been harsh to Bengalis on both sides of the border. It is in light of that harshness that one must observe the manner in which life and society have evolved, or regressed, in West Bengal and Bangladesh in these last many decades.

But by far the general impression, one that we cannot quite ignore or dismiss out of hand, made by the process of historical movement in Bengal (and we refer to it from the perspective of history) is that West Bengal today happens to epitomize all, or nearly all, that we in Bangladesh once struggled for in the 1960s and then fought for in the early 1970s.

No, we do not mean that struggle in the sense of a movement for political sovereignty. We mean, fundamentally, the sustained movement that East Bengal put up more than four decades ago for the creation of a secular entity in Bangladesh. This new electoral triumph of the Left Front in West Bengal somehow puts paid to our own pretensions to a secular political framework.

In the twenty-nine years in which the communists and their allies have governed West Bengal, secularism has increasingly defined the attitude of the Bengalis inhabiting the state. That sort of reality, unfortunately, has been conspicuous by its absence in Bangladesh. But we did begin well, surely. The entire course of the movement for regional autonomy in the 1960s followed by the armed struggle for independence from Pakistan was based on the principle that Bengali culture, purely Bengali politics, would serve as the underpinning of life in this part of the world.

Indeed, the emergence of the free state of Bangladesh in December 1971 was clear proof of the maturity the Bengali in the eastern half of divided Bengal had arrived at. The Muslim Bengali, without in any way damaging his religiosity or clipping away at it, readily accepted the thought that the province he had transformed into a country would be a Bengali state, meaning a democratic structure with the very necessary principle of secularism serving as its ethos.

While East Bengalis suffered through the inhumanity of the Pakistan army and yet moved on to create their secular state, West Bengal struggled to free itself of the Naxalite shadows that had come across its skies. At the same time, the communists waged a sustained, long struggle to wrest control of the state from the Congress as it was led by Siddhartha Shankar Ray.

And then something terrible happened. The Bengalis of Bangladesh simply fell back, or faltered, somewhere along the way. What they had never imagined would come to pass actually happened. Their soldiers killed their own founder-president and the very leaders who had shaped and led the War of Liberation.

Between 1975 and 1977, the independent state of Bangladesh took a swift slide into the past. Secular Bengali nationalism was put out to pasture by authoritarian decrees and politics mutated into the silhouette of a Pakistani past. Democracy was placed in the straitjacket of a general's uniform. MG Tawab, the air force officer brought in from his adopted home in Germany, was utilized as a hint of the future. He presided over a conference of clerics that clearly intended to redefine Bangladesh as a Muslim state. And thus was the first disturbing move toward supplanting Bengali nationalism with "Bangladeshi nationalism" taken.

And even as Bangladesh went through such manifest brutality, West Bengal was charting a wholly different course altogether. In 1977, its leftists, having cohabited with others in government for quite a while, finally seized control of the state through winning the elections.

In Bangladesh, as the Awami League stayed busy warding off the blows inflicted on it by a military regime and its rightwing, pro-Pakistan hangers-on, the Left lay paralysed. The segment of it that had its politics tuned in to the Beijing antenna, however, quickly linked up with the Zia regime and so accelerated the decline of the state.

The tragedy for the Bengalis of Bangladesh is that while their state has slowly but surely retreated into a cocoon, certainly of a communal variety, the Bengalis of West Bengal have constantly reasserted themselves in the matter of building a properly democratic political structure. If communal riots have upset political wagons in the rest of India, the Left Front in West Bengal has made sure that on its watch Bengalis did not collapse into religious or sectarian disorder.

In Bangladesh, General Zia sent secularism packing and then filled the space thus made glaringly empty with invocations to Allah. General Ershad carried the whole thing a few more absurd steps further, through decreeing that the religion of the state of Bangladesh would be Islam. It was a curious condition. While West Bengal gained in health and political wisdom, Bangladesh was being systematically pushed into a condition of darkness.

Healthy enervation set in. What Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had started out doing for Bangladesh, through promoting secularism and socialism, was actually being done in earnest in West Bengal by Jyoti Basu. The people of West Bengal were noticeably giving short shrift to political leaders and workers outside the Left.

In Bangladesh, it was the enemies of independence, the collaborators of the Pakistan army, who were taking over nearly every area of politics and administration. In these decades since 1975, or 1977 (it depends on how you look at the whole idea), the Left Front in West Bengal has carried out extensive land reforms, has expanded the network of statewide education, has disciplined Calcutta in the civic sense of the meaning.

In Bangladesh, those who have benefited from the assassinations of 1975 have persistently divided the country right down the middle, have confused people with their spurious brands of politics and have simply handed over the economy to the robber barons.

Of course, West Bengal's leftists have restructured their economic programs to inject pragmatism in their politics. Jyoti Basu, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, and Asim Dasgupta have solicited foreign investment without undermining their core socialistic principles.

Contrast that with Bangladesh. The quality of political leadership has been embarrassingly low, non-government organisations have claimed increasingly bigger shares of the cake and foreigners have found endless opportunities to meddle in the nation's politics.

The World Bank and the IMF have never called up the courage to tell the Left Front government what it must do as an administration; in Bangladesh, these two representatives of Western interests are everywhere in the corridors of power, have unlimited access to policy making. Ask the finance minister of this independent country.

It is intriguing how divergent the two Bengals have been in the operation of politics. In Calcutta, politics has remained, despite the structural changes to the economy, in the hands of the political classes -- and they extend from the grassroots to the highest level of power. In Dhaka, with as much as eighty four per cent of membership in the Jatiyo Sangsad in the hands of businessmen (and the major political parties happily throwing around nominations at hefty prices), politics has slipped into the clutches of a class that knows not the high calling of the profession. Parliament, predictably, is no more the focus of governance.

In Jyoti Basu, Buddhadev Bhattacharjee, and the recently expired Anil Biswas, West Bengal has had the very enviable good fortune of being led by the politically savvy and idealistic. In Bangladesh, apart from the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and, twenty-one years after his assassination, that of his daughter, politics has been in free fall. The mediocrity and incompetence all around us say it all.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.