Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University, August 3, 2024
On July 26, 6 student leaders were picked up by the Dhaka Metropolitan police putatively for their own security. Photographs of them eating a meal with Harunor Rashid of the Detective Branch (DB), who is no doubt named after the Abbasid Caliph Harun ar-Rashid known for his piety and just behavior, was shared by none other than the head himself over social media in assurance of the wellbeing of the youth. In its July 30 response to a writ petition filed by lawyers to stop the police from its unwarranted seizure and holding of students as well as to cease the attack on peaceful protestors the High Court of Dhaka rebuked the officer for sharing such a picture on grounds that it made 'a mockery of the nation'. It said: “[t]hey take whoever they want to the DB office and then make them sit at a dining table. Don’t make a mockery of the nation like this.” I am very intrigued that the judiciary found this element of the entire fiasco--of picking up the students for their own security--to be a mockery. It begs several questions, what is meant by the mockery of the nation? Is the state or any state for that matter bound to be sincere? How sincere (or not) has the Government of Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina at its helm been in their response to the students of the quota reform movement and their demands? And what is the counterpoint to such sincerity?
Here I reflect on the events that have transpired since the students put forward their central demand that the government not merely reform the quota system by fiat, as pronounced by the Supreme Court of Bangladesh on July 11, but that the leaders of the country meet the students in good faith to hear them. Their insistence, considered irrational by Sheikh Hasina, was met by the full might of the state.
I have no interest in painting the students as subaltern or in pointing out the counter irrationality of meeting a demand for dialogue with a purge, involving bullets shot point-blank at protestors, some of which injured and/or killed innocent onlookers or random passersby including children. While the official death count is 209, hundreds more are rumored to be dead. Time will make all this clear if it hasn’t already, judging by the first serious response by a government, specifically the EU, in delaying negotiations over energy related plans till the Government of Bangladesh can provide a proper accounting of its actions during this calamitous meeting of two unequal forces. This follows upon the call by OHCHR for a similar full disclosure and those of multiple other petitions asking for an independent international board of inquiry, and protection, rather than penalization, of teachers for their support of students. There is also pressure on the government by the Bangladesh diaspora through, for instance, holding back remittances. While appealing to the West for help carries colonial undertones for many, the U.S.’s response has been temperate to say the least--a fact likely guided by the "Islamist" bogey floated by the Sheikh Hasina government in attempts to legitimize its violence. I report these divergences to indicate that the understanding of the moment has not lost its complexity despite its urgency.
Nor am I interested in speculating on who took advantage of this chaotic moment to rampage and destroy, be it local forces or the ‘hidden enemies’ that the state frequently hints at. Only a proper inquiry into each instance of violence will unfold these dynamics and not the broad-brush tarring happening through block raids, arrests, remands, and charges of more than 10,000 at last look. This tarring has entailed the singling out of people associated with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), once a significant opposition party, and the religious party of Jamaat-e-Islami, with people even being picked up in the small upazila town of Chauhali where I went to do fieldwork for all of two days before rushing back to Dhaka so as not to be stranded. It is worth mentioning here that the party has already been decimated, and so could not possibly be the disciplined infiltrating force that the state claims. On August 1, the government simply banned Jamaat-e-Islami and its youth arm, whilst appealing to the broadest public that it had to do so because it saw the hand of terrorists (read “radical Islamists”) in the violent events. The photographer and activist Shahidul Alam immediately posted eye-catching photographs of individuals holding up signs indicating that this action by the government deliberately played on the U.S.’s Islamophobia.
Nor finally am I interested in how the repressive forces of the state are changing the narrative in not-so-subtle ways, such as warning its citizens not to spread rumors here or abroad, and if they are found to do so how they may not be welcome into the country. They are also busy shifting the terms of discourse, such as shifting from speaking of the students as seeking quota reform to being against quotas entirely, in the process pitting them as reactionary against those who have fought hard for quotas, such as women’s organizations. A talk show on YouTube speculates openly about how much money each of the student leaders must be getting to foment trouble or else how could they have brought so many people to the streets. They sit around bemoaning how this so-called movement was creating a youth population addicted to bribes.
This is not to say that these issues are not important, but they are being discussed plenty if not in the bland, generic prose of national newspaper speak, which skillfully manages to be critical of the state without giving offense, but then certainty in YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Viber, TikTok, all of which the state attempted to strike at by shutting down the internet.
A sample of the posters which have emerged out of the protests (click to enlarge)
What I am interested in is how with its charge of mockery, the High Court has effectively brought to light an entire, yet unremarked dimension of the student protests and the authoritarian response to them. Previously I have spoken of the implacable nature of governments, which shock and dismay us when we encounter it, because no amount of reasoning or entreating seems to make a dent in its face. Here I speak of modern politics’ irrepressible powers of doubling, replicating, duplicating, copying, making us ever uncertain as to whether people are who they seem or whether we are even known to ourselves. This uncertainty is in display in this charge of mockery, because the High Court judges are expressing a fundamental uncertainty as to whether DB Rashid is pulling the leg of his onlookers or simply has no optics on himself and his actions of feeding a fancy meal to the students in his custody. And ultimately to whom is this an insult? Groping for a possible victim, as DB Rashid’s actions cannot be a mockery of Sheikh Hasina, who is ultimately the author of his actions and the guarantor of police impunity, the High Court reaches for “the nation.” And in doing so it effectively creates a wedge, an important one I wager, between Hasina and the nation, a unity that her party machinery and the state powers have forged but now is put asunder. Reaching to fix the uncertainty around DB Rashid’s actions, the High Court produces a new uncertainty, is Hasina the materialization of the nation or not and if she isn’t, then is a nation separate from her possible? Let this thought redouble.
That times are particularly bad and not just for those directly impacted by the violence unleashed by the state, is evident in the bloodshed that has an assistant of a friend return to his village home because he cannot get the smell of blood out of his nose and fears that he may be suffering from post-traumatic syndrome. And in the anxiety that plagues the driver who must get his employers home by curfew but who must get himself home past curfew. As he relates, he must slink home to avoid any encounters with the police: “The army or the BGP (Border Guard Bangladesh) just stand by. It’s the police, they like to get their hands all over you. And, if you protest then your papers are taken, you are thrown into remand, and you can only get yourself out with money. These assholes are all the problem.”
But the kind of badness of times I am also trying to draw our attention to is the subtle and not so subtle presence of the state in the air between people. Sitting in an office in the remote reaches of Chauhali, the erosion ravaged upazila town in Shirajganj, I discuss with dismay the happenings in cities across the country with a young staff member of a local microcredit agency. We aren’t being particularly critical in our conversation, just marking the darkness of the moment. In comes a few other young staff members. The person I am speaking with introduces them and when it comes time to introduce me, he warns jokingly, “she is BNP.” I shrug it off without engaging it but feel right away that this has introduced a doubt that will likely shadow my conversations with everyone. Have I been interpellated, I wonder, drawing on the term by Louis Althusser to mean not just that I have been identified as a possible razakar or collaborator but that this subject position is the only one available to me within the current political space just as the students have claimed. “Amra ki Shibeer (Are we of the Islamist cadre)?” asks a young, woman sans-hijab on YouTube. Undoubtedly, she asks this rhetorically, but the moment forces her to frame her identity as beyond her control.
Caught in such a bind, the students aren’t just claiming and transfiguring the loathed term of razakar among others (drug addicts, shibeer, etc.). They are also mocking Hasina. Yet however much they may use humor, double entendre, caricature, memes, etc. they aren’t mockers. Because, as the High Court points out in its awkward, perhaps unintended way, it is the improper deployment of power that is a mockery of the nation. Rather, the students’ discursive success lies in showing how Hasina at her most sincere makes a mockery of the nation, thus divorcing herself further from it. In her first public act after the protests are put down and violence quelled, she gathers businessmen in her office to laud her, to express their appreciation of her providing protection of their businesses and property from the machinations of BNP and Jamaat and other anti-liberation forces. In her second public act, she visits the infrastructure that has been destroyed, a metro station, a toll booth, and the garage of an official building, at the first of which she sheds tears, beseeching the public for justice. Swiftly jokes, poetry, cartoons about her show her to be a farce of a leader who cares more for businesses and infrastructure than people’s lives. Her actions, however sincere, speak the truth of her leadership. Soon, her compensatory acts of handing money to the father of Abu Sayed, the student gunned down by the police on July 16, or bending down to kiss the forehead of a child in hospital shot by a stray bullet from a helicopter produce shudders among her onlookers. It isn’t just the knowledge of her shocking disregard for human lives that does this: it is I would claim the loss of context around her, making her intimate, perhaps in the moment sincerely felt, gestures those of mime and mockery. People now address her in TV interviews, “do you do pull our leg?” “do you mock us by your actions?” Works like fajlami (facetiousness), titkari (sneering), bhua (fake) float with reference to the government.
The students and their vast numbers of supporters (parents, younger siblings, teachers, lawyers, activists, doctors, rickshaw pullers, housewives) have now assumed the mantle of sincerity (nuanced by a Gen Z humor that is beyond me). “We are ordinary students. We want politics out of our institutions,” is their consistent slogan. And their demands are now no longer about the quota. Instead they want Hasina to acknowledge and redress all the violent acts that she has sanctioned, they want ministers, specifically those of law, communication, and education gone from their posts, they want police officers to resign, they want every person who gave the order to shoot on sight to be tried for murder/manslaughter, they want every university official who welcomed the armed forces within their walls to be thrown out, they want justice and they want it now. Last night, August 2, a young man, voice trembling with passion, gave a speech in simple but direct Bangla, urging the nation to begin a movement of non-cooperation starting from August 4. While Hasina’s play of sincerity is seen to be a mockery of the nation and produces shudders, theirs commands respect, and demands our attention.
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