home Opinion Any lessons from a peerless uprising next door?…Ishtiaq Ali Mehkri
It was a mix of euphoria and depression to witness the debacle of Dhaka dispensation. The fourth-tenure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina crumbled like a house of cards, and that too in a peerless uprising led by the students and their likes. The fall has much to do with the disgust that her 15-year-long authoritarian rule had bred and, especially, the transgression of power that she exhibited by shooting down unarmed protesters.
Hasina’s exit has apparently sealed the fate of Awami League too, as it was unprecedented to see the statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the Founder of the Republic, being pulled down and Bangabandhu portraits thrown to the wind in foreign missions. This uprising in a politically conscious society speaks high of the crosscurrents of socio-economic revulsion, and also the thin line that differentiates between an organised evolution and an abrupt revolution.
The scenes from Bangladesh were a dj vu. Perhaps, this is the third government to fall in the region after Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The decamping of Hasina in a copter to India resembled President Ashraf Ghani’s escape to Central Asia as Taliban 2.0 took over Kabul, and Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s fleeing amidst economic meltdown of the island-nation state.
Dhaka was exceptional and leaves many lessons for developing nations, where respective governments don’t mind going over the brink and turning oblivious to simmering ground realities. Despite Bangladesh being one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, the people were not content as they felt suffocation in social milieu as the regime went on to slap a one-party system, undermined the very existence of opposition voices and resourced to clamping draconian laws.
The magnitude of rebellion, thus, had a vendetta ingrained in it. It was heart-wrenching to see a section of the mob in a literate society stoop too low to lay their hands on costumes of the ousted leader, and make mockery of it on social media. That is unacceptable and literally undermined the perception of egalitarianism of the learned pupil, and perhaps has parallels to draw from Afghans flocking the women in public, Saddam Hussein and Emir of Kuwait palaces ransacked, and political bias in Pakistan playing up the personal life of the First Family in the dock.
If analysed from the Gen Z phenomenon, what is happening in Bangladesh has relevance to how societies are now reacting, and it seems there are no holds to determine one’s intuition in a given political frame of mind. That tendency is evident as people are rising to make sure that they have what they want to have from Pakistan to the UK, and from the US to Japan and Taiwan.
The fists and brawls in Manchester and Birmingham, rise of the leftists in Japan and far-right tendencies in Taiwan, as well as Americans going the white supremacy way are notions of change. The entities of State(s) are in a fix and unable to respond in an era when there is unbridled information, and narratives are made and remade in a jiff. So is the aspect of Zeitgeist, spirit of the time, wherein the new generation is not bothered by historic baggage, and is losing interest in nationalism, culture and state-centrism.
The collapse of order in Bangladesh has created a vacuum, and it is not sure how and who will fill the void. The naming of an octogenarian Nobel Laureate as interim leader, the army sitting in the wings and the desolated political conglomerate vying for reclaiming space has come in collusion with aspirations of the people who are unrelenting, and perhaps have lost faith in the post-1971 edifice of authoritarian-cum-civilian governance.
The anthropology in any of the uprising is to shield their rights in individual identity perspective and in doing so they (pupil) hold no brief for established norms of society. They even go to the extent of contesting what happens beyond their territorial jurisdiction as Hasina’s reported asylum status in India is being questioned.
That makes a case of xenophobic upheavals with the denominator that no race or nation is ready to tolerate political repression and worsening human rights. Dhaka, Kabul and Colombo failed to read the street and continued to rely too much on muscle-flexing. Are there any listeners in Pakistan?
Courtesy The Express Tribune