Voter ID, Election 2008 and the legitimation of science

Recently, the Election Commission have successfully completed their voter registration program. Their project was received warmly and many ushered humble accolades for what the commission have done. But the commission seemed dissatisfied with the appreciations they got. So it staged its own “awareness” campaign with aplomb and carnivalesque gaiety to demonstrate how narcissistic three Bangladeshi men (the Chief Election Commissioner and his two deputy) in the power could be. These three men were ably supported by the “co-operative venture” between BIO-Key in the US, Tiger IT in Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh army in their long journey to finish the Voter Id documentation.

However many fear that by digitalizing information the “State” might tighten it’s grip on individuals through constant surveillance or even gather uncalled-for information by “eavesdropping”. State Surveillance that has become a major concern round the world in recent times will also be a top agenda of our state. And it becomes more of a matter of concern when eminent supporters of the Voter ID project claim that the “digitalization” process will make governance “more scientific”. Jean-Françoise Lyotard in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge says that the State purchases scientists, technicians and instruments “not to find truth” but to “augment power” (ed Cahoone, 497). His argument about how science is used to augment power is good enough to catch the irony inherent in the voices of those who want governance to be more scientific, i.e, brutally totalitarian.

"Surveillance" and "eavesdropping" are the modern trajectories of Baroque-styled voyeur-fetish. Once, the crème de la crème of Western Europe participated in such smearing voyeuristic acts. But now it seems that the magniloquent oligarchs of Bangladesh (people with an insatiable desire to control and codify) have an opportunity to fulfill a desire of their own.

Desire fulfilling is no sin. “Repressed” desire, as Freud argues is harmful. Lacan, if lived to this day would have argued that "surveillance"/monitoring/codifying are the natal fantasies of men involved in sucking the juice out of a postcolonial nation or in warfare and arms dealing or in "the holy act of state guardsman -ship".

But it involves something more than sex. It is more pleasurable than sex.

Surveillance/eavesdropping are all-pervading fetishes. They devour the haves and the have-nots, the hideous and the charming, the petite and the belle, the scholar and the layman; all alike.

Those men who have dreamed of this for a long time are gleaning with scrotum juice. But they lacked the "backing" of what Lyotard calls "legitimizing" science. Thanks to those science people who have come up to aide the military/election commission so that their latent desires/fantasies will at last be fulfilled.

People who think they own a state/estate or two naturally hate Kafka. Or illiterate as they are; perhaps never have heard of him. Or perhaps they have heard of him and doing exactly the same that has to be done to get a stronghold on the bureaucratic states Kafka was frightened of. Whether in heaven or in hell or as a mutant (Gregor Samsa) re-incarnated in Jibonanodo Das-er Bangla, the soul of Kafka must be writhing in pain after seeing all these bureaucratic and militaristic hullabaloos.

God is dead, Marxism is undergoing crisis and Bangladesh is tottering

These are the multinationals, like General Motors and Nestle; these are the big industrial groups that weigh, on the monetary scale, much more than big countries like Egypt.
Ahmed Ben Bella

Since Nietzsche declared the death of God, Allah or the Over-Soul as Emerson puts it, the world has seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sad demise of communism, China’s rapid march towards market economy as well as the brisk rise of US militaristic imperialism. While the public tentatively accepted these changes the market gave rise to the vulgar cult of Madonna, Britney Spears and Anna Kournikova. Today the market encourage obscenity on one hand while on the other, states continually devise firm laws (both religious and secular) to impose subtle control on the population. Human dignity in this Mammon driven age has also sunk to the lowest. Societies are obsessed with the fetish, frolic and food. The states are forebodingly Kafkaesque more than ever. This situation is more relevant to the Third world countries.

Man’s greed for personal wealth, jealousy towards the Other and a primal urge to dominate gave rise to capitalism as early as the times of the Pharaoh. Feudalism soon took over. Renaissance and colonization established a deft capitalist system. Then came advanced industrial capitalism fuelling the economy of major Western European nations. All these countries had colonies scattered round the globe and their industries were fuelled by raw materials produced by the native labors of the colonies.

Marx had argued that communist revolution spearheaded by the working class (or the proletariat) was inevitable in advanced industrial nations. It was in the rational self-interest of that class to create such revolution and alter what Marx called the ‘relations of production’ to keep pace with the ‘means of production’. He felt people were led to misrecognize reality by false ideas which were put into circulation. Marxism did triumph and the 20th century saw the rise of egalitarian states as dreamt by previous visionaries. The capitalist forces stumbled across the globe giving rise to states based on the concept of communism.

Capitalist counter-revolutions were also sweeping the globe with the United States leading the party. Finally, religious fundamentalism (who are only but allies of capitalist ruling class) and CIA conspiracy aided by Pentagon made to survival difficult for the Leftist block. Of course, there were irregularities and corruption within the state system of the Communist bloc that made it difficult to survive. However, some communist nations still survive as pariah nations. Ferocious market economy has made the very conception of Communism obsolete. One might go as far to say that the former communist nations are themselves to blame since they had everything in common with the modern day military regimes (with censorship, totalitarianism, state-sponsored oppression). As military regimes around the world are the finest examples of the American policy of ‘regime change’, states were forcefully turned communistic by the Soviet Union. Former Czechoslovakia is the finest example of that.

People often fail to distinguish between Marx and Lenin. Antonio Gramsci comes to their aid distinguishing intellectuals as traditional and organic with the organic prioritized because he is able to change the society through revolution. Lenin was an organic intellectual who implemented Marxist theory while Marx remained an intellectual in the traditional sense. Of course, there is no denying the role Ché Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung or any other great revolutionaries in shaping the history of proletarian struggle. “Revolution” is what made Marx’s ideas come to reality. Such revolutionaries now only seem a mere shadow of the bygone century. What the 21st century has in store for us?
Bangladesh as many argues has experienced “revolution” with the present CG govt. taking control of the state after the political parties failed to hold on to a crippling democracy that ran for almost sixteen years. Bengalis fought a glorious war of liberation to free themselves from imperial hegemony, religious fundamentalism and oppression of the poor and helpless by the rich. But soon a system was erected to ensure a permanent military-bureaucratic exploitation of the masses. Is the current govt. at the helm is truly ‘revolutionary’? A rational mind will say it is not; a military-elitist (sushil samaj) takeover aided by the bourgeoisie can never be a revolution.

Moreover, democracy has been dormant for months now. As the days are galloping by it seems the naughty elite has finally got a firm grip upon the state. Begging for advice from the ADB and WB has become regularity. Privatization has become one of the ways to make the rich richer. And then there is the army to instill fear upon the public. The arrests of the DU teachers plainly serve as a better example.

True, our democracy failed partially due to the short-sighted politicians. They not only failed to bolster the parliament with hotly contested constructive debates but also indulged in rampant corruption irrespective of the ruling party or the opposition. The nation has failed to grasp the immense potential it has in terms of manpower as well as national wealth (gas, coal etc). The bully-boy BNP-Jamaat alliance govt. left no stones unturned to sell the gas and coal to the multinationals waiting to pounce upon the Third World wealth. The AL govt. was not an exception either. Now where will the Bangladeshi public go from here? Is there no way out for them or they are just stranded in the cul-de-sac of dirty oligarchic politics?

The questions asked will only be answered in the future. In the meantime, we can only hope for a similar U-turn taken by many Latin American rulers to lessen American hegemony. But that too seems impossible for us. The rise of Islamist neo-cons is an eerie sign. They have extended their complete support to the present state of the nation. It’s a heaven for them to promote religious laws to subjugate, oppress the masses further and they have grabbed their opportunity to the fullest only to serve the rulers’ interests. But the most beneficiary is the business community. That’s why syndicates still exist to raise price of the essentials. New multinationals are also flocking to exploit our weaknesses to the fullest. The beneficiaries again are the elite and a certain section of the growing middle-class. Others are just busy trifling and aimless loitering in the murky waters of globalization in the false hope of shaping their future.

The solution lies within the public. They must rise to explore their potential to the fullest. History is full of impetus with the recent Phulbari & Kansat uprising, the glories of 1969, 1971 and the 1990 uprising to bring an end to military dictatorship. This road to freedom is by no means easy. They must stand up to the ill motives of the elitists, religious fundamentalists and their perfect ally “the good for nothing bourgeoisie”. The military-bureaucratic forces might prove difficult to beat but their ignominy in the face of mass uprising is a part of the glorious history of mankind. The people must beat out the burden of history to re-create history itself.

RAGE

Voila! The righteous and the religious (ISLAMISTS) have done it again. Bangladesh rally round the khatib to drive out the Satan (like they are driving out corruption, I wonder whether this means showing the brute force of military totalitarianism).

How the media & the conscientious people did went silent on such an issue as a state-perpetrated fatwa just as they did when teachers were arrested and jailed. Where on earth we see such phenomena these days except for our beloved muslim middle-eastern nations and their perfect ally fakistan. Well, curse me if I’m supporting the vandalism let loose days ago in the streets of Dhaka & hating dictatorial religious sentiments of muslims around the world.

We perfectly forget how we fought for a free, secular nation only to be ended up in a religio-centric nation. And we slaughtered the architect of our nation as his beloved Shonar Bangla turned out to be otherwise as opposed to many other muslim nations.

We are saying these days we will end up with a holy, corruption free, naïve Vatican like nation after the storm. Mullahs, bigots and divine priests (Bangla hobe afgan/amra hobo taleban) will thrive there. And as always an Orwellian Commission of truth will continue to stifle free-thinking. Perhaps we have played the George Bush blame game too much. Now it’s time to fix our own house.

Dr Humayun Azad, West & efficacy of the Carnival

I am not concerned here with poetry
My subject is Life, and the protest
against the enemies of life
The Poetry is in the protest
A TO Z, AZAD (For Humayun Azad)

These are lines penned by poet Kaiser Haq as protest against the grotesque rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh. Dr Humayun Azad, a noted linguist, non-conformist author and essayist and a professor at Dhaka University fell a victim to unknown terrorists on a Friday night in late February 2004 after leaving the Ekushey Boi Mela premises. He was butchered with knives and machetes but survived gory wounds quite amazingly. He left Bangladesh for Germany for a post-doctoral research. He was found dead in his hotel room while the doctors confirmed he died out of injury related complications. He left his beloved motherland reeking with bigotry and extremism. The then BNP-Jamaat alliance knew very well who his murderers were but went silent. It saved them from the blushes of arresting top-notch religious leaders and the imam of the national mosque, a virulent critic of Dr.Azad and free-thinking. Previously the bigots issued fatwa upon this maverick intellectual and other scholars, poets and authors million times but the state remained unconcerned regarding the rise of Islamism.

“Fatwa” is hardly a word West knew till Salman Rushdie fell a victim to it in the 1990s’. Now they were terrorized with the fact that a “black skin/white mask” bred in their own backyard could be challenged by clerics from far beyond. Though liberals were shouting that Rushdie must not be tried (or hanged as Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed) and the values of expression of freedom should be upheld, there was a new truth emerging. The colonial tsunami has not only left colonizers “divided” as per class, race and religion, it also created a multi-faceted hiatus. That is, the new nations were subdivided, fragmented and their values scattered into hundreds of ideologies.

Perhaps the whole of western civilization (as they claim) reached an epoch at the end of the 20th century where they thought the only enemy to be the former enemy in the Crusades. Their media continually argued Muslims to be locked in their own prejudices, religious belief and demonstrated a high degree of exclusiveness. To make matters worse Francis Fukuyama included Muslims as part of the battle called “clash of civilizations”. The mullahs thought they were vitally important. Extremism, bigotry, fundamentalism then reached a new height, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan. Fundamentalist groups were funded by the CIA and wealthy Arabs to destroy the Communist block. Gradually they became a treat in their own countries. They avoid anything that is progressive (terming them western) and they only raise voices against those determined to change the stagnant Muslim societies whether it be in Bangladesh or in the Middle East. The vicious propaganda and a plethora of criticism against Dr. Azad justify the point.

The filthy waters of religious extremism in Bangladesh have been flowing since the days of partition in 1947. It has raised leaps and bounds with the change of global politics. The world sadly became unipolar at the end of Cold War and America as an imperial power renewed interest in the “Other” as part of its ‘universal’ hegemony. The former colonizers, Britain and France saw men & women of their former colonies into dehumanized ghettos in their own cities. Authorities of these countries often hypocritically chant clichés regarding those fated people’s inability to “jell” with the mainstream. Ironically, most of these immigrants happened to be Muslims from North Africa(a former French colony) and the sub-continent (in Britain) who got a belligerent interpretation of their religion from clerics and desperate “ethical” men trying to upstage a Fanon-like revolution to upset imperial standards. The result inevitably was a rejection of Western values and a war of terror against Western interests.

But the home brewed mullahs are different from them. They serve particular interests of the ruling class and as the state and religion being loyal bedfellows they thrive. Such is the experience in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, many regard the architect of the nation exonerated the war criminals of 1971. This was obviously a mistake. It was also an act of weakness on the part of the leader. These people with a Middle Age mind-set rapidly gained control of various state institutions and they conducted madrasas, schools, and hospitals. Now-a-days they even own a bank (Islami Bank).

These mullahs (clerics) continually utter their coveted words of jihad and fatwa. They think they are united under the buzzword Ummah & wreck havoc wherever they see a wall against their interest. The recent Lal Mashjid incident is a perfect illustration of their destructive capability. Unfortunately, Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan for almost twenty-four years & “fatwa” and “jihad” were drilled profusely in the hearts and minds of pro-Islamists in Bangladesh. The post-independent chaos in the era of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the helm paved the way for a new demon in the form of military dictatorship. The mullahs were well-paid and fed by successive military regimes. Their ideas and interests did spread like cancer & when Bangladesh finally did breathe the air of democracy the people discovered a world antagonistic towards Islam.

Now with the emergence of literary theory we can look at these group of men (Islamists are narcissistically patriarchal) with a new vision. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque affirms carnival as a potent force against bigotry & religious Puritanism. Dr Azad novel Pak Saar Zameen Shad Bad evaluates such aspects of the Bakhtinian theory. The protagonist finally revels in an act of aesthetic desire absent till he was bounded by his religious ethics. As more and more women in towns and villages of Bangladesh are becoming burkha-clad Azad’s fear of Bangladesh turning into “Pakistan” cannot be ruled out.

But Bakhtin comes to our rescue. Our celebration of Pahela Boishakh can be seen as an act of the carnivalesque. To Bakhtin carnivals gave rise to the disobedience of authority, with the mass parodying official ideas of society, destiny, history, fate as unalterable. It was festive pleasure, the world turned topsy-turvy, destruction and creation with extravagant juxtapositions. Carnivalisation thus “makes it possible to extend the narrow sense of life”. Pahela Boishakh is such an occasion. The students of Fine Arts Institute cloth the streets with arts, parodies and masques are made jeering the state, institutions and religion. The last few years of Pahela Boishakh was more gay and fabulous than ever before. It seems the more extremism and intolerance is on the rise, the more protests people come up with. And it is fully manifested each year in the day of Pahela Boishakh. Each and every Friday Muslims go to mass Jumma prayers to seek blessings for the nation and the Muslim Ummah. Their prayers are hardly answered but the festivity of Pahela Boishakh reminds us we can make the impossible happen. We fail at times but we remind ourselves after the darkness come the light. Thus with carnival & color we satiate Dr Azad’s soul with a message that there is a possibility of building a secular, hunger free, modern democratic Bangladesh despite snarls from hierarchal quarters.