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Bangladesh: Failure of secular forces created a vacuum through which extremism emerged

by Piash Karim, 17 May 2009

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New Age, 15-21 May 2009

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’A government which cannot stop extra judicial killings does not have the moral authority to talk about the Pilkhana killings’

Piash Karim, professor of economics and social science at Brac University, talks to Konka Karim about the multiple faces of violence that prevails in our society

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in our country is a serious concern in our society today. And yet when it first arrived on centre-stage many people were surprised considering the fact that this is a Muslim majority country after all. How do analyse the situation?

Firstly, I would like to avoid the word fundamentalism, a term that has come to use from the western protestant theological discourse, and I prefer to term it as religious militancy.

I am a very secular person and from a deep, profound, level, any sort of religious extremism worries me. Having said that, we need to identify a few things. Religious militancy is a complex phenomenon. There are multiple facets to the problem. We need to understand economic inequality and the extent of cultural dislocation or cultural deprivation, political disempowerment to understand this phenomenon. To just broadly categorize it as fundamentalism as is being done by the secular wings of the society, I find it unacceptable.

Religious militancy definitely needs to be fought. However, we need to understand the complexities of the issue and where there are genuine grievances. For example, the lakhs of madrassah students of our country have a cultural world of their own. We of the middle class rarely try to understand their world. Without understanding all of this we cannot fight militancy.

From your point of view what needs to be understood to tackle the situation?

There are two sides to this. First we have to judge what the secular forces have done. We of the secular forces have spoken on the platform of the Awami League and BNP, but if we look at the nation’s history since 1971, it is a history of the failure of the various secular forces. These failures have created an empty space or a vacuum through which extremism emerged.

The other side is that we need to understand why a madrassah student, or take the case of Hizbut Tahrir or an upper class boy, takes part in such activity.

Islamic extremism is not a monolithic proposition. The kid who comes from the madrassah and the kid from the upper class are not coming for the same reasons. We need to understand the different reasons and the collective psychology behind it. There is a tendency to see the extremism phenomenon throug h the enlightenment/ backwardness dichotomy. I think this is an obsolete dichotomy. We cannot understand extremism through this. These people have certain rational for their behaviour and we need to understand those. They subscribe to a certain world view and I feel that our state and its hegemonic intellectuals have not made any effort to understand them.

Being a teacher of a private university you have been directly exposed to the activities of the Hizbut Tahrir. What is your understanding of them?

Hizbut Tahrir is a slightly different phenomenon than the other type of extremist groups who have a base in the madrassahs and who are not a part of mainstream economic and cultural activities. One of the reasons I feel that these upper class or upper middle class children join the organisation is because they do not have direction of guidance. They are bored, so to speak.

In our generation, we dreamt of changing the world and we had, rightly or wrongly, a direction towards that through Marxism, Leninism etc. In the modern world, these ideologies no longer hold any value to the younger generation. They seem empty - where will I go? What will I do? They can’t find a meaning to life. They have no faith in our political leadership, the movers and shakers in society and neither do they want to belong to the yaba culture. To them Islam is working as a framework.

A few months back, we teachers received packages in our rooms from Hizbut Tahrir. I read them at home and realised that they were written in a very Marxist vocabulary - capitalism, the negative effects of capital accumulation - however, the solution was Islamic. They are using very modern vocabulary. I think this is a very interesting phenomenon and they should not be blown off as backward.

What in your view is the difference in motivation between madrassah students and Hizbut Tahrir?

There needs to be systematic research on this. What we have now is only political rhetoric. One difference that I feel is that the madrassah student is being inspired into an Afghanistan style revolution though his motivation is not that conscious, whereas for the urban kid there is far more conscious articulation. I may have said this a bit superficially, I think the difference lies in well informed articulation and not so well informed articulation.

Having said all of this, I don’t believe that the biggest problem of the Bangladeshi society is the battle between the religious and the secular forces. Making this the biggest battle comes from an over simplified world view of our secular intelligentsia. I may be naïve about it, but I believe that Bangladesh will never turn into Pakistan. Bangladesh has a deeply entrenched tradition of secular resistance to them.

Moving on from militancy, what is your take on the increasing mob violence in our streets? At one end we hear of thieves and hijackers being beaten to death while in late 2006, just prior to the now cancelled elections of Januray 22, 2007, we witnessed a gruesome face of the mob.

There are a few sides to mob violence. As a universal phenomenon - one person starts hitting someone and everybody joins in - in psychology, we know this as collective behaviour where individual psychology takes a back seat. This is a universal phenomenon; it can happen in LA, Bolivia or Bangladesh.

In the context of Bangladesh, there is a specific area which is the peoples’ frustration - I am being pick-pocketed, my daughter is being harassed in the streets etc. but we will not get any justice. Our law is ineffective and law itself is corrupt. In many cases, law enforcement is party to crime itself and so people resort to quick street justice. Quick street justice is an unorganized informal resistance and our government itself is promoting quick justice by promoting extra judicial killing so why blame the citizens.

Since you mentioned extra judicial killing, this is another form of violence that have risen in recent years. What are your views on this?

I am very much against it. Funny thing is, though our LGRD minister said that there would be no more killings we have had extra judicial killings since. Our state is essentially a weak state and the governments’ reach is limited. A RAB commander sitting in Shatkhira may not really follow the prime ministers’ instructions. For this we need a more organized effort. Cross fire is a national disgrace and the people involved with it should be punished.

A government which cannot stop extra judicial killings does not have the moral authority to talk about the Pilkhana killings.

Unfortunately, there is a strong public support on extra judicial killings because of their success in controlling certain forms of crime.

Yes, I do hear that from people and I am reminded by people of what the law and order situation was before the advent of RAB. But the reason for this public opinion is the failure of our legal system. In our existing legal system, these people are not being punished. In some ways, it is similar to why the Italian people accepted fascism.

I am not disrespecting people’s sentiment but what I am saying is, this is happening because of the failure of our legal system. Personally, I find this kind of justice repulsive.