On being servants of The Guide, The Opener and The Just

Sharif Osman bin Hadi a courageous young poet, activist and educator was fatally shot in the head, riding a rickshaw after Friday Prayers on the twelfth of this twelfth month. He was rushed to hospital with severe brain injuries and passed into the next life on the evening of Thursday in Singapore. He was buried in Dhaka alongside Nazrul Islam whose poetry he loved and whose 1921 Bidrohi ( The Rebel) he performed with a becoming that is really something internally transforming to behold. His funeral prayers also were, with an estimated 1 to 1.5 million moved to attend physically and pray for his onward journey. Many wiser heads than I have concurred that he was the real deal, he bore witness to so many truths that so many tyrants in so many placed worked so hard to bury. Hearts of Green Birds inshAllah

Condolences to those close with him and duas for your ongoing flourishing, uprightness, good guidance and protection through everything.

Overcoming the Firaunic Function

The 2024 Bangladesh Rising that ousted the tyrannical Awami League regime, made space for political thought and organising that had been suffocated for a long time. Suffocated by a public-private Firaunic infrastructure that included the state security, higher education, media and cultural institutional participants. 

In this Opening, Hadi, as he was publicly and affectionately known, had focused his energies on co-developing the Inquilab Moncho, promoting learning of the political and social realities of Bangladesh and a path of Insaaf (Justice). Perhaps just in my imagination, the project resembles Hosseiniyeh Ershad, established  in the 60s Tehran, where Ali Shariati gave epic lectures, an institutional space I have long longed for in Bangladesh. Hadi had recently put his hat in the ring for electoral constituency of Dhaka-8 as an independent candidate and was building momentum in his campaign, there is an outpouring of love and support for the July leaders generally, but this one especially. He was interviewed by the English language Centrist Nation a week before his assassination. You will find many of his discussions and contributions over the years online on a range of subjects, not *just* the topic of Indian Hegemony over Bangladesh. 

Who did it?

The Bangladesh sociopolitical scene is well populated by foolish blunderers, liars and psychopaths. I do not mean any of these categories to be mutually exclusive. For now, many of the more empowered psychopaths are off the pitch yet still have an outsized influence over events, whether by remote control or institutionalised psychopath reproduction. Hadi, along with other leaders of the Movement were constantly under threat and abuse, knew they were on hit lists and had expressed this to authorities. The Yunus leadership has failed miserably on security, with a fresh resignation from the home affairs brief coming in at the time of writing. It was probably designed to.

The fingers on this assassin's trigger are currently believed to have been the Awami League linked IT entrepreneur Faisal Karim Masud, his parents have been arrested following confessions of helping their son dispose of the weapon and evade capture. It would not be unreasonable to extrapolate that there are many bands of cultists trained and ready to make good on their party's threats to disrupt proceedings and Ousted Hasina's explicit commands to 'talk less' and 'do more'.

The question of  participation, signalling and support from elements of different states and the Hasinic fugitive regime harboured in New Delhi remains contested, occluded territory, occluded more by the electoral fog and a media ecosystem primarily motivated by fear and favour.

Why?

Motivations suggested have included creating chaos, provoking backlash and preventing elections slated for February. Perhaps its a warm up for the Awami League's latest delusional comeback tour. The subsequent events, feelings and counter-provocations are all quite manipulable, disgusting and in their playbook. I can't think of a worse security situation for a country like Bangladesh, for so many of its senior security officials to have run off to its large hegemonic neighbor with epic amounts of surveillance data and spycraft. However, if we are to be honest about the India Doctrine, the point is moot.

There is a political, intellectual and emotional resonance, for me at least, to the assassination of Aftab Ahmad,  Professor of Political Science at Dhaka University, in the run up to the 11/01/2007 military coup that ushered Bangladesh into the recently concluded Awami Fascibadi period. He had a discourse on the concept of the Bengal Subaltern that is very pertinent to the assassination of Osman Hadi.

In my reading so far, the work of Inquilab Moncho, threaded a rare Bangladesh-First, religion-inclusive, grassroots and justice-orientated approach to the issues Bangladesh has on its plate. Hadi had traction,  an unsullied adorability and longer term vision. In this assassination operation we see a classic "kill them before they grow" tactic used by powers and their apprentices who have controlled the people of the region for centuries and centuries. 

If this is the case, then the trick would be to keep growing into that Krishnachura Period of Justice, Creativity and Prosperity. The futures of Climate Guantanamo and Bracottabad are humiliating non answers to the challenge that the powers and their apprentices would be quite happy doing business with.

What now?

With the progress of the work of the Commission of Inquiry of Enforced Disappearances and the somewhat reformed International Crimes Tribunal, the Interim Government has moved some way towards establishing the beginnings of Justice, under difficult conditions. We now have firmer knowledge of the architecture of state enforced disappearances and maturing cases of serious crimes of regime leaders. These initiatives and their successors must do much much better at improving the ideas, personnel and institutional arrangements at play within them. How do we build healing and reparation without contrition, and can we invite contrition?

With less that 2 months to go until scheduled elections, a compelling, practical and well telegraphed Justice Agenda would do the world of good.

The traditional yellow media of Bangladesh has already made the Assassination Situation all about itself, its eternal right to bat for the Ousted regime and its Indian Sponsor with impunity and its exclusive access to the megaphone. It will behave according to its colonial nature, incentives and assets around the world. Much to improve on and lampoon there.

What this underlines is the great gap, between the kitsch-compromised farts of Dhaka's donor-driver, gate-keeping, war-on-terror-rentier , green-zone-whispering, uncivil-civil-society, and the Post July 2024 hunger for something better. Yet what we have all recently witnessed, so awfully, about the path to Insaaf is the lesson here. A beautiful thing about the story of Hadi, is the existence and futuristic tradition of people like him, that despite the waves of prejudice, cruelty and sadism that he witnessed at Dhaka University, at Shapla Chottor and all through the Long month of July we, sorry they, have the ingredients to refine and transform the situation, and this present transformation has legs.

[New Word] Influectual

Oft combining the worst elements of the three concepts in irresistible ways.

Famine Engineering in Bengal 1943 (Duas for Gaza)

There was a screening of Bengal Shadows by Joy Banerjee and Partho Bhattacharya in East London a few weeks ago which is very much worth crying and writing about.  It concerned the 1943 British-Engineered Bengal Famine which costs the lives of so many millions, devastated the society and exposed villainous institutions that continue to stalk humanity with impunity. It is important to mark and connect with, for descendants of survivors and perpetrator classes and a wider circle of basic elemental justice.

I am not one of the descendants of survivors of this famine who celebrate Indian colonial subject participation in Britain's war effort, no World War Poppyganda for me. The Bengal Famine is one of the reasons I don't buy the anti-Nazi propaganda of the White World War 2 Winners. There really is little choice in the matter if you honour yourself with (more than white) humanity and heritage. More people should know why.

Here's the deal, having spent the first 7 months of 1943 exporting food grains out of India to Britain and its war theatres, Churchill's war cabinet ordered a scorched earth Denial Policy, to destroy boats and food in Bengal citing fears of Japanese landing. Churchill and company were functionally eugenicist and as we are well aware, and as endless quotations and his own voluminous writings show, he was personally a racist of corpulent proportions. The right to food, life and safety of the Indians of British Occupied Bengal were negative in his racial hierarchy which required active hatred and power to constantly maintain and reconfigure, not simply passive disregard. 

A Tenure track into the Zone of NonBeing

Man made disasters like this one do not occur in a vacuum and it can never be said enough, that the parasitic British Indian land tenure system and its beneficiary groups were engines of impoverishment and exploitation upon those beneath them and had been weakening the social economic conditions of the smallholders, sharecroppers and labourers for generations.

Although the roles of more local political rivalries, private companies like the Isphahanis and bog standard hoarders are familiar factor to consider, Bengal Shadows doesn't get bogged down and presents an alarmingly detailed and clear disasterscape in under an hour, wrapping testimonies of some of the remaining survivors of those times with more contemporaneous scholarly contributions.  

We hear from Soumitra Chatterjee, the male lead from Satyajit Ray's 1973 Distant Thunder remembering how important this role was to him. Both Bengal's struggle with survivor bias to reach beyond bhodrolok representation and politics,[its the Brahminisms Stupid]. Though I look forward to learning more about dance pioneer Bulbul's 'Lest We Forget"  and the impact that may or may not have had on audiences in the colonial core.

Bengal Shadows is as good a building point as any, even with its inevitable West Bengal centrism which comes with the territory at the moment. There's an unforgettable scene with a surviving granny figure Jhorna Bhattacharya, recollecting how she witnessed a mother pumping her breast for milk, only to realise that her child was dead, giving the milk to another child so they could live. 

Now think of every time and everywhere right now where this category and worse situation must be playing out.  The film is available to all with an internet connection on the YouTube link below, do watch, if you can in a social context. 

After the screening there was an impromptu Q&A which deserved to have been better prepared for. It was a middling to sparse crowd of largely deshi people in London. There is low awareness of this more than 80 years on, and post Covid I think fewer people show up on these occasions. Brick Lane Circles ran a number of events on the subject some years ago, check their video archive here.

Comments from the audience are always a measure of something. We learned that one young former Cambridge undergrad struggled unsuccessfully with her supervisor about researching this famine. Presumably this was in a History department. The community needs to be our academy, I would not recommend depending on the academy for community.

Holey Social Memory

Another audience member, quite worldy wise shared how often family chains of narration that you would expect to inform you of such vital near history often don't work regarding a traumatising and humiliating matter like this. I concur but its uneven. There's one side of my family where I hear of an aunt walking past live then dead victims on her way to and from University. I hear of rice being sent from Dhaka by an uncle to his mother in the village in a suitcase with clothes for camouflage. I hear of Ispahani company officials dumping rice in the river. On the other side, I grew up with the story of the Brothers and the Grain of Rice.

"The colonialist sees themselves through Israel's eyes, while the colonised see themselves through the Palestinians." A Rahman

Consider this; that the material Impunity of Britain regarding the Bengal Famine of 1943 and its previously engineered famines, in Bengal and Ireland gives subsequent Famine Engineering villains, like Israel & the Zionist Movement - Britain's bastard offspring - impunity for their own Mutation of this, Sadistic, Racially Supremacist Starvation Weapon. 

Eugenic Connections

Some years ago, Madhusree Mukerjee wrote a book on the Famine focusing on Churchill and gave a talk to a larger East London Audience. At the end of her Q&A, she elaborated on the influence of the aristo-eugenicist and physicist Frederick Alexander Frederick Lindemann aka 'Lord' Cherwell on Churchill. Smells of lavender. You can watch the whole thing below. Evil people in high places indeed

I will leave a link to Ray's Distant Thunder here too, who knows how much longer it will stay up for.

[New Word] Tulipsiddiqing

Transnational, Vindictive, Nepobaby self incriminating with Talentless Antics

Dreaming Bangladesh Again

It has been a half year since the Bangladesh Rising made it across that first finishing line. For the first time that I can think of, so many people with family in Bangladesh are peering over with interest, awe, sorrow and glowing embers. 

Just a year ago, Sheikh Hasina's murderous brigade had faked their 3rd election in a row and there was no end in sight. Cringe inducing Government messaging of "Mujib's Bangladesh" was everywhere. Today Sheikh Hasina's murderous brigades are in jail, on the run, or  stirring from Delhi at Narendra Modi's Pleasure, and scheming violence and manipulation on WhatsApp. 

Just a few days ago, public protests responded to her latest antics by demolishing the museum created out of her late father's house in Dhanmondi Road #32.  Such organised pressure matters if just to admonish others into accelerated action and out of ineffectiveness. Soon after the Road #32 incident,  Interim head Prof Yunus finally took the media people to one of the infamous Aynaghar secret detention centres, but not after the military had cleared out and given it a lick of pink paint. So many good men never made it out of there alive, and to add insult to murder, their extrajudicial murders would be turned into Anti Terrorism Performance Indicators. A UN investigation into the former Government atrocities should be read to understand the sick and deadly games that the Hasina regime played at her service: killing, hiding bodies, burning bodies to implicate  and dehumanise protesters. 

No doubt there are many more messes, mixtakes and blunders to come as the combined assemblage of society and government clear their throats, survey the damage with varying degrees of honesty and make arrangements as they see fit. This presents us with the challenge of being alive to what is going on. Traditional media has always been hopeless on Bangladesh, as has academia, inside and out their ivory cages, but these days, thankfully, the Liararchy is getting a thorough wallopping from all directions by established and newly encouraged social media presences. 

Pinaki Bhattacharya's YouTube channel stands out for me. There's an English language interview with him on Centrist Nation  where we learn about his method and his persona.

Breathing in Colour

What we make of this breathing room is on us. The question of colour revolution from the N=2 anti imperial quarter, and people who gave up on desh a long time ago is to be expected. It is worth keeping in mind when building sustained, sustainable movements away from developmentia, delusion, gatekeeping and traditions of extreme and slavish arse licking.