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The observance of Ekushey yet once more ought to send out a message to all of us in Bangladesh. The message relates chiefly to what we, as citizens, as repositories of democratic political beliefs across the spectrum, should be doing about upholding the spirit we have come to associate with the Language Movement of 1952. The spirit, if we recall —- and recall we must —- was one geared towards a reassertion of Bengali rights and cultural values only five years into what we thought was our emergence as an independent people within the parameters of Pakistan. As the tragedy on 21 February 1952, and the circumstances around it, were to demonstrate to us, that assessment of our being a free people was based on some rather wrong assumptions. Our faith in democracy, our belief in tradition and our loyalty to our historical values had come under assault, which is why we needed to reassert them through a massive demonstration of the popular will on the streets of Dhaka and elsewhere fifty three years ago.
   The message today, therefore, is a simple and yet substantive one. It speaks of the great will and awareness of society that went into the struggle in defence of the Bengali language in 1952. But in a far bigger way, Ekushey was for us a powerful signal that as people with distinctive cultural traditions, we could not but prepare to free ourselves as a nation in the times to be. It was from such an understanding of our place in history that the nation’s political leadership initiated the movement for Bengali autonomy. The 1960s, from such a point of view, were clearly some of the more moving times in our lives. It was within this period that we were able to go into profound soul-searching, to come away with the definitive finding that in order to be able to give ourselves a political voice as a modern nation, we needed to be secular, democratic and therefore representative of all the good and decent that life in general symbolised. It is all these qualities that we need to struggle for anew in these extremely difficult times. Let us not pretend that a mere observance of Ekushey reinforces our hold on life and on history as a whole. The rising spate of criminality around us, the endemic corruption, the gradual slide of democratic tolerance among the nation’s political parties and the overall sense of deepening despair among the one hundred and forty million people of Bangladesh are pointers to an unwelcome truth — that our aspirations towards building a just, democratic and welfare-oriented society for ourselves is yet a dream. More ominously, the dream keeps receding, to a point where we fear a nightmare of monstrous proportions could soon be upon us.
   On Ekushey this year, therefore, the prayer must be one related to a forging of national unity across the frontier of political differences. We cannot forget that it was a united, unified and determined nation which went to war to free the land in 1971. With three million of our fellow Bengalis dead in the war, with two hundred thousand women molested and with thousands of villages and towns torched by the enemy and its local collaborators, we could not but go forth to build anew. For thirty four years we have been on a search to find ourselves. It will be unwise to think that we can spend an equal amount of time to consolidate ourselves as a happy, economically developed and politically mature society. On Ekushey, we ask our political leadership to recall the old spirit of 1952 and find the ways and means of rekindling it in us in these tumultuous, hugely disturbing times we live in.

Of shoes, tomatoes and eggs

An angry man tossed a shoe at Richard Perle in an American city a few days ago. The city was Portland and Perle, if you recall, happens to be one of the most ardent exponents of American military might around the world. Till recently, he was an adviser to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Put that in a simpler form. Richard Perle is a neo-conservative, one of a band of men and women in Washington responsible for much of the havoc we have all seen occur around us. But, of course, we do not appreciate that tossing of a shoe. Everything has a purpose to it, which causes us to infer that shoes are never made for tossing. They serve a useful purpose elsewhere and we all know that.
   But who will explain that to protesters? An angry man is, well, an angry man. You cannot make him see reason until he has cooled down. The rule is that he cools down in his own sweet time. We cannot help that. Back in the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, Dean Rusk got a bad taste of how much anger can be caused by bad policies. Rusk was a decent man, but on a trip to Latin America as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, he found that the anger meant for his president was being directed at him. Someone spat straight on his face. That was nasty. Rusk, from a sheer awareness of dignity, wiped it off and moved on. But not all men in public life are so tolerant. A few years ago, Britain’s deputy prime minister lost his temper at a man who had heckled and shoved him. For the next minute or two, the world was treated on television to a wrestling match between the politician and the heckler. It was comedy at its funniest. And all too often there are the sights of people hurling tomatoes and eggs at politicians whose views they do not particularly approve of.
   You might say it is all part of democracy, indeed of a large strain of public consciousness about issues that matter. You may be right. But, then again, there are reasons to worry. Disagreement does not have to be manifested in insult. A shoe or a tomato hurled at people is not always the best way of asserting political rights, is it?

Two events recently took place, which were almost poles apart, geographically and conceptually. One has a long pedigree and awesome financial power, the other is still making baby steps and relies on moral authority. The contrast is as stark as the confrontation between David and Goliath. As in the Biblical story, David is going to win but not because of his legendary marksmanship. Goliath has of late started showing chink in his armor which may stymie his hubristic postures. Paradoxically, David can take no credit or if at all very small credit for this unforeseen setback.
   It should be realized by now that David in this parable stands for Davos. It just held its annual gathering with world political leaders, business magnates, academics, journalists, writers, phianthvophers and handful of Hollywood celebes for five days, as it has been dong ritually every year in the Suiss Alpine town since 1971. The occasion was the World Economic Forum (WEF) which was founded the same year. The agenda included war and peace, poverty, debt relief, AID/HIV, international co-operation and state of the health of the world economy and what can be done to invigorate it. But the agenda item that adumbrated all these and was seen as the main catalyst was globalization. To the anti-capitalist radicals and starry-eyed ideals Davos, embodying the spirit of globalization’s exploitative ethos was a beta noire. They lost no time in organizing themselves to protest, demonstrate and disrupt the proceedings of what they considered as an elitist capitalist cabal. In their relenless and often violent opposition, the anti-globalisers, a loose ad hoc gathering of NGOs, civil right organizations and radical thinkers, challenged the assumptions and ideology of not only WEF, but also unleashed vitriolic attack against the World Bank, IMF and the WTO. Their greatest show of strength and most violent confrontation came in 2001 in Seattle where about 40000 protesters wreaked havoc on the WTO gathering. The World Social Forum (WSF) was born two years later in Port Allegre in Brazil, to give formal shape and an institutional structure to the anti-globalizers. WSF was dubbed as the poor man’s WEF (DAVOS), ready to call the WEF’s bluff. Since the founding of WSF it has strived to outshine and overpower WEFs shows glitzy and hype with spontaneous people power.
   Last fortnight 50000 anti-globalizers gathered in Porto Allegre, Brazil, in a gathering meant to counter the Davos summit of political, financial and business heavyweights. Children from five continents held aloft a banner that proclaimed: “Another world is possible”, as militants marched through the southern Brazilian city, marking the start of their six-day World Social Forum (WSF).
   The eclectic gathering of pacifists, environmentalists, libertarians, trade unionists and anti-establishment militants was timed to coincide with its nemesis, the World Economic Forum held thousands of kilometers (miles) away in the swank Swiss mountain resort of Davos.
   The more than 50,000 demonstrators set off in Porto Allegre, just a few hours after the opening of the Davos summit, which anti-globalization activists routinely denounce as a celebration of crass capitalism. Organizers said some 100,000 participants took part in the fifth annual WSF, which featured hundreds of workshops dealing with issues such as debt, poverty and development.
   In some cases the issues were highlighted in connection with the December 26 tsunamis that hit 11 south Asian countries. Participants observed a minute of silence for the more than 280,000 victimics of the devastating tidal waves. Beverly Keene of the Jubilee South group said the six billion dollars pledged by the leading industrialized countries for tsunami relief efforts in Asia were only a fraction of what major powers used for “war and destruction”.
   “It is outrageous compared, for example, with the annual US military budget of 400 billion dollars, or with the 200 billion dollars already spent in Iraq by the United States and other coalition members”, she said at a news conference. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, for his part, called for the unconditional scrapping of impoverished countries foreign debt. “The debt of the poorest countries is social genocide. Its elimination is an urgent necessity”, said Perez Esquivel.
   At the WSF more than 1,000 non-governmental Organizations appealed to world leaders to do more to battle poverty. They will launch a campaign to back the UN Millennium Development Goals to cut poverty by half by 2015.
   The vast majority of participants came from Brazil, the United States, France and Italy, but a significant number of Asian activists also were at the forum. The last WSF was held is Mumbai, in an attempt to make it a world wide movement.
   Whatever their considerable differences, most Devos Men and Women share at least one belief; that globalization–the unimpeded flows of capital, labor and technology across national borders–is both welcome and unstoppable. They see the world increasingly as one vast, interconnected marketplace in which corporations search for the most advantageous locations to buy, produce and sell their goods and services.
   As borders and national identities become less important, some find that threatening and even dangerous. In and essay last year in The National Interest titled “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite”, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington described Davos Man (a phrase that first got widespread attention in the 1990s) as an emerging global superspecies–and a threat. The members of this class, he wrote, are people who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. Huntington argues that Davos Man’s global-citizen self-image is starkly at odds with the values of most Americans, who remain deeply committed to their nation. This disconnect, he says, creates “a major cultural fault line .... In a variety of ways, the American establishment, governmental and private, has become increasingly divorced from the American people”.
   While his essay focused on the US, Huntington says his point is equally valid elsewhere. “The disconnect in other countries is greater because, to a much larger extent, the populace doesn’t share these values”, especially in non-Western societies. The implications of this for business, public policy and society are profound. If individuals feel no loyalty to any particular country, they could eventually seek to avoid paying taxes in a particular jurisdiction. They might become increasingly disinterested and withdraw from their local communities. And their business decisions could even be harmful to their countrymen.
   Some say they already are. Among the overwhelming majority of the world’s population–a backlash against the global elite can already by seen. In the U.S., it has taken the form of a vociferous debate about the outsourcing of call centers and technology jobs to Asia. In Continental Europe, it’s giving rise to new anxieties about a loss of economic and political control.
   In a new Time/cnn poll, 46% of those surveyed in France and 40% of those surveyed in Germany said globalization has been “mainly bad” for their country’s economy. And 62% of respondents in Britain, France and Germany agreed that some international businessmen and women “have profited unfairly from globalization”. The opponents of globalization used to be hippies with a bunch of signs. Now the feeling is that anti-globalization is more focused, more organized and more widespread. In other words, globalization–once perceived as something that makes poor countries poorer–is now seen as a phenomenon that makes rich countries poorer. With this perception shared between the erstwhile contestants differences of views are likely to narrow down. They may then reach the proverbial golden mean. Globalization to be welcomed by all has to be a positives-sum game.