On August 20, 2024, a Muslim woman student from Dhaka University, Shanjida Anowar Choudhury, considered a firebrand leader during the students’ demonstrations, spoke to Protidiner Bangladesh, a popular daily newspaper in Bangladesh. It is a striking and coherent articulation of the current state of politics in Bangladesh and her grievances about it. Her voice is worth paying heed to.
Below is my English translation of the student’s views, followed by a short note.
“Do they know what politics is? If you don’t build a political party with minimally educated people, the country’s progress won’t materialise. Do they know what politics is? They listen to their party leaders who give them a packet of biriyani and invite them and they come. The leaders make them indulge in violence, loot and arson, and move to Canada and Australia, and these guys are left behind…My pent-up anger is against those political parties that put the innocent and simple minds of people to use in order to implement their agenda.
The meaning of politics does not come to light from the fear against a political party. Politics is a word that reflects the whole system. Our whole system is cancer-infested. This is the reason behind my pent-up anger. No sooner did you topple the old regime, than you started loot and arson. You have made burning and destroying Hindu homes, looting the homes of Awami League members your programme.
Will anyone see this in a good light? Will it be seen in a good light in the world, internationally? Of course not! Why are you doing such things? We can support any political party from our respective, subjective positions. If that party is embroiled in crime, there is law for it. If you want to really make the legal institutions work so that they can give you justice, why are you destroying them yourself with your actions? Is it the work of any civilised community?
Tell me, answer my question. I want to raise this question with my community: Does any civilised community indulge in such looting, etc? I’ve friends from the Sanatana dharma who took part in the (anti-discrimination) protests with us, and got beaten up. But soon after the liberation, people from BNP and others set fire to their homes. Why will such a thing happen in a country? What is this “pent-up anger of 15 years”? So you will just kill people out of this 15-year pent-up anger? In that case, what is your connection to the authoritarian regime? How will you come to power by indulging in such things? How can you expect such a thing?
Bengalis are no longer so foolish. Those who were foolish have now grown old. Bengalis won’t run their politics through them. The current new generation is not so foolish. You can’t make them swallow whatever you feel like and fulfil your party agenda. It won’t be so easy. Their deeds today resemble that of the chairman and vice chairman. That is why there is so much talk about them.
This is the one hope for Bangladesh: Let everyone be decent, be civilised, and be responsible towards the country. Be ethical. And from an ethical position, ask yourself what you have done for your country. Ask this much, to the Ishwar, Allah, god, who sent you to this world: With what objective did divinity send you here? Of course, there was an objective in sending you to this world. Go after that objective. Stop going after corrupt politics.”
Video screengrabs showing the woman speaking.
A commentary on the quote
The anonymous woman student from Dhaka University in the video has said certain things I haven’t heard from anyone else in the media since August 5 when a students’ protest against the quota system in education in Bangladesh unexpectedly spilled over into an uprising against the autocratic Sheikh Hasina government.
When it comes to politics, ideological clarity is not enough. Ideological clarity, for instance, is logically restricted to the objectives of ideas framed within a system of thinking. That thinking will always tend towards self-justification. What is supposed to be legitimate for ideology is legitimate for politics (and even for the world). It is a self-serving logic that serves ideology before it claims to serve larger political issues. Such clarity may not always care about certain ethical considerations that lie outside ideological objective. For those considerations, ideologies need to be self-critical which they are rarely and reluctantly capable of. Ethics demands something more than ideological clarity – it demands critical honesty.
The young woman student in the video has strong views, and she is passionate about her political beliefs. She has a demanding sense of expectation from people in her country, and from her community. She wants the politics of her country to reflect certain ethical standards. It determines the force of her honesty.
The first important political concern she raises is that of fear. She knows the politics of fear has an inherent danger: It creates an enemy in whose name it wants to justify all its actions. She emphasises the point with ethical clarity that fear of the enemy can’t be used as an excuse for violence. The logic of fear can’t be established to create and justify more fear. If the idea of sovereignty allows violence in the name of fear, it slips into the politics of retribution. Retribution is self-annihilation in the name of annihilating the other. No idea can grow under its terrible shadow. The ethic of democracy requires the transformation of the discourse of enmity into the discourse of the opposition. Politics is the art of friction. Every politics faces an opposition and their conflictual presence justifies their being part of democracy. Democracy is the name of a political battle that allows the idea of opposition. “I oppose, therefore I am” is an apt slogan for a democrat. The corollary is evident: You have the right to oppose only if you offer the same right to your opponent. Democracy is not possible without this contract.
Also read: Bangladesh Must Now Face Up to the Risk of Democracy
The student says, “Politics is a word that reflects the whole system.” What she intends to mean is that all those who are currently at the helm of the political world in Bangladesh will have to realise that it is through their actions that the larger political motive and emerging structure of the country will be judged. The new leadership will be judged for what they do from now on. The nature of the public judgement of the new leadership will be based not on what it thinks of the older regime but what vision it has brought to the table. This vision will have repercussions on what is happening to people in the streets, institutions and even their homes. First of all, people must feel safe. To live in a state of fear by anticipating conspiracy is a deplorable form of political alertness. A mature state of political alertness needs to trust something, someone, somewhere. Illegitimate power often uses paranoia as a source of its legitimacy. If you can’t trust your police and army to maintain a semblance of order, if there are rifts and counter-forces within them, you can change their leadership and convey to them the new political ethic. No social or political contract is possible without trust. Trust makes law acceptable. If people lose trust, they (want to) break the law. Trust is more fundamental to law than mischief. Mischief is an aberration under the law’s control. The law cannot control the trust of the people if it is broken.
The argument that institutions and offices run by people who belonged to or supported the older regime are corrupt and need to be replaced can become a dangerous precedent for arbitrary coercions. We have seen it happen in the universities where teachers were humiliated and forced to resign for their allegedly political associations. This encourages vigilantism. Political untouchability is a dangerous mode of othering where prejudice determines the idea of human worth. Those who claim to be a part or supporters of the new regime can’t have absolute authority to judge everyone’s worth before they establish their own. The attacks on minorities and Awami League members and supporters want to pass off such acts of retribution as justice. The student clearly sees it as a new form of injustice as the distinction between crime and law is being erased, where crime becomes the law.
Next, she evokes the civility of restraint. A community that uses political anger as excuse to kill or harm minorities abandons all claims to civility. If anger is used as a provocation for murder it slips into the same mode of violence the autocratic regime is accused of. It damages the superior claims of resistance and liberation. In the poem ‘To Posterity’, Bertolt Brecht raised this concern:
“Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
could not ourselves be kind.”
The student sums up her concerns with a fine set of ethical expectations. If power is a force it has to be a responsible force that understands its own restraints before asking of it from others.
This is a superb statement: “Be ethical. And from an ethical position, ask yourself what you have done for your country.”
Now that the autocratic regime has been dethroned, the ethical question shines bright after the clouds have disappeared. The question of political commitment to the nation cannot bypass the test of ethics. The student invites her people to have a dialogue with their ethical sense of duty. The question of doing involves political action. If that action in any way harms others it loses its ethical legitimacy. National commitment can’t be considered honest or civil unless its responsibilities towards vulnerable people are met. At this point, the student fuses the question of faith with ethics in a unique manner: Divine power has imbued human beings with a certain responsibility on earth whose meaning, or truth, is not easily apparent.
To seek that meaning, or truth, is not just the task of saints. Divine power is the name of something we can draw our meaning from even for asking secular and rational questions about the meaning of life and our ethical task in the world (of politics). The path occupied with questions does not lead to violence.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a writer and political science scholar. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.
