`Rang de Basanti' in Dhaka

JYOTI MALHOTRA
The Telegraph, March 11, 2007

They sit on the floor in front of the canteen in Dhaka University, cradling their over-boiled cups of tea between the palms of their hands, talking about this and that, between classes that don’t begin or which they bunk with the supreme confidence of an aimless generation. Boys in jeans and denim or cotton shirts, girls in salwar-kameez and small pieces of fake jewellery, looking down in the well brought-up Bengali way but still smiling at the boys with their kohl-lined eyes. There’s enough emotion in the little seated group to launch a hit Bollywood film or two.

Meet Dhaka’s `Rang de Basanti’ generation, in the order in which they sit in the semi-circle on the floor : Rocky, Arif, Zahid, Ramzan, Sazol, Laila and Priety. All Sociology students, mostly from out of town, all of them keenly aware of the political upheaval taking place around them in Bangladesh.

There’s one more thing that binds them together, tighter than the glue of their still-awakening passion for each other and for what they believe they must do, one day, inshallah, for their country. This is their love for Hindi films, or more specifically, Amir Khan’s `Rang de Basanti.’

``I saw the film eight times,’’ says Sazol, his light frame trembling with emotion, ``and each time, I cried,’’ he adds without embarrassment. I look at him in surprise. ``Yes, I too am not afraid to die for my country.’’

Sazol said he wanted to be a cop, not a soldier in the Bangladeshi army, with the opportunity to go abroad as a UN peacekeeper and earn real, American dollars. (It was said the Army would never impose martial law but continue to back the Fakhruddin Ahmed caretaker government. Under UN rules, Bangladeshi soldiers could not become UN peace-keepers, a major source of income for thousands of people. It was said that an officer could earn as much as 30 lakh taka, or 20lakh rupees, on a three-year assignment as a UN peacekeeper abroad.)

After he took his Sociology degree, Sazol said he wanted to become a proper policeman back home, so that he could make a real difference to the everyday quality of life in the village.

Soon, the `Rang de Basanti’ group was warming to the theme. They fully applauded the Army-backed political revolution currently taking place in Bangladesh. The corrupt and the powerful and the rich, they must all be severely punished. In Khaleda Zia’s BNP, people like her son Tarique, her former political secretary Harris Chowdhury and former BNP lawmaker Mosaddek Falu, said to be very close to Khaleda – as well as from Sheikh Hasina’s Awali League party -- all those politicians who had destroyed the very fibre of Bangladesh for their own ends. They needed to be punished. They deserved to be punished, to save Bangladesh.

Just then another boy walks into the semi-circle. ``My father was one of them, too,’’ he says, ``my father was corrupt, just like all these corrupt men who stole from the poor.’’ A silence falls in the group. But how did he know, had he asked him? The silence begins to grow and grow. ``No,’’ he replies, ``I asked my mother, she told me. I didn’t have the courage to ask my father.’’

Elsewhere in Dhaka, too, you encounter the same searching, gritty honesty that has had enough, and is now searching for answers. The city’s newspapers seem to have swallowed large quantities of the truth pill, considering the regurgitation the morning after. Fakhruddin Ahmed, a former World Bank officer, has unleashed the Anti-Corruption Commission, while Army chief, Lt Gen. Moeen U. Ahmed vows to cleanse the place. The triumvirate of the press, the caretaker government and the army is at last a formidable one.

Already, scores of ministers from both parties have been arrested, along with bureaucrats and engineers and doctors and lawyers, all those who had made themselves rich by stealing from the poor. Passports of nearly 200 people have been taken away so that they can’t flee the country. Buildings are being pulled down in the heart of Dhaka, because they were found to have used relief material meant for the poor.

Former housing minister Mirza Abbas is arrested because he gave away a two-bigha piece of land, meant for a children’s park in Dhaka, to his brothers and sisters. In Jessore, from an NGO run by the wife of ex-BNP minister Tariqul Islam, 103 corrugated iron sheets have been seized. The bank accounts of ex-Law minister Moudud Ahmed, one of the most powerful men in Bangladesh, have been frozen. The `Daily Star,’ Bangladesh’s feisty English-language paper exults in the fact that a former BNP state minister is being charged because he was found to have 132 flats in Dhaka.

The country seems to be in the grip of an unending expose of the misdeeds of the rich and the powerful. Like voyeurs, every juicy detail is hungrily absorbed : Harris Chowdhury had not only illegally kept two peacocks in his house, but even an SUV costing about $50,000. Mosaddek Falu, said to be one of the most corrupt men in the country, allegedly with a finger in every contract, had kept 15 spotted deer. They have since been sent to the Dhaka zoo. And imagine, surveillance has been stepped up around the house of Khaleda herself -- until three months ago the most powerful person in all Bangladesh -- because two of Tarique’s closest aides, Mian Nuruddin Apu and Shakil, are hiding there so as to evade arrest.

Beneath this massive churning, life somehow goes on as usual. At the La Vinci hotel in Kawran Bazaar, a live band is churning out popular English songs. Young people, both men and women, are drinking at the bar – although, by law, Bangladeshi Muslims are only allowed to drink if they buy a license, which allows them to do so for ``health reasons.’’ Of course there are thousands and thousands of such licenses all over the city.

So does my `Rang de Basanti’ group at Dhaka University approve of alcohol? Predictably, the replies are mixed. Overwhelmingly, though, they believe that a good Muslim cannot be defined by what he/she eats, drinks and wears. Certainly, I saw no `purdahs’ on the University campus, and very, very few in the rest of the city.

It’s time now to cross-question me, an Indian journalist from `Dilli’ (``is `Dilli’ a clean city?’’ ``what is `Dilli’ really like?’’), about this enormous giant of a country next door called India, and its singular inability to understand the small-small crises of identities of neighbours like Bangladesh.

Ramzan, for example, in his direct, disarming way has asked, ``Why is India against us?’’

What Ramzan wants to know, of course, is why, according to the Bangladesh press, New Delhi had arm-twisted Dhaka into signing an unfavourable Ganga waters treaty during Sheikh Hasina’s regime in 1997 (``the Padma river near my village, once a huge river, has been reduced to a rivulet,’’ complains Sazol), or why trigger-happy BSF soldiers kill innocent Bangladeshis across the border every other day, or why `Dilli’ refuses to give duty free access to Bangladeshi goods…or why…

It is a litany, to be sure. Still, I agree, that `Dilli’ has been unable to explain its message to Bangladesh, actually since the time both countries fought together for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971.

Clearly, since the `Mukti Bahini’ and till Amir Khan, it seems as if New Delhi and Dhaka have been talking past each other.

Clearly, too, if relations are not worse than they are, it is because people like Amir Khan and Shahrukh Khan – and former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu -- are also Indian.

In fact, Bangladeshis, otherwise fiercely Bengali, even speak a faltering Hindi today, as distinguished from the hated Urdu of their Pakistani oppressors, because of Hindi movies.

``It is because of our freedom-fighters who defeated Pakistan, that today we are speaking our native language, Bengali,’’ says Sazol. The group readily admits that the ``Pakistani oppression’’ is something they have only read or heard about, but believe to be completely true.

From a corner, Preity, the only Hindu girl in the group, speaks up. Seconds before she was being teased because her father was trying to find her a match in Australia. ``We refuse to speak Urdu because it was the language of Pakistan. We speak some Hindi because we love watching the `saas-bahu’ Indian TV serials every evening. That is the difference.’’

ENDS