Archive for January, 2014
CounterThoughts-1 : India’s failure in Bangladesh is a failure to understand Islam.
It is almost six years since I started writing on this blog. As with most of my intellectual forays, it was to search for root causes to phenomena on which people seem to be talking from belief, bias, preconception and conscious or subconscious agenda, and on which I seemed to find no answers of my own yet.
Six years later, and a myriad interactions with ideological friends and foes or the merely non-committed, desperately trying to appear neutral middle-roaders, I feel that the task is not only to understand but also to try and share what I have felt to be the way forward while trying to understand.
However, I should stress that I do not support the idea of final answers and incontrovertible truths. More of that later, and I will try to explain why I think so. I am not demanding or claiming that others should think like me, or that what I say or think is important. But it is a deep seated, slowly maturing urge over the years to think aloud, to borrow the cliché. What do I expect out of it? A myriad small sparks, not the incinerating brilliance of a nuclear device, but the small, fragile, light of the primitive oil lamps, or the hopeful glowing embers of the evening fires of cooking of the first human settlements.
I am starting off this sequence with a topic that appears to hog the Indian subcontinental discourse for some time (apart from supposed uniqueness of Indian propensity to rape, or supposed waiting global disaster of a Modi led “saffron” resurgence, or the glowing future of a post NATO Afghanistan, and the continuously improving civilizational status of Pakistan) – namely, the recent elections in Bangladesh.
My thoughts on Bangladesh and its society has been laid out on this blog before. So I will only briefly touch and summarize.
Bangladesh was formed in 1971 as a result of an intra-elite factional contest for power over the Islamist movement that had managed in 1947 to use tactical violence, British covert support, and Delhi-Uttar-Pradesh-Gujarat based axis of the Indian Congress’s fear of the more populous two ends of the Gangetic plains – Punjab and Bengal’s long tradition of independent counter-Delhi political undercurrent.
For the Islamist, they needed a base in which they could nurture jihad and hopefully accumulate the resources for a future “final solution” of getting rid of all Kaffir on the subcontinent, and as many mullahs openly express – more openly in Taliban land fertilized by decades of Saudi funding and tacit support from the UK and the USA through their islamist allies in power in Pakistan. Pakistan was a good starting point for their agenda, as they felt that the liberalizing, modernizing, educating world of the Indian Hindu would eventually open up Islamic society beyond mullah sadistic control.
For the British, smarting under the loss of their global dominance to the Americans, Pakistan would be boots on the ground for British interests. Such interests would include long term hope of reviving sole control over Indian Ocean ring, use American fear of Soviet expansion to simultaneously get the USA involved in regional wars of attrition so over the that long term Americans would be weakened and hated sufficiently to leave the field open again for the British, while at the same time prevent modernization, liberalization and resurgence of cultural identities that the British had hated out of racial, religious and perhaps a bit of underlying twisted obsession with the darker side of human nature. One of the foremost targets of British hatred was anything to do with the “Hindu”. It was the “Hindu” they saw as the elusive system which sourced resistance to imperialist subjugation where as the supposedly more virulent and “martial” Islam quickly turned bootlickers. For the British – the Congress was “Hindu”, “Sanskrit” was Hindu, Hindu temple and architecture was ugly compared to the seductive feminine curves of the “domes” of Islam, Hindu texts, knowledge base and culture represented the apotheosis of all that was supposedly, pure, Christian and “white”. The rump state of India that was left after 1947, was still “Hindu” and the galling reminder that the Hindu failed to “convert” to submission to British claims of supremacy. Thus Pakistan, in its western and eastern ends would remain the best chance to gall India into the future, and be hopefully bases of jihadism if not outright British comeback – that will continue to bleed “Hindu” India. At least that was perhaps the hope anyway.
Where the British failed was their belief in their own propaganda, invented out of a necessity to play intra-Islam factionalism to subdue the Ottomans by raising the Wahabi-Saud jihad – that somehow intra-Islamic factional fight for dominance represented the non-monolithic nature of Islam. Islam being actually a cover for blatant imperialism, every regional power within a broader spectrum of Islamic following, will try to become the centre of that imperialist claim – so that they can then use the religious imperialist authority enshrined within Islam – to mobilize the total resources of global reach of Islam for their own individual regional power centre benefit. This has been the history of the Islamic politics right from its inception.
Contrary to western misrepresentation, this internal drive to become the supreme imperialist claiming the loyalty and support of all Muslims behind their power hunger, leading to inter-regional fights, does not represent any actual deviation from the core genocidic, culture erasing, enslaving agenda of Islam – where it concerns the as yet non-Muslim.
Now to understand Bangladeshi politics, this above understanding is crucial. The Awami League split from the Muslim League of Jinnah, not out of secular or non-Islamist core drives – but as power seeking movement that wanted the fruits of the partition of 1947, the control over the land and in more mundane terms, the wealth, property and women of the Hindu’s of eastern Pakistan and dominance over the whole of Pakistani state structure. The greater contiguity and inter-mingling of non-Muslim motifs and memes and the relatively later entry of Islam into the area historically, compared to the western end of India, implied a difficult task ahead for “eastern” Islamists. There were spontaneous popular movements influenced by the remnant secular, liberal and modernizing influences of pre-Partition Hindu-presence [the relative strengths were roughly 45/50-55/50 at the end of a disputed and allegedly biased-in-favour-of-the-Muslim in the last census before Partition], which was seized upon shrewdly and tactically by the Awami League leadership under Mujibur Rehman. But the fact is often forgotten that Mujibur started his political life as a student activist for the Muslim League in Calcutta, under patronage of Suhrawardy – the architect of government supervised and protected pogrom on Calcutta Hindus that led to the notorious pre-Partition massacres.
Independence for Bangladesh was therefore just a manifestation of the intra-Islamic fight within Islamic imperialism for monopoly of the imperialist claim, it no way represents any compromise at any fundamental level with the commitment to jihadist clearing of non-Muslim cultures, seizing their property and resources and enslaving their women. It would be natural to expect that after the formal separation of power and independence for Bangladesh was obtained by necessary tactical pretension by future leadership of Bangladesh to get Indian and global support – that the core of this political movement would quickly reassert its fundamental drive by getting rid of all symbols and structures that they saw as being tainted by the need to compromise even tactically to “Hindus” or non-muslim sympathetic powers. Mujibur was the most blatant symbol of this and therefore he had to be made an example of. Note that elements of the core of Awami League and the military which had apparently sided with the “liberation movement” collaborated in the bloodshed.
Since, Bangladesh has consistently seen expulsion and genocide of remnant Hindus, looting of their property, rape and abduction and forced conversion of their women. Islamic atrocities are also typical in the deliberate psychological cruelty or sado-masochistic practices involved – for example it is not enough to simply kill the kaffir, but make it horrific by torture of the most inventive imagination, not only rape but rape before a father or a husband and forcing them to watch – intended to not only cause psychological trauma, but also to burn into the helpless men their emasculation and ineffectiveness. This is an extremely sophisticated grasp over the psychology of coercion, ans shows that the mullah is a highly trained and conditioned psychological warrior who has almost no sense of guilt or empathy where it concerns unleashing the more twisted form of sado-masochistic tendencies in the human.
The recent elections, showing widespread torture, rape, genocide of Hindus as an aftermath, in which elements of both the supposedly winning “secular” Awami League, as well as the BNP and Jamaat combination participated – shows that nothing really has changed from the early days of Islam in that zone. Mymensingh Gitika, a collection of medieval folk tales in verse forms from a region in Bangladesh – tells the story of a Hindu housewife being forced to pleasure a Qazi. Whether a faction loses or wins, be it Awami League or BNP or Jamaat – Islamists would go out to rape Hindu women, torch their houses, and loot their belongings, be it to celebrate a win , or to grieve over a loss.
Bangladeshi core thinking is reflected in the blatant statement of academics of Jehangirnagar university (a deliberate naming done to emphasize the Mughal association, from the Mughal name given to the then town, over the more ancient Dhaka-Vikramanipur – having therefore Hindu connotations) aspiring for an unbroken new Mughalistan carved out of Northern India stretching from Punjab and Pakistan over the Gangetic Valley all he way to Bangladesh and hopefully even what is now North-Eastern India. Academics and “intelligentsia” of Bangladesh, openly discuss on media and TV shows, the desirability of destabilizing the North-East India so that eventually it gets detached from India and become ripe for Bangladeshi and “Islamic” expansion.
It is in the interest of the core drivers of Bangladeshi society – to preserve elements of Islamist jihadism. Over the years, Saudi and UK based funding sources have developed an extensive network of madrasshas and other institutional means of preaching the Arabic, Sunni-Wahabi views, and the result has been the increasing mass-presence of younger people in extremism, and obvious support enjoyed by the organizations like Hifazat whose members have played an increasingly visibly public as well as militant role.
Indira Gandhi scored a tactical brilliance in 1971, but a strategic blunder when she helped an independent Bangladesh to form. This independent nation immediately showed its fangs of islamism, has continued to expel Hindus, abduct rape and enslave Hindu women, and welcomed all possible transnational anti-India and anti-Hindu forces. As and when Pakistan falls, this nation will provide an alternative base for jihadis to retsart their movement.
I know that many have disagreed with me on this, but I still think, that in 1971, India should have raised the stakes by tantalizing the “west” with supporting Bangladeshi independence, but prepared to compromise if allowed to conquer and re-incorporate the northern “Pakistani occupied Kashmir”, hold on to the thin corridor to Rawalpindi up to the hills of the Swat, and extract a land corridor through Chittagong in the east to the sea. Impose demilitarization of east Pakistan on the formal logic of ensuring that Bengalis were not going to be subjected to Pakistani military atrocities, and guarantee autonomy within Pakistan. End of all manipulations by China, USA and the UK and their support for the violently sadistic societies and mullahs of jihad in both ends of Pakistan. The Indian naval presence on both sides of the mouth of the delta and demilitarization would ensure the prevention of Pakistani military presence for ever to repeat the type sex-alavery and torture camps that they ran in 1971, and end of Chinese imperialist expansion schemes and their consequent inputs in genocide on subcontinental soil. End of Karakorum highway being lucrative for geo-political sadism and an alternative and peaceful land network to central Asia, connecting to India the more liberalizable northern Afghanistan, Central Asian Republics bypassing the Pakistani/Gulf/Saudi proximity and mullahfied jihadi societies of Southern Afghanistan and starving them of the economic flow that they now hog and use to support jihad.
It sounds too cynical, too “reverse-imperialist”, “safffron-revivalist”? We have seen most of the previous liberalizing conquests. They have only enhanced the blatantly cynical, racist, and sadistic existing imperialistic implementations of the Abrahamic cults. Why not a counter offensive that has proven its secular, liberal and modernizing credentials?
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