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Today marks the seventy-fifth birth anniversary of Badruddin Umar.
   Our foremost Marxist-Leninist theorist-activist-historian-pedagogist and our most fearlessly vocal intellectual engagé, Badruddin Umar serves as an example of how commitment, conviction, courage and a cause––or how gnosis and praxis––come to inform and influence one another in the service of our people’s struggle for liberation. Thus Umar can be readily identified as an exceptional figure in our country where the mainstream political culture––to use Umar’s own words, the ‘lumpen bourgeois political culture’––has not only revealed its characteristic hollowness and ideological bankruptcy but also its decidedly and incurably anti-people character and content. Of course Umar himself has already theorised, with superb rigor, the (de)formation of the national ruling class in Bangladesh, suggesting time and again––to use a Third World poet’s voice from another context and another register––that ‘progress is history’s dirty joke.’
   But Umar’s own theoretical and analytical interventions accompanied by his activism––uncompromisingly combative as they all are––keep our hope alive in the power and resources of people’s movements and struggles for a revolutionary social transformation. It is Umar’s firm contention–– exemplified repeatedly in his massive corpus of written works––that none but the people themselves, not just a few leaders, change and make history. Thus, proclaims Badruddin Umar with his characteristic ardentia verba: ‘Nothing can stop a people’s movement once it erupts to change the course of human history.’
   But who are the people for Badruddin Umar? And who are the people in Bangladesh at a time when the noisy mainstream political parties––high and even overdosing as they are on mere electoral agendas for grabbing personal power––have not only brutally relegated our people to a peripheral space but also reduced them to oft-repeated rhetorical ploys or flourishes, evacuated of meaning in the last instance? For Umar, of course, the answer is distinctly pronounced and relentlessly relayed: the people in question are none but workers and peasants themselves.
   And those workers and peasants precisely constitute the forces of history, or the agents of change, that have involved and engaged the entire horizon of Umar’s work––in fact, his almost entire life.
   The life of a revolutionary: And, indeed, that life is the life of a revolutionary, the life of a dedicated communist, alive as he has been to the deep specificities of his own local site of struggles, while at the same time remaining attentive to issues and concerns that are global in scope and range––issues and concerns that continue to affect the lives of workers and peasants in the world at large. Umar is an internationalist.
   And today––on Badruddin Umar’s birthday––I vividly recall what two of my favourite writers and my friends, who are no longer physically with us, kept saying about Badruddin Umar. They are our leading fiction writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias and our powerful creative writer-thinker Ahmed Sofa. Elias, who worked closely with Umar, asserted with utmost enthusiasm, ‘Umar has taught us how not to be communal. And it is Umar who has revealed to us the true meaning of work and struggle for a cause.’ Sofa, in a different context and in response to Umar’s magisterial work on our Language Movement (I will take up this work later), commended Umar thus: ‘I am fortunate to have been born in the era of Badruddin Umar––the Umar of Purba Banglar Bhasha Andolon.’ I also recall my conversation with Aijaz Ahmad––the famous Marxist cultural critic from India and the author of In Theory––who told me in Dhaka back in 1994 after he had met Umar briefly: ‘Umar? An outstanding man!’ And after having read the text of his inaugural address delivered at an international conference held in Mumbai a few years ago, the Filipino revolutionary Jose Maria told his comrade Mendoza Aguilar who reported to me thus in the United States: ‘Umar speaks like a true revolutionary.’ And I can cite numerous others.
   But it is unfortunate that, his massive contributions notwithstanding, Umar’s work has not yet been adequately evaluated; while, of course, it is also perfectly understandable that Umar has a whole host of detractors at a time when anti-revolutionary and anti-liberation elements, including certain liberals, prevail and predominate with a vengeance in our country.
   Badruddin Umar was born on December 20 in 1931 in the town of Bardhaman in West Bengal. He was educated at Dhaka and Oxford Universities. In fact, he received his honours degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford. Umar began his career as a university teacher. He first taught philosophy at Dhaka University on a temporary basis. And, then in 1963, when he was only 32, Umar joined Rajshahi University as the founder-chair of its department of Political Science. He was also a founder of the department of Sociology at the same university. His interdisciplinary intellectual background was thus formed at a relatively early stage of his intellectual career.
   And the mid-1960s marked the period––a turbulent and heady period during which all kinds of decolonisation and national liberation movements, mostly inspired by Marxist-Leninist principles, were taking shape and gathering momentum across Asia and Africa––during which Badruddin Umar made his interventions as a highly charged, historically grounded, and politically engaged writer with the publications of his three remarkable works––Sampradayikata (Communalism, 1966), Sanskritir Sankat (The Crisis of Culture, 1967), and Sanskritik Sampradayikata (Cultural Communalism, 1969).
   It is important to emphasise here that the aforementioned three books are all groundbreaking interventions that arguably, for the first time, acutely theorise in our contexts the dialectics of the political valences of culture and the cultural vectors of politics vis-à-vis the phenomenal forms of ‘communalism.’ Indeed, no other theorist has taken up the question of communalism––while accentuating a historically specific interplay between colonialism and communalism itself––in ways in which Badruddin Umar has done it. In short, Badruddin Umar is a first-rate, indeed an outstanding, theorist of communalism in our part of the world.
   But to say that Umar is just a theorist of communalism in our specific contexts is by no means adequate. At a time when there was a strong need in the 1960s for a theoretical framework within which Bengali nationalism could be grasped in all its possible configurations and contours, Umar’s books in question also made significant intellectual contributions to the growth of Bengali nationalism itself. In fact, to call him an early theorist of Bengali nationalism is certainly a right move in the direction of characterising part of his work.
   Political activism: And, indeed, it was during this very period that Umar’s anti-colonial, liberationist antagonism to the Pakistani government became increasingly pronounced and sharp. That antagonism prompted Umar to sacrifice his otherwise extremely productive and promising university career, and to devote his entire time and even his entire life to his intended political work for the working-class folks and peasants in Bangladesh. This is indeed an exemplary story––and a rare one at that––of how an Oxford-graduate and a university teacher radically transformed himself into a full-time political activist in the interest of the people themselves––’the toiling masses in particular,’ as Umar would say.
   And Badruddin Umar realised early on that theory without practice is simply vacuous; that Marxism without organisations is just academic hot air. In 1969, the fierce and uncompromising and determined Umar––who was already amply armed with Marxist theory, and who of course was by no means made to be a ‘traditional intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense––joined the then East Pakistan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). Also, from February 1970 to March 1971, Umar ably edited the mouthpiece of the East Pakistan Communist Party––Saptahik Ganashakti. Umar’s editorial tour de force––his historic role for that matter––was immediately evident in a range of theoretical and historical issues he had traversed with unusual theoretical acumen and commendable political astuteness, particularly––if not exclusively––vis-à-vis the problems and prospects of communist movements in the then Pakistan.
   But, during our Liberation War of 1971, Umar fiercely opposed the line of the party itself, submitting two historic documents. He soon resigned from the party in December 1971. Since then he has remained variously active in reconstructing the communist movement in our part of the world, while he has also contributed significantly to building progressive cultural movements in our country. He was president of both Bangladesh Krishak Federation (Bangladesh Peasant Federation) and Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir––the country’s oldest organisation of progressive writers, intellectuals, and cultural activists. Currently he is President of Jatiya Mukti Council (National Liberation Council).
   Unusually productive and prolific as he is, while noted for his intellectual and political energy, Badruddin Umar has hitherto authored nearly a hundred books and countless articles. The scale, scope, and reach of his interests and engagements are simply staggering. And by no means do I claim to offer a comprehensive evaluation of Umar’s wide-ranging work, given particularly the limits or exigencies of space here. However, I intend to tabulate and underline only a few high points of his work rather quickly in the following section.
   Theoretical contribution: Despite his vast swathes of writings, one can certainly catalogue at least some of Badruddin Umar’s characteristic theoretical and thematic preoccupations pursued to varying degrees over the last four decades during which he has been exemplarily steadfast in his commitment to the democratic and socialist transformation of class society. Some of those preoccupations, then, include: the class question in our part of the world and for that matter the historical formations of our ruling classes and other classes in Bangladesh; the theoretical questions of hard politics itself, informed as they all are by Marxism-Leninism as a rich body of dialectically engaged and interventionist analytic apparatuses and practices; the ‘political physics’ (to use the philosopher John Potevi’s by-now-pretty-handy term) of mass movements, including peasant, working-class, and national movements themselves; the rise of not only fundamentalism but also religious fascism in India and Bangladesh; and the ruthlessly demystifying and devastating ideology-critiques of the lumpen bourgeois political culture in Bangladesh.
   And the catalogue in question can certainly be extended to include other topics and issues as well. Those issues, for instance, include: the political economy and culture of capitalism on both global and local scales; the problems and prospects of world socialist movements as well as the problems and possibilities of reconstructing communist movements in Bangladesh; the phenomena of militarism and military dictatorships in the Third World; the criminalisation of politics, business, and even law itself; the politics, ideology, and political economy of education and pedagogy; education movements; the role of intellectuals and writers; the politics of culture and the culture of politics; the question of national culture; the language question as a mass politics; issues of religious-ethnic-linguistic minorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere; the women question; even ecology and environment; certainly the entire political, economic, and cultural histories of the Indian subcontinent and Bangladesh; the credit-fetishising poverty-business of the world-famous micro-shudkhor Dr Muhammad Yunus; and of course imperialism and ‘globalisation’ in their various manifestations, including their historical and phenomenal forms.
   And indeed one can keep lengthening the above catalogue––which is indeed far from being exhaustive––while citing numerous titles from Umar to account for his reach and range and even rigor of his engagements. And one can certainly cite his relatively recent work––his two-volume work titled The Emergence of Bangladesh––a work that deals with the trajectories and histories of class struggles in our parts of the world since 1947; the genesis and growth and effects of Bengali nationalism; and of course the rise of Bangladesh itself as a separate and sovereign nation-state in the world.
   The monumental work: But any discussion or overview of Umar’s work is bound to remain unjustly inadequate without at least some attention to his monumental, pathbreaking, three-volume historiographical work called Purbo Banglar Bhasha Andolon o Tatkalin Rajniti (The Language Movement in East Bengal and Contemporaneous Politics). It is here where one can underline Badruddin Umar’s contributions as a historian, as a historiographer (historiography has to do with the very politics of writing itself). But to say that Umar is an important historian of our Language Movement is only a slender acknowledgement of his actual achievements.
   In fact, Badruddin Umar’s contributions primarily lie in mobilising for the first time in our country a particularly radical and organically sustained approach that sees history itself from below or that sees the people themselves––workers and peasants in particular––as the true protagonists of history. Running against the grain of traditional, bourgeois, elitist, and colonialist historiographies, Umar’s work for the first time empirically, historically, and analytically reveals that the Language Movement is not just a movement of some middle-class leaders or enthusiasts, but a movement of the masses, a movement in which their liberationist and emancipatory consciousness manifested itself in some form.
   Umar himself puts the case thus: ‘The total character of the Language Movement was shaped by not only the aspirations and the struggles of the Bengali middle-class but also by the struggles of the peasants , workers, and other sections of the working people. For this reason the Language Movement contained elements both of bourgeois nationalism as well as the aspirations of the toiling masses. And this gave the Language Movement a certain democratic character which remained unsurpassed during the subsequent political developments in East Bengal.’ Mark Umar’s characteristic Marxist-Leninist accent falling on the very question of totality itself, tempered by acute historical specificities and situational concreteness––qualities that indeed characterise most of his oeuvre, noted also as it is for clarity and cogency and charge that Umar can effortlessly bring together in his attempts to capture and stimulate his readership. Activism itself is organic to Umar’s substance and style––both. And reading Umar, one finds the famous Gramscian contention reinforced: that even style itself is political and ideological.
   One can go on and on charting the manifold itineraries and contributions of Badruddin Umar. My purpose here, admittedly, has not been to produce a full-length analytical essay on Umar, but to provide a quick overview of his life and his work––an overview that I think is necessary for the members of our new generation at a time when bourgeois politics is clearly and unprecedentedly crisis-ridden. But every overview is inadequate and even highly selective. But I have plans to come up with a book on Umar, since I have realised that his contributions as an intellectual and political activist have gone by and large unnoticed.
   Personality and character: Let me end now with a few observations about Umar’s personality and character. Unusually courageous and uncompromising and principled as he has always been, Badruddin Umar has never sought in his life power in the establishment and cheap comfort in his life. Simplicity and straightforwardness and honesty are the hallmarks of Badruddin Umar. And, also, mark this: it is none but Badruddin Umar who could reject, as he did, prize after prize, and the ‘prestigious’ ones at that, including the Bangla Academy Prize and the Ekushe Padak, for instance, telling us rightly that prizes are never innocent vis-à-vis the power of bourgeois institutions. Badruddin Umar thus turns out to be a classic threat to all those sell-outs, all those corrupt intellectuals, who never tire of licking the boots of either major generals or even third-rate bureaucrats in our country. And certainly he is a model of oppositionality, integrity, and dignity in a country where compromise and opportunism continue to be deemed the qualities of the ‘fittest’ and the ‘smartest.’
   Finally, what is most important for me––as I had the privilege of working with Umar rather closely in my capacity as the acting general secretary of Bangladesh Lekhak Shibir––is Badruddin Umar’s dream, alive and untrammelled as it is by odds and adversaries: the dream of a Bangladesh where its people are totally liberated from all forces of exploitation and oppression.

NEW YORK: With the near final collapse of its much-vaunted ‘coalition of thewilling,’ the Bush administration is looking for a way out of Iraq that protects US corporate interests and Bush’s reputation. As Britain, Poland, and Italy recently announced they would begin phased or complete withdrawal of their military contingents from Iraq, the Bush administration has suddenly become very isolated on the war issue.
   Republican strategists in Congress and the administration are scrambling to find a way out of the war without conceding they may have been wrong in the first place. The Democratic Party has also concluded that getting the Iraq war off of the agenda is ideal for their chances of regaining the presidency in 2008.
   The Democrats are divided, however, between a section of pro-war elites who have sided all along with the administration and the sizeable contingent of key antiwar Democrats in Congress who refused to authorise the war in 2002 and who campaigned in 2006 on antiwar pledges. Neither party, however, has definitively made ending the war and bringing all US troops as rapidly as possible an immediate and urgent goal.
   The bi-partisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) was established as a reflection of this political inertia and was assigned the task of preparing recommendations that would be acceptable to this disarray.
   The ISG’s analysis of the situation and its 79 recommendations for a ‘way forward’ were released on Wednesday, December 6. The report criticised the Bush administration’s dishonest reports about the levels of violence in Iraq, confirming suspicions that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its policy aims.
   The report blamed the Iraqi government for failing to strengthen security and predicted a bleak outcome in terms of a potential US military victory.
   Some of the key recommendations included opening talks with regional powers, including Syria and Iran, beginning a partial withdrawal of US troops by January 2008, and sustained efforts to resolve the Israel/Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution. Deep on the list of recommendations was a proposal to privatise Iraq’s oil industry and open it to foreign investment, while disingenuously claiming that the US doesn’t seek to control Iraq’s oil.
   
   The peace movement responds
   Though the report presented by the ISG is a sharp criticism and rejection of the Bush war policy, its recommendations simply ‘continue the occupation in a new form,’ said Hany Khalil, organising coordinator of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest antiwar coalition in the US.
   During a telephone press conference earlier this week, spokespersons for UFPJ criticised the report for failing to provide a truly new direction in US policy on the Iraq war. Phyllis Bennis, a co-founder of UFPJ, pointed out that the report is a reflection of the weakness of the Bush administration and the failure of its war policy, but, she added, ‘despite the hype, there is a great deal missing.’
   Bennis said that the ISG’s report and recommendations are aimed at getting the war off of the front page in time for the November 2008 presidential elections without actually ending the war.
   ‘The report is not a set of new ideas to end the war. It is an attempt to transform the war into a sustainable occupation,’ she argued.
   She pointed out that the recommendations included in the report, though calling for withdrawal of thousands of combat troops, also call for embedding troops in Iraqi military units and keeping tens of thousands in place – as much as 70,000 – in Iraq.
   Antiwar activist Tom Hayden added that while it is clear that the ISG’s report was a response to the elections last November, widely regarded as a referendum on ending the war, the proposals ‘look a bit like the endgame of the Vietnam War: turn things over to the Iraqis and blame them for the collapse.’
   Hayden predicted that despite its drawbacks one positive benefit of the report will be the ‘society-wide discussions’ on the need for a political solution to the war, adding that the peace movement has to be ready to make specific alternative proposals.
   Nancy Lessin, an organiser of Military Families Speak Out, an organisation that claims more than 3,000 members from military families in the US who oppose the war, described the report as a ‘giant step sideways rather than a step forward.’
   The ISG’s plan for partial withdrawal will not effectively bring regional powers to the diplomatic table and will put remaining troops at greater risk than they already are, Lessin stated.
   ‘The best solution,’ she insisted, ‘is getting all US troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. The real way forward stems from the November 2006 elections when the people of the US made it clear that they want the war to end.’
   Lessin called on Congress to use its authority to cut off funding for the war and urged support for proposals in Congress that would eliminate funding for combat operations except to protect troop withdrawal.
   Leslie Cagan, the national coordinator for UFPJ, added that the most important thing about the ISG report was that it has signalled that ‘this administration has been forced to retreat from its policy of ‘stay the course.’’
   But Cagan sharply critiqued the ISG recommendations. ‘We do not believe that the recommendations, if implemented, will lead to the things that need to happen in order to end the war. The most immediate thing that needs to happen is that the US must withdraw all of its troops.’
   Cagan added that provisions for permanent bases and advisers (as suggested by the ISG) are just another form of occupation.
   Cagan stated that UFPJ has called a march on Washington for January 27th in order to tell the incoming Congress that it must do its job and end the war. ‘Congress has the power to end the war. They control the money,’ she noted.
   ‘On November 7th, the voters gave Congress an unmistakable mandate for peace in Iraq – not for continuing the occupation in a new form,’ Cagan continued. ‘On January 27th, as Congress begins its work, United for Peace and Justice will bring that mandate for peace to Washington to press the new Congress to implement the voters’ will.’
   Cagan also stressed the importance of real reconstruction efforts as part of the US responsibility for its involvement in the war.
   Bennis also rejected the widely disseminated claim that US withdrawal would lead to increased levels of violence. ‘It’s already a bloodbath,’ she said.
   Anyone who claims to be able to predict with certainty what is going to happen after troop withdrawal is lying, she continued. ‘But we know what will happen if the troops stay.’ Iraqis will continue to be killed in large numbers, and US troops will also die and get injured.
   Because the presence of US troops helps provide cover for terrorist forces by legitimizing anti-occupation sentiments among a majority of Iraqis that favours violence against US troops, the best solution to curbing terrorism is to take away the occupation issue by withdrawing all of the troops, Bennis argued.
   It is possible that terrorist forces would then be isolated and be more easily corralled by future Iraqi government security efforts. Maintaining the status quo, however, ensures terrorists will continue their activities with popular support.
   Hayden also called for a serious examination of the personal and corporate interests behind the ISG report. Hayden cited James Baker and Vernon Jordan, two prominent members of the group, as having links to corporate interests directly involved in the war.
   Aside from his personal friendship to the Bush family, Baker’s investments in Texas oil companies and his relationship to Halliburton likely motivated his contributions to the ISG report. The report’s recommendation that Iraq privatise its oil industry as part of the peace plan, for instance, could be interpreted as a demand for the ‘multinational corporate takeover of the Iraqi oil industry,’ Hayden said.
   Hayden concluded that this recommendation is a ‘revelation that blood is being shed for oil.’
   
   Other views of the ISG Report
   The Council for a Livable World, a US-based group that advocates for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, described the ISG report as a good start, but added that ‘more needs to be done.’ It praised the call for more regional diplomacy, but is urging its supporters to ask Congress to call for troop withdrawal ‘sooner rather than later.’
   Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee remarked, ‘Last month, the voters threw the president’s Iraq policy overboard. Today (Dec. 6), the Iraq Study Group is throwing him a life raft. I truly hope that the President comes to his senses and concedes that we must drastically change course in Iraq.’
   Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the liberal Centre for American Progress and former Reagan appointee-turned anti-Iraq war spokesperson, criticised the report for failing to provide a real deadline for troop withdrawal. Korb added that the continued presence of 70,000 US troops would give the appearance of a continued occupation and would make regional diplomacy more difficult.
   In a press statement, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), the lobbying arm of the faith-based American Friends Service Committee, also levelled guarded praise at the ISG report. ‘The study group,’ stated FCNL, ‘has produced a document that points toward diplomacy and political processes as the way to address the deteriorating situation and to withdraw US troops.’
   But the recommendations fail to provide a definitive timetable for withdrawal. ‘The United States should send a clear message to the Iraqi people that it has no intention of remaining in Iraq indefinitely,’ concluded FCNL.
   Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine based in New York. He can be contacted at: jwendland@politicalaffairs.net

Butenis’s speech

The US ambassador to Bangladesh has got no right to ‘order’ the chief of caretaker government. Professor Iajuddin Ahmed is trying to implement the package proposal as per the Constitution and in order to stop countrywide political instability he called out the army. But still political parties continue to give ultimatum, etc. Without the cooperation from the political parties how is he supposed to hold a free, fair and neutral election?
   Amzad Hossain
   University of Dhaka

His supporters said he gave free-market to Chile and saved them from communism, I also believe in free-market, but it is a contradiction to think it is possible under a tyranny, where private agents competition is hugely biased by political favours and corruption.
   Also it is understandable that Pinochet has a huge support from the armed forces family since he gave to them several benefits over the rest of civilian population. That includes a retirement system quite different and more stable.
   Sabbir Khan
   Dhaka

If the Bangladesh workers are getting about 5 pence over an hour are they being underpaid by local standards? If the average wage is about that amount then at least they have employment and can feed their families. If they are being underpaid then they are being exploited by the firms mentioned. I would think that the wage they earn is probably a good wage for that area. You cannot blame major firms for finding the cheapest places to make goods. It is a part of being competitive.
   Amy Koen
   UK

Next on Quick Comments

a. AL, allies give 24-hour ultimatum to implement package proposal: Dawn-to-dusk hartal on Dec 21 (December 19, New Age, Front Page) b. JP, LDP forge electoral alliance with AL-led combine (December 19, New Age, Front Page) c. UTTARA SECRET MEET: Probe body wants departmental action against participants (December 19, New Age, Front Page) d. Task force starts grilling Guantanamo Bay returnee (December 19, New Age, Front Page) e. Libya sentences medics to death: A Libyan court has sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for knowingly infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6192599.stm)