| EKUSHEY SPECIAL |
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Ekushey and the state of undemocracy
by Nurul Kabir  John Milton THIS is indeed a matter of pity that Bangladesh today is forced to observe Ekushey, or its language movement day, under a state of emergency – a political proposition that suspends the fundamental democratic rights of the entire population. It is pitiful on the part of the rulers that it continues to keep suspended the fundamental rights even on Ekushey, and that too, in the name of enhancing democratic rights of the people. It is equally pitiful on the part of the ruled, particularly the so-called democratic political forces outside power, that does not appear to have been adequately uncomfortable by the perpetuation of the emergency into Ekushey, which primarily symbolises the democratic passion for freedom. The other name of the state of emergency is nothing but the state of undemocracy. Languages, particularly the mother languages, have many things to do with freedom, democratic freedom that is, of the individuals, of the societies, and of the states. The language, the prime human instrument for expressing ideas, remains especially crucial for the fight against political establishments standing in the ways of democratic emancipation of individuals, societies and nations. While many of us aspire for the creative growth of individual persons with all their inherent human potential, we cannot at the same time ignore the fact that persons cannot grow to their full potential without democratising our societies and states that frequently impedes sovereign growth of the individuals. By democratisation of societies and states, we, therefore, mean retuning of such institutions with the core idea that they will remain in place to help individuals grow freely, of course without causing any damage to the collective interests of individuals, and not restrain the creative growth. In such a perceived situation, the societies and states must have the tenacity to pay heed, not just listen, to the members of the societies and states, and to do so the institutions have to honour the people’s inalienable right to the freedom of expression – a proposition that undemocratic political establishments hate to comply with. The reason that the undemocratic rulers lunch frequent attacks, both political and cultural, on the languages of the ruled is that they do not want a popular language, in other words, the most effective medium of the expression of popular thoughts and opinions, to survive – let alone flourish. The struggle for retaining the strength of a language is, therefore, inseparable from the struggle for democracy by a people speaking that language, and vice versa. The history of the Bangla language movement remains a glaring example to this effect. Bangladesh, or, as subaltern studies of history suggests, the country’s ‘ordinary’ masses, registered protest against the attempted linguistic hegemony of Pakistani ruling elite as early as in December 1947 – only a few months after the emergence of Pakistan in August the same year. The spontaneous protest against the rulers’ hegemonistic attempt to coerce Bangla, the language of the majority of the population of Pakistan of the time, out of the state’s cultural framework eventually grew into pervasive political agitations – thanks to the rulers’ insistence on Urdu, the language of a small ruling coterie, to remain the sole state language of Pakistan on the one hand, and mobilisation of the Bengali masses by the politically enlightened students against the Pakistani rulers’ undemocratic agendum on the other. The result was obvious: The rulers got defeated, by way of accepting Bangla, side by side with Urdu, as one of the state languages of Pakistan. The result was, however, achieved at the cost of a ‘terrible beauty’ born out of extraordinary sacrifices of certain ‘ordinary’ Bengali lives in February 1952. It is not surprising that the Bangla vocabulary, the vocabulary used by a fighting people, does not contain that many appeasing words meant for the rulers. Our Amar Ekushey, immortal February 21 that is, has meanwhile earned a universal significance, particularly after UNESCO declared the ‘day’ in 1999 as International Mother Language Day and urged the people across the continents to observe the day with due importance. Why should it be considered so important for the people across the globe to remember an event, and that too every year, that took place in a small town called Dhaka, which is located in the smallest periphery of the eventful world? Is it because the Bangla language movement in the early 1950s inspired a greater secular-democratic political movement, within the framework of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, leading to the emergence of a secular democratic sovereign state called Bangladesh in 1971? The answer will be a definitive no, because Bangladesh, however important the country could be for us, the 140 million Bangladeshis, bears hardly any significance – political or economic, let alone martial – in the world’s international state system of the day. Then, what gave our February 21 political event an international significance? Very simple. Underneath our nationalist cultural surface of the Bangla language movement, a local issue that is, flew the current of a politically universal human aspiration: The democratic right to the freedom of expression – the most important political right of a populace, Bengali or otherwise. Since democracy is primarily about governing a country on the basis of the unambiguous consent of the people, and since freedom of expression remains the most vital means of expressing consent/dissent on earth, and since people on earth can best express their hopes and aspirations in their mother tongues, Bangladesh’s Ekushey, the first organised political movement for the language rights known to the history of human civilisation, rightly attracted positive attention of the democratically-thinking world. Hence, our local ‘mother language day’ eventually becomes International Mother Language Day. Ekushey’s language movement provided another sense of political direction towards democratisation of the societies and states – pluralism, equality and diversity. The Bengalis did not demand Bangla, spoken by some 66 per cent of the erstwhile Pakistani population, to be the sole state language; they wanted Bangla to be one of the state languages. The inherent message of the movement was absolutely clear: The language of the minority groups, or in other words, the democratic right to the freedom of expression of the minority populations, ethnic or otherwise, has also to be reserved and protected equally with that of the majority. Democracy is, of course, about forging unity among diversity – diversity of opinions, choices, etcetera, and equality among citizens irrespective of their racial, gender or religious or identity. Bangladesh’s political struggle for national independence, as records its history, progressed on the basis of Amar Ekushey’s democratic spirit. But, alas, the country’s ruling elite, organised under different political parties like the Bangladesh Awami League, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, etcetera, has always betrayed, some way or other, Ekushey’s spirits. The elite in question, a bourgeoisie with crony capitalism and a distorted consciousness that it generates, betrayed the causes of all the great democratic struggles of the people only to perpetuate its parochial political dominance over the greater national hopes and aspirations cherished by the poor millions. And to sustain its political dominance, the political parties of the elite have always suppressed the voice of the people by various means – sometimes by applying repressive laws that their legislators enact in parliament and sometimes by applying sheer political intimidation at local and national levels. The result of such undemocratic activities is obvious: There are no equal opportunities, political or economic, for the citizens, the state has not been allowed to grow on secular-democratic direction, while equal rights of the smaller ethnic groups have never been upheld properly. But worse are the incumbents of the day, a small coterie of a few civilian individuals propelled into power by top military officials under the banner of ‘non-party caretaker government’ – an absolutely undemocratic idea of an unelected government that the feuding political parties of the elite had agreed upon in the 1990s to put in place for ninety days every five year for conducting general elections ‘neutrally’, thanks to mutual mistrust among the parties concerned. However, the present regime took over in January 11, 2007 in the wake of the failures of such a caretaker government to create a congenial atmosphere to hold national polls, which were constitutionally due to be held, by latest, on January 22 last year. Immediately after the assumption of power, the incumbents got the state of emergency promulgated, the direct implication of which is suspension of the people’s constitutionally guaranteed basic democratic rights that includes, among other things, the right to the freedom of expressions and the right to assemble to register protests against the government for its anti-people actions. Many an arbitrary action of the present regime has resulted in massive unemployment, unusual inflation, unprecedented social and political injustices, but none is allowed to speak up their mind against the regime – let alone putting up resistance. What is more surprising is that the regime has created such a suffocating situation in the name of law – Emergency Powers Rules. The incumbents are either ignorant of, or indifferent to, what John Locke, one of the most famous political theorists of modern democracy, argued about democratic governance: ‘The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom….’ The chiefs of the caretaker government and the armed forces have initially given some lip-services to the media, but they have not yet taken any effective measures to stop the security intelligence muzzling the press, both print and electronic, by making intimidating phone calls to the journalists, coercing them to be present in the intelligence headquarters to receive lectures on journalism, so on and so forth. The incumbents refuse to realise, not unpredictably though, the fact that when the rulers are reluctant to pay heed to the barking of democratic press, they are destined to be exposed to the biting of the people at large. Besides, the military-propelled unelected government has visibly decided, going beyond the constitutional binds and to the utter shock of the country’s democratic minds, on an open-ended tenure for itself. Precisely, the incumbents, and their civil-military supporters, do not believe in the concept of democratic accountability, which neither supports the idea of a few persons setting up a government nor does it approve an unlimited tenure for any government – elected or unelected. ‘Government is not a trade which any man or a body of men has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumable,’ argued the Rights of Man famed Thomas Paine, a famous American who was honoured to have been requested by the French revolutionaries to contribute to the drafting of the constitution of France after the abolition of monarchy. In a democratic dispensation, the people, only the people, are legitimately entitled to delegate the ‘trust’ to their representatives, and resume the ‘trust’ as and when the people find it necessary to do so. And people resume the trust on themselves by way of expressing their dissent against whom they once entrusted it with. True, a significantly large section of our population, annoyed at the crude street clashes between the power-mongering political parties, were initially happy with the incumbents, particularly when the head of the government promised them decency in politics, transparency in economy and peace in society. But a year after its assumption of office, the people are not only unhappy with the incumbents but also scared of their political, economic and cultural future under the regime. People are scared politically, because the government is visibly out to destroy the political institutions, instead of streamlining them in democratic directions. They are scared economically, because the process of development, which was of course unequal and unsatisfactory under the elected governments, has now taken a U-turn towards the negative direction. They are scared culturally, because the regime has instilled an atmosphere of pervasive fear across all segments of society, forcing them to suppress their dissents, a situation that never ever steered a society towards economic progress. The Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen has rightly argued that development is directly related to expansion of rights of the people. Where there is no freedom, there is no development. Initially popular though, the regime has now become almost isolated from the people – thanks to the government’s highhandedness about almost everything related to the matters of public importance. Subsequently, the regime has become absolutely week, in terms of public support. ‘…the strength of government does not consist in anything within itself, but in the attachment of a nation, and the interest which the people feel in supporting it. When this is lost, government is but a child in power; and though … it may harass individuals for a while, it but facilitates its own fall,’ wrote Thomas Paine. There has been no reason for the incumbents to be proved exceptional. However, the isolation from the people does not automatically cause the fall of an autocratic government; rather the people need to be politically vocal against the fundamental freedoms of the citizens that the regime has taken away, and that too, in the name of improving on democratic system! The incumbents are free to speak even rubbish, while the people, to whom belongs the state’s sovereignty, are forbidden to speak even conscientiously on matters of public importance. This is unacceptable, because this is just not an unjust ban on the people’s right to the freedom of expression; rather, it is a ban on the enormous prospect of Bangladesh’s progress – political, economic and cultural. A nation cannot make any significant progress without having the scope for serious debates over its political, economic and cultural issues, while a country is bound to take a regressive course if the entire population is made to keep silent on matters of national importance. It is, therefore, high time that we reactivated one of the vital spirits of Amar Ekushey – freedom of expression – and stand in the way of the course of regression that the nation is set by the incumbents upon. It is, therefore, high time that our well-meaning, self-respecting, conscientious and democratically-oriented individuals of society come forward to protest against the state of emergency, state of undemocracy in other words, imposed on us by the incumbents, albeit at the risk of being ‘harassed’ a little, and of course with the universal optimism that such governmental harassments eventually ‘facilitates its own fall’, ushering new avenues for taking the people’s struggle for democratic emancipation to a new height. If we fail to do so, we will not only fail the martyrs of our Amar Ekushey, we will also fail the democratically-oriented international communities who has honoured our Amar Ekushey by recognising it International Mother Language Day. John Milton had uttered in 1643 his immortal words – give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties – in defiance of a law imposing censorship on the printing and publishing of books. Milton took the risk and the law was eventually scrapped. Milton won, with him won the process of English democracy. We badly need to democratise our society and state. Where are our Miltons? |
Ekushey and the state of undemocracy
FOUNDER EDITOR ENAYETULLAH KHAN; ACTING EDITOR NURUL KABIR
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