Author: Tariq Ali
Publication: Daily Star News
Date: June 13, 2003
URL: http://www.dailystarnews.com/200306/13/n3061302.htm#BODY4
Time for some honest answers
Amonth or so ago, I was in Kurigram
and talking to an NGO worker. She was young and
pretty and although the ostentatious
sindur was not there on her sinthi, the white sankha on her hand told me
that she was married. She proudly told me that she is considered to be
the best worker in her office, and I could see that she possessed those
ingredients of management that set leaders apart from the others. The reason
she had started this conversation, it turned out, was that she was asking
for my opinion over a dilemma that she was going through. She was, in reality
echoing the anguished question that has rankled the minds of Hindus all
over Bangladesh since 1992. "Dada, we are still young and now is the appropriate
time to make the choice of whether to go over to India or not. Will we
be able to live here, in Bangladesh?"
She had not asked me the question
that would normally occupy the mind of a young person, out to make her
presence felt in the world. She had not asked whether she will one day
make it to the top of the office she worked in, or how she could help her
husband in turning around the family business or whether they could one
day become the pivotal players in the Kurigram social circuit. "We are
being given subtle messages that our neighbours would be happy to buy my
husband's property in the town. There is pressure as well from our relatives
in West Dinajpur to cross over and settle there," she said.
I remembered that as a sequel to
the Babri Masjid demolition, when there was widespread violence on the
Hindu community here, the same anguished question was raised at a Conference
of the Rabindrasangeet Sammilan Parishad in Dhaka. One of the responses,
from an intellectual of the country was a tearful appeal from the stage.
He concluded that in a Bangladesh bathed with the combined blood of its
Hindu and Muslim children, things were bound to get better and that they
should stick it out for just a little more time. The appeal was so passionately
and intensely made that it induced sympathetic tears in many of those who
were in the auditorium. Ten years later, tears welled up in the eyes of
this dada as well, as he faced that same question from this young and beautiful
woman. Even if she was able to ignore the "gentle" suggestion of selling
her homestead, would she not, ten years from today, still be strapped to
her desk as a programme officer, as she watched the entire retinue of her
Muslim colleagues, one after the other, bypass her -- yes, even in an NGO
setting, let alone the government?
This is not a story cooked up to
provoke a controversy. This is the brutal reality for one significant chunk
of the Bangladesh population; the denial of rights that the state had promised
him or her in 1971. The time has come for the majority community to face
this issue squarely and honestly.
This young lady in Kurigram could
thank her lucky stars that she was not Shilpi Chakraborty. For Shilpi,
a 14-year-old student in a village school in Arua upazila of Manikganj,
the time clock reminding her that she did not belong here, had already
started ticking. Their neighbour had claimed a part of her father's property.
The father, in turn, had brought the Thana Amin who measured the land and
confirmed that the land was theirs and placed demarcating pillars in the
presence of the village elders. A few days later, the pillars were found
missing but under the stern stare of that 'eternal guilt', Shilpi's father
did not dare raise a voice. On the night of April 26, she was sleeping
between her mother and father. The neighbour's son and seven or eight other
accomplices forced open the door, tied the father to a tree, dragged the
mother outside and then four of them gang-raped her. When they left at
dawn, they did not of course, forget to defile the whatever excuse of a
shiv-mandir that stood in the premises. When we saw her in her spartan
but spotlessly clean room, her head was drawn down in shame and she was
answering in monosyllables. All that her mother wanted us to do was to
arrange for some sort of a marriage for her because lajja would never again
let her take the two km walk to school. Her father was devastated, because
like the daughter, his own prestige as the village priest had been destroyed.
Not that there has never been resistance.
On the outskirts of Faridpur live a community of Adivasis, (from Central
India, they say) who had settled here seven or eight generations ago and
who were officially allocated a large tract of land. That land happens
to be prime property today, as the Faridpur-Khulna highway runs right through
this land. These people live on the fringes of the society, the men doing
menial labour and the wives, foraging the forest for firewood. Of late,
some of them were beginning to get themselves educated, and one man in
particular, Bhagya, was emerging as the leader of the community. (Reminds
me of Alfred Soren, the leader of the Santhals, who was burnt to death
under similar circumstances, in Naogaon). Around the beginning of May a
girl student of the community was harassed on her way to school, and Bhagya
protested. That set one event following the other, and on the afternoon
of May 7, a large number of people invaded the community, beat up the women
cooking their meal of the day, kicked away their rice pots (according to
them, the supreme insult and in a few cases disrobed the women down to
their skins. Twenty-six houses were damaged, their property looted, some
homes totally demolished and one home burnt to ashes. Two mandirs were
razed to the ground and the deities in them defiled. As for the expletives
hurled at them, they took no notice of them. The Adivasis, however, unlike
their Bengali co-religionists who have been cowered into accepting everything
lying down, decided to fight it out and the community as a whole took up
the issue. Perhaps, it was the Adivasi resilience that worked in them.
We wait to see if they get justice.
The news of Bibharani Singha, has
received wide coverage in the vernacular press. She was studying in the
second year in the Bangabandhu College at Chitalmari and was abducted by
an employee of a photocopying shop -- in this instance, a member of her
own community -- and it is rumoured that after a day or two she had conceded
to marry him. However, by the time her father could trace her, the lover-boy
had lost his ownership rights to some other people in Bagerhat, close to
the powers that be in today's Bangladesh. When she was finally recovered
from Khulna, around the beginning of May, she had been repeatedly raped,
burnt all over with cigarette butts when she resisted and numerous slashes
were made on her body with a sharp knife. She and her father had to sign
a written statement to the effect that nothing had happened and they would
not seek redress. Consequently, no one -- not even the father -- dared
to talk to us about the incident or name the culprits. We enquired with
the OC of Bagerhat Thana why he had dithered in accepting a police case
and why it was not recorded as rape. The master thespian tried to wriggle
out of the situation by telling us that the victim herself had refused
to take a medical examination.
I shall not talk about Mridul Rakshit,
who was forced to live incognito in Dhaka for the last five years because
he was under the threat of being killed. It was his young son, who finally
paid that price, on his behalf, around the beginning of April. Mridul Rakshit
now has no one to bequeath his Chittagong property to and no reason to
safeguard it. Thus has been removed the last obstacle to selling his property
and going where a section of the majority community wants all Hindus to
go. The story of the minorities in South Asia has been a sad one. But can
we not show the way in Bangladesh?
(Tariq Ali is a businessman.)
