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Will the green of Bangla turn the green of Islam?

Early this month, waiting to be served "spicy" mangshor jhol (mutton curry) and rice in a small Bangladeshi restaurant in downtown Montreal, I marvelled at the enterprise of the two Sylheti brothers who had successfully converted discerning Francophile palates to hot Bangla food. By the time I had worked my way through rubbery pieces of deep-freeze mutton stewed in a tasteless curry and served with genetically modified rice that smelled of used latex, I was fuming at the audacity of the Sylheti duo to palm off such garbage as authentic Bangla cuisine. I retaliated by refusing a tip when the bill came.

Early last week, I found myself sitting in yet another Bangladeshi restaurant, this time in London's Brick Lane, dragged there by gracious friends who insisted on treating me to authentic "curry". It tasted like dishwater and I watched in silent horror at the huge tip left behind by my hosts who kept on insisting that nothing could beat a good, hot and spicy "Bangla curry" while wiping their runny noses. How naïve, I muttered under my breath, but managed to slip in a line of rebuke in Bangladeshi dialect to the waiter who was obviously a recently arrived illegal immigrant but had mastered the art of incomprehension of his mother tongue.

Last weekend I was in Dhaka and, along with a couple of friends, ate myself silly, gorging on excellent and for the first time authentic Bangla cuisine. It was gluttony at its worst, but I have no regrets. I was glad to be in the land of my forefathers and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh guessed as much when he asked me whether I was "happy to be home".

Of course, he was being facetious. My father came to India as a refugee from Dhaka, too young to comprehend why he had to leave his home but old enough to remember the blood-curdling cries of "Allah ho Akbar" and the marauding mobs of believers looting, burning and killing, frenzied by the lust for blood. That makes my father a post-1947 citizen of India. But for me, India is the only home I have known. Yes, I was happy to be in Bangladesh, which my father, uncles and grandmother still refer to as East Bengal, but I was happier that I was only visiting Bangladesh.

That could sound slightly ungracious, since the Bangladeshis were decidedly gracious during our brief stay. But the fact of the matter is that no matter how much we complain about life in India, we rarely realise the tremendous manner in which democracy and democratic ideals of liberty, dignity and equality have seeped into every sphere of public and private life in this country. It is only when you are in Pakistan or Bangladesh, or, for that matter, in Sri Lanka, that this realisation dawns on you. Perhaps as a nation we are democratic to a fault, but I would not have it any other way. But we digress.

More than two decades after emerging as an independent state, Bangladesh is yet to emerge as a country that can claim any degree of self-sufficiency. There is no public transport worth its name in Dhaka: The rich and famous travel in reconditioned Toyotas while the less fortunate use rickshaws. The shops in hotels are stocked with foreign chocolates, foreign cigarettes and foreign watches – they provide duty-free shopping to travelling businessmen.

I wanted to buy some Bangla music and books, but nobody knew where to find either. My interlocutors, of course, were members of Dhaka's elite, dressed in pastel coloured suits who are more at home with things Western than Bangladeshi. Their objective in life is to ship out their offspring to the USA or the UK so that they can be spared the embarrassment of finding themselves in a country of unrelenting poverty.

In a sense, Bangladesh suffers from the same syndrome that has weakened the state in many an Asian and Latin American country. The Bangladeshi elite controls society, politics and economy with a firm hand, guided by nothing more than self-interest. It is an exclusive club whose members, to quote a journalist whom I met, "are corrupt and venal". Membership to the club is zealously guarded and a common motivation unites the members – deny all forms of social mobility. Therefore, if you are born outside the charmed circle, you are condemned to a lesser life.

The elite that runs the show in Bangladesh has decided that the best thing is to sell off all government enterprise. Therefore, everything is on sale for MNCs to pick up at a cut-rate price. Thanks to a rapacious economic model framed not in Dhaka but at the IMF/World Bank headquarters in Washington, the ecology is on the verge of irreparable destruction.

With the Bangladeshi population bursting at the seams, jobs are at a premium, so wages are at an amazing low. This makes Bangladesh a tantalising destination for those who want to produce designer label garments at a ridiculously low cost, to be sold in fashionable stores across America and Europe at ridiculously high prices. For all we know, Monica Lewinsky’s famous blue Gap dress was made in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. Little could the poor Bangladeshi who toiled at the dress on slave wages have imagined that it would one day be honoured by a spurt of American presidential semen.

The Bangladeshi elite prefers to speak in English – some have even taken to Hindi, thanks to pirated video cassettes of Bombay films. The salwar-kameez, which was till not so long ago despised as a symbol of pre-1971 West Pakistani hegemonism, is the preferred mode of dress. The saree pallu has yielded place to chiffon dupattas.

Yet, despite its uncaring, deracinated elite, Bangla culture – music, literature, food – continues to flourish in Bangladeshi. The credit for this goes to the non-elite that continues to take immense pride in being Bangladeshi. As a result, some of the best Bangla literature and music today comes not from West Bengal but Bangladesh. My favourite is Miles, a group comprising young Bangladeshi musicians and singers that has revolutionised traditional Bengali music and lyrics.

It is the non-elite that gave birth to Bangla cultural consciousness during the historic language agitation of 1952 when students from middle class families battled armed police against West Pakistan’s attempt to impose Urdu as the official language. That battle for Bangla triumphed in the liberation of Bangladesh and the adoption of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore's O amar shonar Bangla… as the national anthem. The green in the Bangladeshi flag was not meant to denote Islam, but the emerald paddy fields.

Islamists, however, are today threatening to appropriate the green. Never mind the public show of official secularism, the Jamaat has made tremendous – and terrifying – inroads into Bangladeshi society and politics. It has infiltrated the bureaucracy, the police and the armed forces. The growth of the Jamaat has been greatly facilitated by the cultural alienation of the elite that controls Bangladeshi society and politics. The Jamaat does not win too many seats, but it can tilt the balance of power – this makes the Jamaat a potent force not to be fooled around with.

It is, therefore, not surprising that Sheikh Hasina Wajed should have refrained from taking a pro-India position on Kargil and ignored the fact that the proposed bilateral agreements have been accepted by India without any reciprocal clause at the joint press conference with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. There is latent anti-Indianism in Bangladesh, spawned and fuelled by the Jamaat, and no government in Dhaka can afford to trifle with Islamist sentiments. That is a harsh truth, but a truth, nonetheless, that will play an increasing role in influencing the view from Dhaka.

A pity, though, if the green of Bangla were to turn into the green of Islam. For, that would herald the end of Bangladesh and the birth of just another Islamic state.

Kanchan Gupta is a political analyst based at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in Delhi and editor of the party's official organ, BJP Today.

Kanchan Gupta