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The capsize of MV Maharaj in the Buriganga on Saturday is one more of those stories of immense sadness we have through the ages become familiar with. But that would be one way of echoing our minister of inland water transport, a means by which we can excuse ourselves over our collective failure to prevent a recurrence of all the river disasters we have seen. The minister has described the tragedy on the Buriganga as an act of God. We hope he did not mean by that statement to shift responsibility away from himself and from those who ought to have ensured that the rules relating to river safety were in place. Most clearly, the fact is that the rules have once again been tampered with. The capsized vessel, we understand, had an overall capacity of carrying 200 passengers. In the event, there were as many as 300 people who were on it as it set sail for Chandpur late in the evening on Saturday. Now that one more inquiry committee has been set up, this one to tell the country about the circumstances leading to this newest of disasters, we can only hope that the report emerging out of the inquiry will see the light of day. But that again could end up being a forlorn hope for us since it has never been the good fortune of this country to be made acquainted with any of the reports prepared in the aftermath of similar accidents earlier.
   It is time someone at the highest perches of political authority took the matter of river accidents seriously. We do realise, of course, that there is much about nature in Bangladesh that is unpredictable, a fact which often turns even the best of disaster preparedness hollow. A major reason why the MV Maharaj sank on Saturday has to do with the sudden storm which came over it, a huge gust of wind which simply made it topple over. Given that the storm was rather unexpected, that indeed the meteorological authorities had made no forecast of bad weather, we understand why the vessel went down. Even so, the sheer scale of the tragedy, with as many as 120 bodies recovered so far (and it is a fair guess that more will be recovered and quite a good number may actually have been washed outward by the river current), is absolutely mind-boggling. It only serves as a harsh reminder to all of us that since 1977, there have been no fewer than 261 times when launches carrying people have gone to the bottom of the rivers. Altogether, in all this time, about 4,000 people have been left dead. That is where no amount of explanation, religious or philosophical, comes in handy. One simply cannot put the idea about that all these 261 accidents have been acts of God, for there was much about these that were caused by the callousness of men. The question comes up, therefore, as to whether the authorities are finally ready and willing to enforce the rules that have always been there about ensuring safety for people on the rivers. It is not acceptable that every time a boat or a launch goes down into the river, a few days of highly publicised activity on the recovery of bodies and vessels will be enough as a way of a purge of emotions in the collective consciousness.
   Let the minister in charge and his officers take their job seriously. The country does not expect them to announce stern measures in the aftermath of a disaster, only to back down in the face of defiance on the part of river vessel owners.

Democracy’s charm

The heart is cheered to no end when democracy anywhere is seen to be a thriving affair. It is when we watch politicians from rival camps engaging in conversation or joint work that we realise what modern politics is all about. The sight of former US presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton together making the rounds of tsunami-hit places in Indonesia and Sri Lanka is one of those wonderful hints of the huge degree of good democracy does to the world. Back in 1992, Clinton defeated Bush in a thrilling election; and yet the two men have now come together on a mission sanctioned by George W. Bush, the present occupant of the White House and son of George H.W., to offer succour to the tsunami-hit.
   In Britain, for all their jousting in Parliament, Tony Blair and Michael Howard have never let partisan politics come in the way of personal friendship. In neighbouring India, many have been the instances when Sonia Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee have shared a platform and greeted each other with folded hands. In Israel, even as Likud and Labour wage battle on policy, their leaders do not, in moments of national emergency, hesitate to come together in defence of the national cause. Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres today share power as prime minister and deputy prime minister. What better sight of a functioning, thriving democracy can you have than a country whose politicians uphold etiquette as a fundamental principle of political pluralism? In Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, having won an outright majority at the recent elections for his Thai Rak Thai party, has told his junior coalition partners he will not be having them in his new government. They have understood, and now plan to play their due role in parliamentary opposition.
   That is the way in which we expect the democratic process to function. Beyond parties, beyond ideologies, there is the abiding appeal of the bipartisan. In a democracy, accommodation is an underlying principle. Parties may win or lose elections, but within the ambience of governance, they are all winners when they cooperate with one another. When Ronald Reagan died last year, all living former presidents of the United States as well as the present president gathered to pay tribute to him. If this is not beauty, what is?

The question relates to writing — and being able to write without a mob or the ancient laws of statecraft hounding the writer out of town. Now, there is a whole array of views, or points of view, over which we disagree with Taslima Nasreen. But that certainly does not take away from her the right to be able to express her thoughts in the way we expect such thoughts to be articulated in a democratic atmosphere. For the past eleven years, though, Taslima Nasreen has been in exile. That is a most unfortunate part of a writer’s life. It does not have to happen that way, unless of course the one who writes chooses voluntarily to stay away from her own country. There are plenty of examples around us to demonstrate the nature of exile lurking in writers’ souls. Ernest Hemingway, though not in exile in that proper sense of the meaning, nevertheless chose to spend a very significant portion of his time abroad. In the years of the Cold War, a wide swathe of intellectuals from eastern Europe simply made their way to the West, where they prospered and became famous. In 1974, the Soviet authorities bundled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on to a plane and sent him off to the West, for he had become a very troublesome thorn in Moscow’s side. Twenty years or so later, the author of the Gulag chronicles returned home.
   The difficulty with the Taslima Nasreen case is that there are a lot of people out there standing ready to strike her down, physically, if she sets foot in her own country. The result of that fear or threat has been a long period of wandering for the young woman whose writing has always been a breath of fresh air to a generation of men and women eager for a demonstration of intellectual courage. It is immaterial as to whether or not you agree with her. The broad masses of her readers do, and then there are the handful who do not. But that surely is no criterion for anyone to judge the quality or content of her writing. Do not let go of the thought that a writer is not a politician and therefore is not taking part in a popularity contest. If Nasreen were ever tempted to judge her position through ratings on the opinion poll scale, she would find that she left a lot of people disturbed or feeling uncomfortable. The good thing about her is that she has never fallen for such histrionics. More importantly, from our point of view, it is only when a writer creates a disturbing or upsetting sort of situation for his or her readers that he or she is truly fulfilling the demands of writing. For what is writing if not the boldness to tell people that what they have believed in so long may not actually be true or logically acceptable? More to the point, it is the responsibility of a writer to induce fresh bouts of thinking, or reflection, in their readers. That precisely is what Nasreen has been doing since the early 1980s, when she moved into this risky territory of writing. And how has she been different? Let us just say that she has always had her own point of view on offer, in contrast to others who have generally fallen for a ceaseless repetition of clichés. In a world where bravery is fast receding from the life of the writer, Taslima Nasreen has in her lonely way kept our faith alive in the power of writing to bring about change in people’s intellectual dimensions.
   But that contribution of Nasreen’s is these days carefully being kept under the rug, even by those who have regularly claimed, with justification, fidelity to liberal intellectual beliefs. Taslima Nasreen has complained that Bangladesh’s progressive intellectual society has never displayed any great enthusiasm about her return to the country. She has lived in Europe, moving from place to place as it were. And she has spent time in America. Feeling the urge to be home, she has come closer to home, staying just outside its political parameters. In West Bengal, she has tried savouring something of the Bangladesh she has been compelled to stay out of in the past eleven years. And yet no one in this country, either from political as well as intellectual expediency or a fear about upsetting sensitivities, has ever made a public call about the need to have Nasreen come back home. Newspapers in Bangladesh have in most instances reported on her work and her travels, through making sure that she is described as a controversial writer. It makes you feel that Taslima Nasreen is a being from outer space. Or that she is one individual whose very presence on earth is detrimental to the future of the human race. But have you ever reflected on just what people mean when they describe individuals as controversial? Fundamentally, in our times the term ‘controversy’ has gone through much abuse. Controversy implies setting into motion a process of thought over which people do not agree or have a whole range of sharply divergent views to express. That is fine with us. But look a little deeper. A controversial writer is, more than anything else, a courageous writer. She is one who relates to us what she sees, which is that she observes the emperor for what he actually is. While the rest of us think that the emperor is wearing new clothes, people like Nasreen inform us, bluntly, that in fact the emperor is wearing no clothes at all. Small wonder, then, that our middle class minds go looking for sand to hide the face in.
   Let us go back in time a little. Some of the biggest damage done to free thought came from Rajiv Gandhi when in the late 1980s he decreed that Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses be banned. Gandhi’s act was of course motivated by the fear that the work could ignite a communal bloodbath on a scale unimaginable. He was not about to forget the carnage that was the 1984 murder of Sikhs in the aftermath of his mother’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards. But it was clearly a short-term view he was taking through banning Rushdie. The long-term idea should have been for the book to be displayed and sold in the open market in order for people to debate the contents and style of it. You will not find very many people who will appreciate Satanic Verses. It is a roguish book written in language that is meaningless and using images that do not enhance the state of literature. You can say the work is blasphemy. But is it not enough to say that it is bad, extremely bad literature? And yet this bad literature, thanks to Rajiv Gandhi and then Ayatollah Khomeini, turned Rushdie into an unlikely celebrity. Let us make something clear here first, which is that Salman Rushdie is and has been a good writer. But Satanic Verses remains one of the worst examples of modern literature, if indeed it is literature. The bigger point here is that Rushdie should have been in a position where we could all have challenged him academically on his knowledge of the Islamic faith, through much intellectual debate and discourse and thereby demonstrated to ourselves that there are good people, Muslims among them, who do not simply wish to end an argument through putting someone’s neck through the guillotine or the noose. But when Khomeini decided, in the infinity of his anything-but-wisdom, that the author of Satanic Verses deserved to die, he actually gave all Muslims around the world a bad name. That was unfair.
   And today it is unfair to think that Taslima Nasreen, by any stretch of the imagination one of the foremost writers in Bangladesh, must go on being a fugitive from her land. Politicians, including those who profess to be in the secular camp, have condemned her. The rabid right wing is of course still out there baying for her blood. It is all part of a pattern, this uncouth way of keeping a writer out of her land. When people of the progressive mould begin to think that a problem will simply go away only through ignoring it, when they reach somewhat the bad conclusion that writers in exile are individuals whom history will soon forget, they are engaging in a bout of beautiful delusion. They do not remember that in literature, in the wider territory of aesthetics, it is always advisable to let a hundred flowers bloom. You simply cannot stamp out one of the flowers only because it happens to be a deeper crimson than all the others around it.
   It is time for a serious rethink on Taslima Nasreen in exile.
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk