FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (1)

[kalu_miah]

Ok, English is not one of his strong points, numerous spelling and grammar mistakes, but the content shows what educated Bangladeshi's are thinking today:

FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (1) |

FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (1)



Dr. M. Abdul Mu’min Chowdhury: The Challenge

Since its birth Bangladesh has to contend with the debilitating effects of its tangled birth midwife by India. We have `For thirty years looked for the independence’ and after forty-three years we are faced with the prospect of observing its `Sradha-Shanti’ rite! It is not an altogether unexpected turn.

Before the December War broke out General Ataul Ghani Osmany and some of his leading officers started dreading about the midwife’s design. Of the officers, Major M.A. Jalil, became the first political prisoner of the country he had fought for. His `crime’ was that he had shown the guts of a true patriot and demanded that the Indian army be stopped from taking away arms and ammunitions left behind by the Pakistan army and industrial and commercial assets owned by the Urdu speaking Muslim settlers. This he did only a day after the war had ended. A fortnight later he found himself in Indian captivity and the provisional Bangladesh government staring condignly at it. Even after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman put Tajuddin on the wayside and became prime minister, he could not keep Jalil in the army.

Mujib might have accepted Indian aid for getting minority votes, marshalling the pro-Indian lobbies’ support and financing his political campaign. Nonetheless, he was not ready to be an Indian stooge. Reflecting the deep seated `sultanic tradition’ of Muslim high politics, he had thought that once in power he would be his own master. Delhi out played him. He learnt the fooly of his recklessness at his own as well as the nation’s cost. The time has come for us to decide whether we should bartar away our national existence by sheepishly meeting Delhi’s ever increasing hauty demands or not. Delaying this crucial decision might result in servitude.

Unless we have succumbed to the latter-day myths spun by the Indians and their Bangladeshi fifth column, the `adharja’s of the Rig-Vedicparlance, it is important to understand that both Mujib and Ziaur Rahman have tried their best to get the country out of Delhi’s boa’s snake-noose; alas, without much success.

They had a country which was deemed `destined to be a client state of India’ because of its unexampled geopolitical handicap by no less a person than Dr Runaq Jahan, one of our distinguished political scientists and a well-known admirer of Mujib. To make it worse, the hapless new state was also laden with a 25-year treaty making India its sole pivot and a constitution prescribing what should be its polity’s legitimating and organizing principles. On top of all that, the entrapped state was left with, to borrow the words of Dr Talukdar Maniruzzam, another distinguished political scientist of the country, a `virtually disarmed army’. Because of many such constraints both Mujib and Zia did not, perhaps could not, undertake the bold move needed to free the country from Delhi’s boa’s snake-noose in a few, if not a single, grand sweeps and let it have an unencumbered re-start. Instead, in their politician’s piecemeal approach, they tried to do it in stages over an undefined time frame. Among their successors those who recognised such a need also failed for the very same reason. Perhaps, in their judgement both internal and external situations of the country were not condusive for such a risky endeavour.

They might have a point. Nevertheless, that the country could not shake off Delhi’s boa’s snake-noose; instead afforded the incorrigible enemy time and scope to stealthily continue with his subversion through the fifth column can hardly be denied. Remember the Reg Vedic native female terrible with a dog-musk, called Sarama? That turncoat was famous for extracting tributes, with dire threats, from her own people for her new master, Indra the Aryan conqueror. For her treachery Sarama became known to her folks as `Indra’s Bitch’. Those who know her story or have read Noami Klein’s The Shock Doctrine would find Delhi’s hedgemons and their Bangladeshi female trrible’s stridency and brazen use of force an incontestible proof of the undeniable fact referred to above. Without accusing anyone, we all need to acknowledge this bare fact.

Delhi’s hegemons did not have to tax their treasury for maintaining their fifth column, or `the suckers’ as Mujib himself described them. A portion of the huge gains out of the cross border smuggling, currently worth about eight to nine billion US dollar per annum, is sufficient for this. Like the East India Company before them, these hegemons are frying the oily `Koi’ fish in its own oil.

Now, having our prime minister in power, thanks to an interim puppet government brought about by, and a fraudulent election affected with the help of, a small coterie of corrupt and misguided senior officers of the Bangladesh army, the country has reached a stage where its patriotic fighters might have to come forward to retrieve and recover it or else face a slow but eventual sikkimisation in not too distant a future.

To ignore any of these will, in effect, amount to conniving in the destruction of our nation, a plain and simple act of treason. The staged BDR mutiny was not only aimed at bringing the army under the control of the adharjas and making the porous border even more porous with the help of BGB, the substitute of BDR, but also whenever necessary use them as our Priyodarsini’s defacto Rakkhi Bahini, as is the case right now! Eviction of her from power will not make the state institutions free of their adharja woodworms. Even if it does, there is no gurantee that these institutions will remain impenetrable.

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The matter of fighting is better left to those who know how to plan, organize and carry it out. It is better for old haggards like this correspondent not to get involved in this. However, even if the fighers could make the enemy to retreat, he would neither vanish, nor desist from his hegemonic machinations. To put it in another way, irrespective of whether it has to be retrived by our patriotic fighters or not, the country would need to go on countering Delhi’s hegemons perpetuallyand making its house impenetrable. There is no alternative. This being the case, it is only prudent that we start thinking about these issues as well now. We shall have to make advance preparations and be pro-active.

How to Counter a Hegemon: Lesson from History

History offers two grand strategies for countering a hegemonic power. The first is to reconstruct the geopolitical environments through war and revolution. It requires militarization of society and the use of mobilized people to attack and transform the environment. Its execution has taken forms of aggression and conquest (Germany and Japan from 1931 to 1945), support for world revolution (Soviet Union), and fomenting people’s wars (China and Cuba) etc.

While the sheer size of the enemy might rule out aggression and conquest in our case, there is no such compelling prohibitive reason in regard to something similar to the other two forms. With its rebellious North East and East-Central tribal belt as well as disaffected Dalits, India is especially rife for such a strategy; provided we are able to secure the country from the enemy’s subversion as well as aggression first. Otherwise we shall end up in the same fiasco which we have recently seen, letting ourselves and others down. In pursuing such a policy we need not be alone; a few other countries are already at it. A coordinated effort together with them is likely to be more productive.

The second strategy is to empower and embolden the country economically. Its execution has also taken different forms: drive to imitate the technological innovations of the economically advanced countries (Japan’s state guided industrialization from 1868 to the 1930s and again from 1949 onward) and state’s use of tariffs to shelter its own economy from the penetrative power of stronger national economies (USA during the 19th and early 20th centuries and West Germany after Germany’s defeat in WWII and China in post-Mao era in the light of the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and economist Friedrich List.)

Irrespective of form, this strategy requires state guidance of the economy, cartelization, and the strategic allocation of industrial finance. However, unless implemented with due care and diligence, and through nationalist entrepreneurs it might end up making development itself the main legitimating and organizing principle of society, replacing or displacing democratic representation, tradition or other set of political or cultural principle and turning the state into what the cabal of globalist financier elite euphemistically call ‘developmental state’ under cutting the country’s cohesion, sovereign purpose and sovereignty. The so-called `connectivity’, `globalization’ and `free-trade’ are not free of hegemonic and developmental-state’s traps. We need to be cautious about them. In fact we have already got quite a bit entrapped and we need to get out of them fast before it is too late. The thirty odd treaties our Lendup Dorjini has quietely entered with Delhi will have to be thoroughly reexamined in public and must not be approved without free vote in the parliament. It will be adviseable for our patriotic leadership to give this promise to the nation.

House Needs Putting in Order First

However, whether we emulate any forms of the two historically validated strategies or tailor-made them to meet our particular needs, we shall also have to put our house in order. Make it rock-solid from within and impenetrable from outside by the hostile enemy. Above all, make our entire citizenry battle ready for pursuing our sovereign ambitions.

For this, we shall have to be truly ourselves, not a pack of hunting dog hounding and killing our own people or a monkey force putting fire in our own house at the service of our master–in-waiting. Indeed, civic education and eradication of the fifth column should be a high priority. Discouraging the current crops and denying the future ones the breeding ground should be part of our security and defence strategy and all our state institutions and system of governance would have to be reshaped with this ongoing need in mind. We must not gloss over the cardinal truth that the security and defence need of the nation and the country comes before every other need. From now on we should prepare public opinion.

(to be continued)

 

[kalu_miah]

This section is better, not as many errors as the previous one. I get the feeling that they were typo's or not edited for errors. The writer is definitely well read and has good grasp of our regional history:

FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (2)



Dr. M. Abdul Mu’min Chowdhury: We Must Not Forget

In putting the security and defence need ahead of every other need, it is important to keep in mind two other salient facts. While without amity and accord among the citizenry a strong state cannot be built, by denying or papering over a nation-state’s nation’s self-identity a strong and stable state cannot even be contemplated.

Ours is a Muslim nation-state. It is not just a mere territorial legatee of East Pakistan, its national self or `we’ as well. Only scoundrels and credulous adharjas can say that a centuries’ old nation has altered itself in less than 25 years! Many of his acolytes may not know it, has Mujib been alive, despite being artfully laden with the title of Bangabandhu and Thousand Years’ Greatest Bengali and dabbed with the ideological colour of linguistic nationalism, secularism and socialism by the enemy and its Bangladeshi adharja orderlies, he would have been the first to confirm that to the last he had remained an unreconstructed Muslim nationalist `Bangal’ and anti-socialist free-marketer. In fact, to underscore the territorial denotation of the Muslim nation of Bangladesh, in official papers he used `Bengalee’ (inhabitant of Bangla) rather than `Bengali’ (Bengali speaking), as noted, among others, by Dr Runaq Jahan. Similarly Prof. Rehman Sobhan, a close adviser of Mujib, is crystal clear as to what Mujib and his advisers thought about the identity of the Bangladeshi nation. Indeed, defying India it was Mujib who sought ties beyond Indo-Soviet block from the very day of his return from Pakistan and later took us into the OIC, representing the civilization ‘we’ of all the Muslim nation-states. After all these, if doubters persist they might hear Muhammad Asafuddolla and/or read J.N. Dixit to rediscover the true Mujib. New Delhi’s Brahmanic rulers all along knew this unvarnished Mujib but have used their propagandists to portray him differently to beguile our simpletons. Lest readers find this chicanery unbelievable, they might read India’s Brahmanic rulers diplomatic ved – Kautilay’s Arthashastra and learn more about their meme, mind, and mien. Indeed, educating about their sly ploys and practices should be part of our civic education. The `theft’ of our language and history should also be included in the curriculum of our civic education.

Hearing the fact that Bangladesh is the true legatee of East Pakistan in terms of its nation’s territorial denotata and connotative meaning, no one should think that this identity is a construct of Muhammed Ali Jinnah or the Muslim League. From the territorial perspective East Pakistan-cum-Bangladesh is similar to the Muslim majority East Bengal of the British Indian province of East Bengal and Assam created a year before the creation of Muslim League. This area’s association with the Muslim nation goes back to at least the beginning of the 13th century CE, if not before. Although during the Muslim rule from Bango the Bengalee dominion had its name and territorial extension up to the borders of Bihar and Odisha, the distinctive ethnic and linguistic characteristics as well as historical memories of the people of ancient Bango were not entirely erased. At least from the time Bengal’s extended part covering most of the present-day Indian province of West Bengal or former Radha or Rhar became a stronghold of Brahmanism under the Imperial Gupta dynasty (4th-6th centuries CE) Bango’s sense of distinctiveness became more pronounced. Later the establishment of Muslim dominion at the behest and backing of the oppressed Buddhists and its unexampled economic success, acceptance of Islam by numerous Buddhists and the transformation of ancient Bango or East Bengal into a Muslim stronghold on the one hand and on the other the adherents of Brahmanism’s tacit disapproval of Muslim rule, the rise of the Baishnab movement with its epicentre in West Bengal, its Brahman leaders’ creation of an anti-Muslim rule nationalist coalition of all pro-Brahmanicsampradyas or sects under the rubric of Hinddu-Dharma in the 16thcentury and in the mid-18th century the `Hindu’ leadership’s success in supplanting Muslim rule in the then Subha Bangla through the preditor-entrepreneurs of East India Company further sharpened the age old distinctiveness of East and West Bengal. Throughout most of the 19thcentury the Muslims of the subcontinent fought for independence under the banner of Tariqa-i-Muhammadia. In this armed struggle the East Bengalee Muslims were most preponderant. It was their legatees who in the early 20th century formed the Muslim League at Dhaka. Thus, not only through the present day Bangladesh the age-old `two-nationhood’ of the `Hindus’ and Muslims of Bengal has remained in force, the pre-Muslim distinctiveness between the old Bango’s `Bangals’ and the extended Bengal’s `Ghotis’, as attested by J.N. Dixit, has also stayed pulsating.

Although the contrasting `other’ of the Hinduism’s `we’ is none other than the Muslims, the `Hindu’ nationalists of the subcontinent including those of Bengal adopted a policy stance to deny the separate Muslim nationhood. Their argument is that the Indian Muslims are the progenies of the `forced Hindu converts’ to Islam; hence their national identity continues to be `Hindu’. According to Pandit Nehru’s concoction 98% of Bengalee Muslims belong to this type of Hindu nationals. However, unlike his pure Aryan pedigree their’s is of lowly Namasudra untouchable bloodline. Even if one disregards this strange argument, borrowed from the German racists, which insists that even if one forsakes one’s religion and samaj, they cannot forsake their primordial ties of ‘soil and blood’, the lack of its historicity can hardly be ignored. It is true that before the establishment of Muslim suzereignty the entire area of later-day Bengal including Bongo or later-day East Bengal was under Brahmanic rule. But it is also a fact that the subjects were overwhelmingly Buddhists. The Buddhists were certainly not a `rebel’ sect of Brahmanism as the later-day `Hindu’ nationalists want us to believe. It is the Buddhists who were the local props of Muslim dominion and the main source of the inflation of both Muslim and `Hindu’ numbers. By turning to the writings of English sociological historian James Wise and Bengalee `Hindu’ historian Romeshchandra Majumdar anyone can realise the extent of the Indian hegemons’ `theft of history’ in this respect.

To get out of all such traps, first and foremost we need to come to grips with the essence and significance as well as the challenge of being a Muslim nation within the context of our geopolitical environment. A nation is a solidarity brought about and sustained by its members’ sensitivity about their distinctiveness from other peoples with whom they have transactional relationships. Objective factors such as language and domicile are not the essential component of nationhood, though in certain cases they serve as its adjunct features. In other words, the sense of `our’ collective distinctiveness from ‘others’ involved in transactional relationships with ‘us’, `our’ conflict of interest with `them’ engendered by this sense of collective distinctiveness and the memories of such conflicts are the foundational bedrock of a nation. This subjective definition of nation handed down to us by, among others, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Rennan and Max Weber has remained unsurpassable.

This human solidarity manifested in a nation is a sub `we’ of the larger `we’ of a civilization, the biggest form of human solidarity known to history. This larger `we’ can, as history of many civilizations including West European, Islamic and Brahmanic civilizations have underscored, either subsume all national `we’s within an `universal state’ of its own or over arch the national `we’s forming their own nation-states. Movement between these two poles is not unidirectional; that is, reversible. The European Union is an example of this reversibility.

Two cognate civilizations can also converge. Civilizations with proselytizing creed can draw peoples from other civilizations through conversion. India’s Brahmanic civilization is unique in the sense that it does not admit the prospect of either convergence or conversion. Its only tool for acquiring numerical strength is absorption of the enslaved as untouchables under its caste pyramid, with small Brahman elite calling the shot from its top.

That such a social pyramid can never be solid has not gone remiss with the intellectually adroit Brahman supervisors of the edifice and out of this sense of vulnerability they have always remained alert and united in their hegemonic intent. Because of this for past three to two and half millenniums they have mandated `world conquest’ as the `highest duty’ of their rulers. It is no surprise that while Delhi’s hegemons want to enslave the Muslims of Bangladesh and turn them in to untouchables, likewise they also like to repress the Indian Muslims, indigenous tribals and untouchables to the abject level of the Dalits.

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This is why Rabindranath Tagore wrote Bharat-Tirtha and his ideological adept and anointed Mahathma (great-soul, leader of shadu-warriors), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi divined that Indian independence would be meaningless unless `Hinduism’ is able to play the role of an ocean and Islam, Christianity etc. are made to perform the function of self-dissolving rivers in augmenting the Brahmanic Ocean. The leaders of independent India have not forgotten that sovereign purpose of theirs. Unlike ours, one cannot find faults with their perseverance. Seemingly they have succeeded making a substantive section of Bangladeshi Muslims, including Mujib’s daughter keen to drawn their Muslim nation into the India’s Brahmanic Ocean. Without denying the fact that there are sociological reasons behind their suicidal madeness, it has also to be said that if the suckers are denied their gluttony, they will die out in their vines. If their roots are also dugged out there will be no `hunting hounds’ left. Talking about suckers and hounds it is worth recollecting that it is gluttony which made dog the first domesticated animal out of a species of ferocious hunting animal, the wolf.

Remember Mujib’s Six-Points. It wanted two currencies in one Pakistan for overcoming inter-wing disparity. Now his daughter, according to her finance minister, has asked Delhi to have one single currency for both India and Bangladesh! Not to speak of public consultation, there has not been a single report of its discussion in and approval by either the parliament or the cabinet. Few can call it anything other than a gross affront to the principles and practices of democracy. But its intent and implications go beyond the infidelity to democracy. Consider this fact. The EU is an ambodiment of the West European civilization’s deep seated urge to recreate its universal state. Yet EU members states have spent many years in public discussions, parliamentary debates, referrenda and inter-governmental negotiations before most of them, not all, were able to reach an agreement to have convertible common currency, not to speak of a single currency. Now mark the fact that the prime minister of Bangladesh is seeking a single currency between two nation- states belonging to two antithetical nations and civilizations, and that too, secretly in violation of not only of democratic norms but even her much adorned made-in-Delhi constitution. Unless stark mad, which she is not, her infidelity to both her national and civilisational `we’s is unique.

Her brazen misuse of a corrupt section of the judiciary, civil service, and security agencies and use of torture, forced disappearance and killing as tools of coercion are signs to make an unyielding majority to follow her in meeting the requirement of the non-`Hindu’ national self-drowning scheme of Tagore and Gandhi. Her destination is the same like that of the Lendup Dorji of Sikkim. But unlike Lendup Dorji, she is walking up-stream in the direction of Ganga-Sagar! And here lies her and her Indian patrons’ problem. A great majority of this Muslim nation will die in resisting rather than allowing this national suicide. Whatever one may think at this moment in time, with times this will become increasingly obvious and the hegemons will realise that their celebration for having `the revenge of thousand years’ was misplaced and has boomeryang into another thousand years `oppressive time’ in `komotbratha’ (survival in the manner of the tortoise).

Have they and their canine wagtails read the fundamental process of Islamic history encapsulated in Ernest Gellner’s `Pendulum Theory of Islamic History’ which brilliantly predicts the response of a Muslim nation faced with existential threat, they would have desisted from their pipe-dream. In case some readers are not familiar with it, let me give its gist. When existential threat starts staring at their face, almost instinctively the faithful start correcting their errors and lapses in the light of the Quran and Sunnah on the one hand and set out to repulse the enemy on the other! Make no mistake, the hitherto sloth Muslim nation of Bangladesh have awaken and InshAllah they will prevail.

To stop future recurrence of similar treason against our Muslim nation we shall have to stop the traitors, deal with the causes and ways and means of their treachery. For this urgent task we shall require a `Truth Commission’. In addition to implementing its findings, they should also be instiled in our nation’s historical memory, the rock bed of nationhood. All nations strive to keep the memories of their historical experience alive and we should also be pro-active in this regard. For this, there must be a national effort to recover out `stolen’ history and make them part of our public education.

The Muslim nation-state of ours cannot be built and expected to last and flourish by papering over its nation’s identity, falsifying its history, delegitimatizing its tradition, values and norms, and denying it its inalienable right to pursue its enlightened self-interest through its state. Our leaders can ill afford to ignore the saliency of this fundamental truth.

Delhi made us to have secular linguistic nationalism as well as secularism itself as our mandatory state ideologies in order to de-Islamize us. Has Hasina and her cohorts’ jingo for linguistic Bengali nationalism been genuine, they would have called upon Indian Bengali speakers of Assam, Bihar, Tripura, and West Bengal to join Bangladesh. In the past Maulana Bhasani publicly and Mujib privately gave such call with no avail. That there is no prospect of their changing their mind, to paraphrase West Bengal’ longest service chief minister Joyti Basu, `in 500 years’ is known to our leading lights of Bengali nationalism. They are mis-selling their make-belief ware to people who have been accustomed to using their domicilary identity since before Muslim suzernity. Our patriotic people need to be made aware of this fraud.

Now secularism and its mordernism! It is a unique by-product of the crisis that the West European civilisation faced in the wake of the disarray of its Holy Roman Empire and has no intrinsic connection with modernization. A comparison between `religious’ USA with `secular Europe’, especially the latter’s archetype France, should be an eye opener for our `Doubting Toms’. Secularism became a ‘modern superstition’, in the words of Latin American diplomat and political thinker Octovia Paz, thanks to West European imperial ascendancy and it intellectual apologetics, the `Social Darwinism’ and `Theory of Progress’. A section of Western educated colonial elite took to it in imitation of their colonial masters to show that they too, could be like them. And in time a section of aspiring intellectuals also allowed their head to be `colonised’, as noted by the Palestinean scholar Edward Said. Our faith is theocentric and unlike Western Europe our polity has never been theocratic. Nor any Muslim ruler in history has ever demanded that his subjects should join him in his faith, as the rulers of West European states have, for example, commanded their respective subjects under the Treaty of Westphalia. Moreover, a cursory look at all the Muslim nation-states will underscore the futility of attempt at implanting such `modern supersition’, whether crafted from within or without. Add to this the huge value of Islam as a `social capital’ of which a renewed appreciation is growing even the secular West. Besides, a forthright Muslim nation cannot wear the secularist mask and take recourse to the sly, morally and politically corrupt and corrupting device of democratic majoritarianism either. More importantly, being an isolated `Muslim Island’ outpost in a treacherous Brahmanic Sea, for Bangladesh it is no less than a psychedelic drug to induce our nation to commit economic, linguistic, cultural, and political suicide.

We Bangals may blissfully be unaware of the fact that Rabindranath changed the Bengali rendition of culture from krishti (meaning cultivation of higher values and taste) to sanskriti (meaning a way of life based on Brahmanic sanskar or rites and rituals) and got his Pandit, Haricharan Bandhapadhya to compile another prescriptive Bengali dictionary to bolster the same Brahmanic conceptual clout on us as well as the untouchables of India. It was meant to help further what Indian sociologists call `sanskritization’, that is, the process of reinvigorating the `great tradition’ of Brahmanism enshrined in their Sanskrit texts. The Brahmanic ruling elite of India have made it a constitution obligation to `enrich’ all languages of the country with the help of Sanskrit in their ‘Gurudev’s footsteps. No wonder the Indian sociologists have identified sanskritization as being the most dominant social process of their polity. That it is so, can be seen from the very fact that the `Hindu suprimatist’ BJP is replacing the make-belief secularist Congress as the govering front of the Brahmanic India.

(to be continued)

 

[kalu_miah]

FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (3) |

FOR A SAFE AND SECURED BANGLADESH- (3)



Dr. M. Abdul Mu’min Chowdhury: Historically speaking, this drive towards sanskritisation had been at work in Bengal since the time of Imperial Guptas, progressing under the Brahman installed Buddhist Pals and their Brahmanic successors the Sens. In spite of the murderous suppression by the Sen, under Muslim rule the native language and literature had a new lease of life. After about three centuries intermission, the old Brahmanic drive to sanskritise was revived with fresh zeal, thanks to the Baishnav movement, with a new twist. While writing their own religious instructions in Sanskrit, the Brahman leaders of the Baishnab movement, centred in West Bengal, used Bengali language, with Brahmi script invoking Brahmanic deities, as the vehicle of their mass propaganda. Thereafter, during Mughal rule, they forged an anti-Muslim alliance of various pro-Brahmanic religious communities by giving equal validity to each other’s deities, rites and rituals under the rubric of Hindu-Dharma. In the mid-eighteenth century, when ours was the most prosperous land of the world, the leaders of this nationalist cult, led by Maharaja Krishnachandra of Nadia, were instrumental in ushering in the British in Subah Bangla, that is, the present day Bangladesh, Indian provinces of West Bengal, Bihar and Odhisa. In the early 19th century together with their chosen new rulers the Brahmanic elite rewrote Bengal’s history, with `oppressive Muslim rule’ as its central theme and displaced 90% of the extant Bengali language, as noted by George Abraham Grierson, which had grown with active Muslim contribution with a new print language, forged at East India Company’s Fort William College in Kolkata, based on Sanskrit words and idioms and by deriding the extent Muslim Bengali literature as `literature from under the Banian Tree’ made it unworthy of reading. Those who might think it untrue, may read Nandita Ghosh, a West Bengalee research scholar based in Britain.

During the Pakistan movement our leaders were not only committed to accept Urdu as the lingua franca of the new nation-state of the Indian Muslims but also to reform Bengal’s sanskritised print language in line with East Bengal’s colloquial Muslim speeches. The uninformed and the beguiled may not know it, the language movement was the Indian sponsored counter drive for retaining the patently anti-Islamic script symbolising Brahmanic deities, the de-Islamising sanskritised Suddha-Bangla and the influence of Kolkata’s Brahmanic literature. Anyone familiar with the instrumentality of the Bhagavat-Gita and Baishnabism’s psychedelic cult of Krishna-Prem will recognise the artfulness of our Okkar-Pujaris (Script Worshippers) and Matribhasa-Premiks (Lovers of Mother Goddess’s Language). Our foolhardy may not know that in the Brahmanic idiom Matri-Bhasa is not Mayer-Joban or Mother-Tongue; it is the language of their Mother Goddess, Durga or Kali. If thesePujaris and Premiks had any commitment to the people of Bangladesh and their identity and independence they would have acted in the footsteps of Noah Webster of America and Ivar Andreas Aasen of Norway. If the independent America’s WASPs could feel the need to have a distinctive English of their own, with by far the most pronounced national need of ours should we not also get ourselves out of this treacherous anti-Islamic and anti-people trap? Our future leadership must give a public commitment to end the current parody of the feigned Okkar-Pujaris and Matribhasa-Premiks and lead and facilitate the drive to have a distinctive Bengali language of our own.

Moreover, we must also stop the lionization of anyone who has crossed the border as Freedom Fighter including the traitors of the so-called Mujib Bahini trained by RAW, not to mention the post Bangladesh frauds, the so-called 16thDivision. To put it in another way, anyone, dead or alive, other than those who had taken arms in protest of Pakistani Army’s crack-down and not part of Indian conspiratorial ploy to enslave our Muslim nation then and/or later should be debarred from any such honour and recognition. Furthermore, Bangladesh should ask Pakistan to join it in forming Historical Truth Commission of competent historians from brotherly Muslim countries to determine the treachery and war crimes from either side and to ensure justice and reparations to the victims. Even if Pakistan declines the call, Bagladesh must go ahead with this task. It would save us from the Indian and their fifth column’s histrionics and enhance the historicity of our nation-state.

A Fresh Start

Attending to all these would be necessary if we are serious about putting our nation at its own keel and giving our nation-state a fresh start unencumbered by Indian snares. In this connection it is worth remembering that our 1972 constitution, which has off late been given a reincarnation in its original form, was actually given to us by India. The doubters might get the confirmation of it from Tajuddin’s disclosure in early January, 1972 to the effect that a draft has already been made and Mujib’s circulation of the draft to the existing political parties before the end of that month. The veracity of this could be found in the news reportage of the Bengali press of West Bengal and Bangladesh of the time. India doled out the draft with the maligned aim of keeping us ensnared and making our Muslim nation digestible. Presumably the only spanner Mujib and his Law Minister Dr Kamal Hussain were able to insert in it is the Section 1, which says that the territorial jurisdiction of Bangladesh would be same as that of East Pakistan. We cannot go on with this constitution; given its proven cat’s life, no amount of cut and paste would do. It must go in lock, stock and barrel.

It does not require any leap of imagination to anticipate one cardinal fact. That to the great majority of our patriots, their future ruler’s fidelity to their nation-state and seriousness to put it out of harm’s way would critically hinge on his or her readiness to rethink aloud about giving the country a fresh restart under a new constitution. If anyone is inclined to consider this proposition of fresh start under a new constitution outlandish, they should be reminded that the Republic of France has had five successive constitutions! Unlike France the Muslim nation-state of Bangladesh can do well under a constitution which affords the nation to pursue their sovereign ambitions and secure their state from the hegemonic power next door.

The emphasis laid earlier on freeing our Muslim nation from the trap of linguistic nationalism and secularism is not a call for converting Bangladesh into a full-blooded Islamic state where every aspect of its public life would be fashioned in the light of Shari‘a. While acknowledging that this might be the dearest wish of all devout Muslims, the knowledgeable realist among them would also admit that it has to be a distant dream. For, to reach that coveted position the Muslim nation states must have substantive sovereignty, renovate and redesign their desolate and dysfunctional public institutions afresh, educate the masses, train technical and managerial class, and remove their society’s structural impediments to it. To do all these, it will require another fifty to hundred years.

Thwarting Indian hegemony, affording substantive sovereignty to our nation-state and, thereby, empowering our Muslim nation to pursue its sovereign ambitions should be our goal. In this care should be taken that freeing the Muslim nation should not mean to, or felt by the non-Muslim nationalities to be at their cost. Like the great majority of nation-states of the world, 88% according to a 1973 survey, ours also have various minorities. Beside the question of equity and fair play, our own as well as other countries’ experience have also shown that it would be futile to deny these dual realities and expect rock-solid unity among all sections of a country’s citizenry. Fortunately, in the Islamic as well as in the non-Islamic traditions, including modern West European political tradition, constitutional devices are available to accommodate both without waylaying anyone’s cherish identity, faith, language and culture. While ensuring proportional representation in the governance, they all could be afford mandatory proportional public funding for looking after their special religious, linguistic and educational needs. This could be structured in line with Consociational Democracy or partnership of nation and nationalities and run through the rethought out territorial devolved structure of governance. This is also in line with our Prophet’s (peace be upon him) Charter of Medina and theOttoman Empire’s Millet system’s self-governance of religious communities.

The territorial devolved structure of governance could follow the classical Muslim administrative structure from which Bengal benefited so remarkably in the past. However, in keeping with the requirements of representative democracy, in every tier, with specific remits, the task of governance would be vested in peoples’ chosen representatives. At the state level an Executive Presidential form of government with obligatory proportional representation of minorities in the cabinet, accompanied with US type separate judicial and legislative organs could also be given serious consideration. To this a supreme council of state could be added to ensure the integrity of all organs and institutions of the states, including the press and political parties and efficient discharge of their respective tasks in so far as the nation-state’s security, defence and foreign relations are concerned.

For a Safe and Secured State

Wisdom dictates that there should not be any reticence in learning from others, including our enemies. In rectifying the design faults of our state institutions and setting up the state anew, especially in checkmating Delhi’s hegemons we may draw from their `Ved of Statecraft’, the Arthashastra a much needed holistic approach and many potentially useful tips. While considering the recommendations set out above, especially in operationalising them, Arthashastra‘s tips should also be considered. Obviously to do this many other aspects of our national realities will have to be considered and addressed and will thus require a major rethinking. Besides, such major changes cannot be rushed and will require due diligence in their implementation and a patient time frame to derive the requisite benefits. To be impatient is as bad as being in slumber. The patriots need to be both proactive and practical in this respect.

On Immediate Policy Undertakings

Meanwhile in view of the current state of ‘undeclared war’ on Bangladesh by New Delhi, our patriotic politicians and parties should immediately pledge to incorporate the following urgent tasks in their Election Manifestos. Since the enemy is already aware and knowledgeable of all of Bangladesh’s internal systems, structures, processes, policies and strategies, and are all the time analysing them at New Delhi’s South Block and Lodhi Road there is no need for any secrecy from the Bangladeshi side. Because nothing is secret to the Indians in this age of ‘insect size’ drones and outer space satellites eavesdropping, and not to mention their ‘fifth columnists’ inside Bangladesh! The Indians are at it too! Rather an ‘open source system’ of openness and fullest transparency with the Bangladeshi public will enable a truly patriotic government to achieve maximum political and strategic national consciousness of the population and thus secure committed and ‘knowledge-based’ mass patriotic participation to counter all India’s hegemonic designs and stratagems and thus continuously defeat them. Because of the geological and geographical position and location of Bangladesh vis-a-vis India; the ‘Kautilyan war of attrition’ will be never ending. Thus Bangladesh’s open acknowledgement of having to eternally fight the ‘fog of war’ will be its own ‘asymmetrical response’ to India’s much greater cunning, resources and forces.

To this end, our patriotic government’s immediate tasks would be :

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1) Politically educate the mass population of Bangladesh as to the stratagems and policies of India.

2) Politically educate the party activists and leaderships of all the patriotic political parties as to the stratagems and policies of India.

3) Establishing policy think tanks and research institutes to continuously assess Indian policy formulations and their impacts upon Bangladesh.

4) Initiate and publicly publish annual, three yearly and five yearly impact assessment of Bangladesh’s counter policies and counter measures to the policies and stratagems of India.

5) Have a compulsory full 100 marks subject, with examinations, on understanding ‘Indian Kautilyan policies and strategies’ in the National Defence & Staff College, Police Training Academy, Foreign Service Academy, Civil Service Academy, Bangladesh Border Guards Academy, and in the international relations, political science, sociology and history departments of all the state and private universities, quomi and alia madrassas of Bangladesh.

This way over a period of next 5 years a huge cadre of trained ‘Kautilyanologists’ (like the Kreminologists of the Cold War period) will emerge, in all the sectors of Bangladesh, and thus ‘Kautilya-proof all Bangladesh’s domestic and foreign policies’.

6) Build up an open ‘all weather’ strategic, defence and sustainable economic and cultural relationship with China.

7) Urgently revamp, if necessary with help and assistance from China and other friend and allies, the Counter-Intelligence and Counter-Surveillance Departments in DGFI, NSI and Special Branch and immediately flush out all the adhorja ‘fifth columnists’ traitors who have been infiltrated into the core defence and security apparatuses of Bangladesh.

8) Similarly undertake Counter-Intelligence and Counter-Surveillance assessments of all of Bangladesh’s Civil Service, Foreign Service, Police Force, Education and the Judiciary Service to immediately flush out all adhorja ‘fifth columnists’ traitors who have been infiltrated into these bodies. This urgent task should be an open and transparent election manifesto pledge of the patriotic politicians and parties so that they can secure a popular electoral mandate to undertake these re-patriotisation or Bangladeshification processes of all these services and forces.

9) Immediately issue publication and broadcasting licences to properly security vetted Business Groups and individuals to establish print media, radio and television stations and internet channels to establish patriotic hegemony over the media world as part of fulfilling the election manifesto pledge. Then regularly initiate and publicly publish annual, three yearly and five yearly impact assessments of these media and internet outfits’ programmes and their outcomes so as to determine whether they should retain their licences. Those not fulfilling the patriotic objectives should have their licences revoked and it should then be auctioned off to properly security vetted Business Groups and individuals thus generating additional revenue to the treasury. A fully staffed and funded Patriotic Media Regulatory Commissionshould be set up to undertake all these urgent tasks.

10) Establish a legally constituted, conscripted, unpaid, million person Popular Militia Defence Force (PMDF) which should be set up as a ‘back up asymmetrical response’ to any hegemonist or imperialist invasions or incursions into Bangladesh’s sovereign territory and waters. All 17-year olds must undertake compulsory 6 months Popular Militia Defence Force training when reaching their 17th birthday. This militia should be modelled on a fusion of the Swiss militia system and the British Territorial Army. This will be the most cost effective system, yet build up a strategic reserve for the future generations of committed and military trained patriots who will be always a force to reckon with by India’s Kautilyan strategists, and who will think many times about their inability to digest this brave nation of ours.

11) All Bangladesh’s school, college, technical and vocational institutes, and university curriculum need to be ‘national security’ reviewed to weed out or cleanse it of all subversive and anti-national material by properly constituted, and appropriately trained and qualified, panels of patriotic academics, scholars and intellectuals.

Without the rigorous implementation of all of the above‘national security, sovereignty and independence consolidation’ urgent measures our beloved fatherland, this brave and indomitable Muslim nation-state of Bangladesh will be sent towards its abyss!

Bangladesh Zindabad! Let this be our national dua, goal and battle cry.

(The END)