The Highwayman, Our Role Model

“[He] should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies." 

– Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

A COLLECTOR CALLS

Summer, 1994.

Our democracy was only four years old. The myth at the core of this religion was that brave students had overthrown the General: In fact, the donors had given him the push, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. (As The Economist observed: “…the cold war's end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms”.)

Still, I dreaded what lay in the future for us, for I reasoned that young students, armed by the parties, who believed that they could topple the government, would never again have any respect for law and order, or for anybody for that matter. And during the summer of 1994, I learned the truth of my prognostication first-hand.

My wife and I were living in a rented flat at Farm Gate, and my parents were in their one-story house at New Eskaton. All was well, until the day my father sold the property.

That very morning a student politician called Nanno rang the bell; Shahid, the servant, opened the gate, and recoiled from a sharp slap on the face administered by this Dick Turpin’s august hand. He came back into the house, weeping, terrified. Nanno swaggered into the driveway, sidekick in train, and was met by my father. My mother stood behind him, rooted. They noticed the butt of a gun protruding from his pocket.

My father came out, and stood at the door of the house. Nanno, a young man, probably eighteen years old, started calling him filthy names (“your mother’s anus” still sticks in my memory). When he had finished with his soliloquy, he threatened my father.

"Do you know that the boys would have killed you by throwing Molotov cocktails if it hadn't been for me?"

My father asked him what he wanted.

He wanted 200,000 Takas (back then, around $5,000).

"I can't give you that much money".

"Then they will kill you."

"Kill me, then." Long years of negotiations with militant and violent labour leaders had trained my father how to act, and not to act, in such situations. (He received “anonymous” letters threatening to kidnap his sons if he continued to lean on the trade unions in his job in the public sector.)

"No, no, we don't want to kill you!" He could feel the money slipping out of his grasp. "Why should we kill you?"

OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

The next two weeks were to be a veritable hell. My mother called me, and told me what had transpired. Farhana (my wife) and I packed some clothes, and went off to stay with my parents for the night.

Shahid was overjoyed to see us.

In the afternoon, Nanno came round, with his goons, young boys of about the same age. When I saw him, all I wanted to do was to--kill him. I wanted to kill him for making my parents go through this nightmare, for jeopardising their lives. I had once won an award in a shooting contest with a .22 rifle, and now I wished I had the rifle so that, perched on the roof of the adjacent building, I could pick off this monster like I had picked off crows on branches at an age more wanton.

We tried our contacts. My brother-in-law, who employed hockey sticks not to strike the ball, but more human targets,  had once been with the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), the student front of the Awami League (AL) to which Nanno belonged, and which was the source of his power. His cousin was also a member of the BCL, and he met Nanno that night. It was the Night of the Student Thugs.

Nanno was in an alcoholic stupor; he couldn't even recall whom he had tried to shake down, and so the attempt at influencing him by a fellow-member, a drinking buddy, proved fruitless (the drinking-buddy passed away this year, over gun-pulling with his own brother; he died of a heart attack).

My parents were close to two members of the Awami League, Justice (retired) Debesh Bhattacharya and his wife, Chitra Bhattacharya, who was to be MP after the next election that would bring the Awami League to power (these threats were, incredibly enough, being made when the AL was the opposition! This was a foretaste of what would happen when the thugs would come to power).

(Picture Scanned from Bangladesh Observer, February 2 2006) 

Debesh Bhattacharya’s conversion to “democratic and human rights” appears to have been half-hearted. Incarceration for his Marxist beliefs and actions (1949 - 1951) in what was then East Pakistan disappears from this announcement: my mother would often tell us how my maternal grandfather, a police officer, would arrange to have him meet with his wife in jail in the town of Mymensingh. Both sons studied in Moscow, the elder a firebrand Marxist before 1990, married a Russian woman, Irina Bhattacharya. The days of dialectical materialism and proletarian dictatorship left behind, he’s now an avid student of Smith, Hayek and Friedman. 

It was only later that I had enough leisure to ponder the fact that these two people--the retired judge who had sat on the highest court of the land, and his distinguished wife--were allied to a party that drew its funds with the agency of students-turned-thugs: and this was no secret. Everybody knew that the parties employed the services of muscle men--more like muscle boys--to extort money. But what were an alleged gentleman and lady doing with these people?

The Bhattacharyas were thick as thieves with the Awami League (the “lady”, a “rights activist”,   would be MP from a reserved seat by selection among the thirty women members); and, they were our family friends, but they couldn’t--or wouldn’t--help my parents. My father called a party apparatchik, hoping to be let off paying the "tax". He was informed, in no uncertain terms, that the tax would have to be paid for part of it would be routed to the top. The private army, like Napoleon’s, lived off the land. 

The amount to be had from my father was a paltry sum; but these were early days: democracy was only four years old. Over time, five-figure extortions would yield to seven- and eight-figure shakedowns.

Nor were these revelations: everyone knows about the use of student thugs in politics. Quondam president and chief justice Shahabuddin Ahmed observed that “students are getting guns instead of education.” “He reiterated his stand against the ‘political use of students and urged the students to sever connections with the political parties’ (The Daily Star, July 11, 2000).” He became enormously popular for his ineffective jeremiads. Another former president, A. Q. M.  Badruddoza Chowdhury, thundered, “Students are armed to punish the opposition and we strongly condemn such acts (The Bangladesh Observer, March 30, 2005)”.

A PRIVATE ARMY

I then decided to take matters into my own hands. I knew some trusted people, and my parents, my wife and I drove out to see them at their village a few miles from Dhaka, the capital.. I spoke to my man, and a meeting was arranged at my flat. 

They came in four motorbikes, driving terror into the hearts of the security guards at my apartment building. They were the real McCoy--hired guns!

It was a Hobbesian all against all.  

My parents were in my flat, and my father and I spoke with the blood-shot little militia I had put together. They were murderers; for the right price, they would kill anybody without a subsequent thought.

They were decent, too.

One of them--half-drunk--heard my wife making tea in the kitchen, and he went out to tell her not to bother because they drank nothing milder than whiskey!

I felt powerful with these blokes, my posse,  around. I could see them blowing away Nanno and his boys in a blaze of bullets--if they caused trouble! But the feeling didn't last long.

My father declined their assistance--to my disappointment, and to his credit. We were back to square one.

Now, I recall certain events in my life associated with the subject of student politics. For instance, there was my uncle, retired Major General M. Khalilur Rahman. I remember right after the resignation of General Ershad asking him about the evil of student politics. I remember his reply to this day:

"There's nothing you or I can do about it."

The late Major General M. Khalilur Rahman, ensconced over a newspaper, at our home. 

Well, he was one person who did a great deal to promote student violence: he negotiated General Ershad's overthrow, acting as a go-between with the students on the one hand, and the General, on the other.  At one stage, Ershad had wished to parley (apparently Sheikh Hasina was unwilling for the strongman to resign): my uncle proudly told us in our living room how he had refused the offer. (The rumour was that the strongman and the political heir had a sub rosa financial quid pro quo, explaining why in 1987, when Ershad had been corralled by the student pols, the movement mysteriously evaporated). 

Ershad, in mufti, in his living room 

"There's nothing you or I can do about it" will forever ring in my ears. There's little we can do against evil individually, but we don't have to promote it actively, just because foreign donors, who won't be living in our country, insist on it.

But most of all, I remember my father's friend, Dr. Muzaffer Ahmed, Ph.D from the University of Chicago, a graduate student at the Sorbonne, a scholar who had made his mark in the west, teacher, and later, director at the Institute of Business Administration, one of the most respected figures in the country.

I used to revere him, and hang on his every word. Then one evening he and Mrs. Rowshan Jahan, his wife (a PhD in English literature from the same university), paid us a visit, and the subject of student politics came around (this was before the shakedown described above).

Both husband and wife--equally highbrow--were solidly in favour of student politics. When my wife and I mentioned the ruined lives, they shrugged off the problem: "The students can always go back to class." Yet, being an economist, Dr. Ahmed should have known how difficult it is for lower-middle class parents to get their children through university in the first place; and then to lose a son, perhaps the only male breadwinner-to-be after the father's retirement, by murder from other student pols, to student politics and criminality. For not all student politicians got to be ministers.

Fine. The professor and his wife believed in the inherent wisdom of students (odd view for an educationist) and the propriety of their getting into politics at a tender age. After all, in 1952, so goes the nationalist mythology, a handful of brave students were mowed down by the police when they defended their right to use their mother tongue. The second mythology stems from the valiant student movement that brought Field Marshal Ayub Khan to his knees in 1969 (never mind that the students were rooting for a demagogue who brought unimagined disaster on the nation, and then went on to starve 1.5 million of the loyal voters to death as first prime minister of a liberated country). These are the myths. Fine.

One can criticise a man for holding obnoxious views, but to be able to label him immoral he would have to contradict himself. He would have to act contrary to his own precepts. And this, the very next morning, the good professor proceeded to do.

A TALE OF TWO STANDARDS

I get up late, and I remember Dr. Ahmed nearly waking me, having come up to my bedroom to speak. I rushed into the living room after changing hastily. Something had agitated him. It was the fact, discovered only an hour ago, that his son (who came in tow) had failed the admission test at Notre Dame College. Those who can't get into Notre Dame try to get into the rival college, Dhaka College. But it was well-known that Dhaka College was a factory for turning out student politicians, especially those belonging to the BCL, the Bangladesh Chatra League, and at the tender age of sixteen. The professor didn't want his son to be embroiled in student politics, it seemed.

I knew some of the priests at Notre Dame College, and Dr. Ahmed asked me to put in a word for his son. My wife and I were stunned. What kind of man would laud other people's children entering politics, and be horrified at the very prospect of his own son doing the same?

That very evening, after work, I went down to Notre Dame College. Fr. Banas and I sat talking in a room at Mathis House. I urged him to accept Dr. Ahmed's son--I mentioned that he was a great scholar, and his son would make the college proud, and other assorted rubbish. 

Fr. James T. Banas, csc, came over for lunch 

Fr. Banas knew about my interest in student politics, and he had related to me how the college had kept student politics off campus: the first prime minister's son, Sheikh Kamal, had personally interfered with police duty, telling the cops to leave the benighted campus after his thugs had cut the power. This had been in the early '70s.  The fathers, in cassocks, confronted the boys, and then Fr. Peixotto, who was vice-principal at the time (the principal was out of the city), entered into negotiations with the leader and a police officer. The latter backed every demand made by the former, and Fr. Peixotto went along. Why? Because the priests had decided they would leave the country the next day rather than run a college as an appendage to the ruling party. The boys sensed this, and never came again.

After the incident, for several years, Fr. Peixotto set up ballot-boxes for elections to the college students' union: not a single boy voted! They had clearly perceived the dangers of "civil society" to their education and their future--the elite boys go to Notre Dame, and letters of recommendation from the priests open many a university door in the United States. "Good" boys don't get into politics. And this was how Notre Dame College kept student politics off the campus.

After I described the argument over student politics with Dr. Ahmed and his wife, Fr. Banas and I sat in silence, looking at the floor, our heads hung in shame: the leading educationist of the nation had displayed a dangerous lack of character.

The boy got in--such was the prestige commanded by Dr. Ahmed. 

When he passed away, Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB) Executive Director Iftakharuzzaman told bdnews24.com, "It's an irreparable loss for the country." "He had devoted his entire life to the development of the nation," he said and added, "He will be remembered for his contribution to the fight against corruption and establishing good governance." The TIB is not above a Homeric confection of legends and myths. 

The reader must have surmised by now why the thought of going to the police never even occurred to me--or to my parents. The police would never come between a student politician and his victim: indeed, it made every sense for them, in such a situation, to side with the former, and make some money. One couldn't blame the police.

My father negotiated his way out of the ordeal: he had to pay, but less than what the kid had wanted. The kid even robbed the poor middleman in the transaction, who called my father, blubbering into the phone. The place was, however, sold, and my parents moved to an apartment building.

A LOYAL FAMILY

During this awful interlude, I was delighted by one thing: my father had sworn never again to vote for the Awami League. Now, I thought to myself, now he will come to his senses and give up the blind loyalty for the party!

I was wrong.

My parents grew more loyal--if that was possible--than before the incident. It was as if the event had never taken place. Now I realise why the humiliated members of the communist parties were more faithful than the others. I could not explain it--but I could, for the first time in my life, see that it happens. My entire extended family, who had been helpless spectators in the shakedown, continued to be loyal Awami Leaguers, as these people are known.

I ask myself today, what would sap their loyalty completely? I realise that even if the party killed me--their son--they would continue being loyal. This is the very antithesis of family values that are part of our Muslim culture. Thus, the import of democracy has pervaded even the intimate recesses of our family life.

But perhaps I have been privileged in a perverse fashion: I have lived to see, first-hand, how an entire society goes mad, and loses all humanity--some in the pursuit of money and careers, and others, like my mother and father, out of a mysterious love for an idea from hell.

As to Nanno's fate, the last I learned of him was from a newspaper report. After the military took over, he was finally arrested: "Official Sources said Shawkat Hossain Nanno was wanted by Ramna police in seven cases, including murder." The headline read: "Younger brother of Liaquat held in City."

TO THE VICTOR, THE SPOILS 

 

Nanno jailed by the military government of 2007-8 (Scanned from Bangladesh Observer, March 24 2007)

Liaquat Hossain had been a known (“listed top terror” (sic)) yakuza for the Awami League; however, when Nanno came knocking softly on our door, and slapping the servant, and greeting my father with expletives instead of salam, the Muslim salutation for an elder, his brother was doing time in prison. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) was then in power, so he was probably behind bars for political reasons. One notices, with a shiver, the brothers’ respective territories--Hatirpool, Ramna. The younger brother inherited the elder brother's calling, like the Corleones. Nanno was wanted for homicide; extortion was a mere peccadillo. 

A partial profile of student thugs appears in Lawrence Ziring’s Bangladesh: From Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study (Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press Limited, 1994, p 188). Page after page, Ziring describes the opposition-inspired hartals (“strikes-cum-blockades enforced by partisan thugs” was The Economist’s tortured definition) taking their toll on lives and property, young boys obeying the behest of two crazed females, the dynasties,  making bombs and molotov cocktails, ignorant of our true history (pp 162-4). Based on a narrow sample of seventy-five student leaders of Dhaka University in 1983-4, Ziring drew the boilerplate, sanitised, mythologised caricature of the student pol, the result of asking these students to self-report.  

“Pulsating with energy, provoked by the world around them, provided with the required sustenance, intelligent enough to judge, evaluate and offer guidance, strong on commitment, and consumed by enthusiasm, they enter politics with the dedication of crusaders.” 

He may be a murderer, but he does love his mother.

We’ve seen the horror with which the padres, parents and students regard student politics. In our Muslim-Asian culture, the ideal student burns the midnight oil--not motor cars in hartal hours. While no philosopher of education himself, certainly no Plato nor Rousseau but an army officer, General Ershad exhorted these young people to swot  for exams, articulating a hoary Islamic as well as Asian value. Predictably, no lovers of sophia, they cocked a snook at the man in khaki. For playing hooky carries a price: ignorance. Had these know-alls looked around, they would have noticed the modernising role played by men in khaki in Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia….Not to mention the starvation meted out to millions by our earlier civilian government, an open-and-shut case of autogenocide. Ziring makes an illuminating observation: “Bangladesh's universities were only marginally concerned with producing scholars or professionally trained functionaries for the private and public sector; they were better situated to process embittered generations of politically aroused but seldom satisfied citizens (p 184)”. Not exactly the Lyceum, then. 

(We may aver that the manifest function of the university here is to teach, but the latent function is insurrection.) 

And, as Eric Hoffer pointed out, the former type does not participate in mass movements; it’s the latter, burdened with what he brilliantly terms “the unwanted self” who constitutes the true believer: “...a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, (New York: Harper, 2010), p 12).”

And “the required sustenance”, as my subsequent interviews with these boys (at age 15, in 1987, exactions paid for pipe guns and cocktails) and numerous newspaper reports attest, came from extortion of the kind practised by our Dick Turpin, Nanno. 

I had once wanted to kill Nanno: today, I feel terribly sorry for him. A young man who could have made something of his life, and who was inveigled by the party into a criminal career, was to spend the rest of that life in prison. However, one could argue that he was lucky: for between 2001 and 2019, eight hundred eighty-eight student politicians have died, mostly in intra-party gangland wars over sharing of the swag. To the victor, the spoils. 

Headlines screaming murder

Take careful note, though, of the precipitous drop in student pol murders while the army stayed in power (2007-8) and extortion and lawlessness subsided: To the state had been restored the Weberian legitimate monopoly on violence.  

At least, Nanno was alive. Of course, he may be awarded the death penalty, and then justice would be done.

Or would it?

Family Diary (2007): unremembering what might have happened thirteen summers ago

THE SUMMING UP

Bangladesh’s democratic transition produced two private armies that live off the land. My family encountered one early in their career. This was the story of embattled parents and their children. 

The exploitation of boys by the ruling party for political purposes, especially political violence, has been rationalised: the current one-party state has finessed the Soviet “agitprop” to suit local tastes, and the Komsomol has become a model, indoctrinating children as young as seven. 

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