Dear Members,

Please read my article on probable vote rigging plans in today's Daily Naya
Diganta:

http://www.dailynayadiganta.com/2008/12/17/fullnews.asp?News_ID=118915&sec=6

Another article provides some suggestions to prevent it and is published at:

http://www.sonarbangladesh.com/article.php?ID=470
 
Best regards.

Ahsan Mohammed

[From the Moderation Desk:
Shetubondhon congratulates Dr. Khan for his just published book.]

With regards!

Dr. Md. Maimul Ahsan Khan
Professor of Law (Islam, Human Rights and International Commerce)
University of Dhaka
Dhaka - 1000, BANGLADESH.
Fax: +8802-833-2452

BABA

(Bay Area Bangladesh Association)

Silicon Valley, California, USA

Program for December 20, 2008, Saturday

========================

1.  Bangladesh Bijoy Dibosh with Special Presentation

2.  Eid Reunion

3.  Pitha Party competition

4.  Bangladesh American Community Center (BACC) Presentation

5.  Cultural Program

6.  And a Lot of wonderful time together as a great Community !!!!!!!!!!

Date:  December 20, 2008, Saturday
Time:  5:00 PM to 10 PM  ( 5 - 7 PM  Bazar Opens & Pitha Competition,  7-10 PM Bijoy Dibosh Cultural Presentation, Live Singing Show by Local Artists, and Bangladesh American Community Center Presentation with Q & A)

Location:  Fremont Warm Springs Cabana Clubhouse - 251 Goldenrain Ave, Fremont, CA 94539

 

Program Highlights:   Eid Reunion,  Bangladesh Bijoy Dibosh with Special Presentation & Cultural Program, and also Pitha Party competition.

Pitha Competition Details:  Please tell all your friends to bring their best pithas to sell.  Judges will receive free samples of these pithas and will judge them anonymously.  The top 3 pithas will be awarded attractive prizes. For further questions regarding the Pitha Competition, please contact Piu Tahera: 408-451-0707
This program is free for everyone.  Dinner and drinks (water, soda, tea) will be available for purchase. So, please come and attend this program and have a wonderful evening together with our great community.

 
Respectfully,
Kamal Khan
BABA President  
On behalf of BABA Team
408-858-9212
kamalpro64@..., baba@...

In response to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Shetubondhon/message/9419
=======================================================

Congratulations Dr. Khan.

I regret that I was too busy to review your first book although I wanted to,
please send me word file of this book so that I can review it.

Thanks for mentioning me in this book - you made me shy.

Regards.

Hasan Mahmud


To: maimulkhan@...
From: maimulkhan@...
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:03:46 +0000
Subject: [Shetubondhon] A new book on Islamic J. and Women's Rights from
Bangladesh

Dear respected readers,

A Chora AMI HOBU MONTRI is attached in Bangla pdf.

Thank you
Adnan Syed

Weekly Blitz Exclusive

Anticipating the landslide victory of Grand Alliance led by Bangladesh
Awami League, former Prime Minister and chief of the alliance Sheikh
Hasina is busy in finalizing the names for her 45-member cabinet and
set to take oath on January 10, 2009.

A highly placed sourced in Bangladesh Awami League on condition of
anonymity told Weekly Blitz that, Sheikh Hasina is confident of
winning the Monday election with at least 168 seats, while she has
finalized most of the names of her 45-member cabinet. She has also
instructed some of her personal staffs to start working for the oath
taking ceremony on January 10, 2009.

According to the source, some of the names in Sheikh Hasina's next
cabinet are:

Sheikh Hasina
Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim
Ashraf Uddin Ahmed
Barrister Fazle Noor Taposh
Motia Chowdhury
Mustafa Jalal Mohiuddin
Sajib Wajed Joy
Asaduzzaman Noor
Sara Begum Kobori
Abul Maal Muhammed Muhit
Maj Gen Abdus Salam
Saber Hossain Chowdhury
Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury

It is also learnt that, Bangladesh Awami League chief has decided to
elect eminent Awami League leader Zillur Rahman as country's next
President. Grand Alliance leader earlier promised to give the
Presidency to former millitary dictator Hussain Muhammed Ershad.

Ershad, who is now in Rangpur, sensing Awami League's preparation in
forming the government and deceiving him from the post of country's
next President has also instructed a number of leaders of Jatiyo Party
to get prepared to form the next government in the country with him as
the Prime Minister. Party's acting President Barrister Anisul Islam
Mahmood is reportedly busy in preparing another list of cabinet led by
Hussain Muhammed Ershad.

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/index.php?id=252

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - a Book Review

Changez's life changes drastically, from pursuing efficiency and fundamentals in appraising businesses to questioning the fallacies embedded in hard core capitalistic haunting bonanza. Freshly graduated from Princeton, highly motivated pursuing career to coveted aristocracy, Changez moves past his classmates and colleagues at Underwood Samson in rapid pace, beaming with unmistakable confidence in his every strides, demeanor and winning smiles. September 11 changes everything as he reflects on his plight: "the door to the elevator was shut upon me and I began to travel down the shaft, alone."

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a slender novel, but with substantial pathos imbued in sharp observations, without relinquishing a good story's structured rhythm into cliched slogans against power and superpower. The effective monologue that the writer used where an unnamed American was entertained over a cup of tea and later the mouth watering dinner of Lahore, the twist and turn and underlying tension as the story unfolds revealing life of Changez in his abandoned beloved Princeton and New York, made this a novel unputdownable, so readers should be forewarned: you will be tightly embraced by its fast moving plot.

Like the Guardian's reviewers (Link) I also found the writer used allegories, depicting plots and subplots with the reality of our world, like Changez's romantic relationship with Erica (Am-Erica), Erica's subsequent breakdown from tragic loss of her dead boyfriend Chris, and comparing Erica's grief with American grief after September 11: ""it seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia".

As the war in Afghanistan started, Changez's outlook had already begun to change, "preferring not to watch the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below................I was reminded of the film Terminator, but with the roles reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes."

It's not only war and aftermath that this novel is about. There are fine sporadic descriptions of Lahore's cuisine delicacy like the following fragment: "such an authentic introduction to Lahori cuisine; it will, given the dishes for which this market is justifiably renowned, be a purely carnivorous feast -- one that harks back to an era before man's knowledge of cholesterol made him fearful of his prey -- and all the more delectable for it......No, we are surrounded by instead by the kebab of mutton, the tikka of chicken, the stewed foot of goat, the spiced brain of sheep! These, sir, are predatory delicacies, delicacies imbued with a hint of luxury, of wanton abandon....Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire."

Changez's "not squemished" desire to be part of an exclusive elite society in America shuddered to halt during his work trip to Valparaiso in Chile, the home of legendary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, where the publisher of the company he was appraising, Juan-Bautista "added considerable momentum to my inflective journey, a journey that continues to this day...."

Juan-Bautista was direct in his characterization of Changez, asking:

"Does it trouble you," he inquired, "to make your living by disrupting the lives of others?" "We just value," I replied. "We do not decide whether to buy or to sell, or indeed what happens to a company after we have valued it." He nodded; he lit a cigarette and took a sip from his glass of wine. Then he asked, " have you heard of janissaries?" "No," I said. "They were Christian boys," he explained, "captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to."

That was the final blow on Changez's deluded world. "Juan-Bautista's words plunged me into a deep bout of introspection. I spent that night considering what I had become. There really could be no doubt: I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was pre-disposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain."

Changez left his job in his beloved New York to return to his homeland to be with his family, away from humiliating strip search at airport, the looks of suspicions, and war frenzied flag waving to his native land where the similar drum rolls of war were raising louder into higher pitch in every passing days from tension between India and Pakistan.

Perhaps, Mohsin Hamid could make this novel a bit longer. Perhaps, more dialogues and extensions of plots like the sudden disappearance of Erica (Am-Erica), incidents in Chile, aftermath of September 11 both in U.S. and inPakistan in more vivid detail could have raised this novel to a level similar to ones reached by Jeffrey Eugenides' splendid Middlesex or Ian Mcewan's Atonement. On the hindsight though, the slenderness of this little novel preserved its charm and iressistibility due to its same minuteness in words but with razor sharp tensed storyline.

Shoes - The Noble Truths of Suffering

Aleksandar Hemon's story published in The New Yorker on September 22, 2008 was one of the best stories I've read this year. The title of this sparkling and mini-voltage filled story is The Noble Truths of Suffering. A novice Sarajevo writer's encounter with an American prize winning author, the observations through a voice of drunken stupor, and elaboration of violence through Buddhistish non-violence made the conflicting descriptions of war, brutality and politics painfully live.

Here is an excerpt from Aleksandar Hemon's "The Noble Truths of Suffering":

"an ex-marine who would have been a hero in the battle of Falluja had he not been dishonorably discharged for failing to corroborate the official story of the rape of a twelve-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her entire family, an unfortunate instance of miscommunication with local civilians. Tiny returns home from Iraq to Chicago and spends time visiting his old haunts on the North Side, trying vainly to drink himself into a stupor, out of turpitude. He has nothing to say to the people he used to know; he breaks shot glasses against their foreheads. The city barked at him and he snarled back. High out of his mind, he has a vision of a snake invasion and torches his studio with everything he owns in it, which is not much. A flashback that turns into a nightmare suggests that he was the one who slit the girl’s throat. Lamia Hassan was her name. She speaks to him in unintelligibly accented English.

He wakes up on a bus to Janesville, Wisconsin. Only upon arrival does he realize that he is there to visit the family of Sergeant Briggs, the psychopathic bastard whose idea it was to rape Lamia. He finds the house, knocks on the door, but there is nobody there, just a TV playing a children’s show. Tiny stumbles into a nearby bar and drinks with the locals, who buy him booze as an expression of support for our men and women in uniform. He tells them that Sergeant Briggs, a genuine American hero, was one of his best buddies in Iraq. He also tells them about his friend Declan, who got shot by a sniper. Briggs dragged him home under fire and got his knee blown off. Tiny tells them not to trust the newspapers, or the cocksuckers who say that we are losing the war. We are tearing new holes in the ass of the world, he says. We are breaking it open."

..................He tells them the gory details of the rape—Lamia’s moans, the flapping of her skinny arms, the blood pouring out of her—and the old man listens to him unflinchingly, while the mother goes to the kitchen to fetch coffee. They seem untroubled, as if they’re not even hearing him. For an instant, he thinks that he is not speaking at all, that this is all happening in his head, but then he realizes that there is nothing inside them, nothing but grief. Other people’s children are of no concern to them, for there was no horror in the world beyond Declan’s eternal absence from it. Tiny is sobbing."

By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)

December 30, 2008

Writing about the dispossessed, poor and the destitute is not a small feat. Poor and the impoverished do not own the press. They don’t have any powerful and effective lobby group to represent them in the government or corporate sectors.

Portrayals of this underrepresented segments of human society is mostly superficial and marginal at best.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reminded me Monica Ali’s The Brick Lane, not in its depiction of men and women in Indian sub-continent, but the razor sharp words of critiques, untangling the myths and disillusions perpetuated by the ruling “master” in the name of preserving so-called democracy, have similarities in overall texture. Also, various issues in Arundhati Roy’s poignant non-fictions, essays are explored in White Tiger in moving dialogues and monologues.

The story of Balram Halwai is the story of a common man who can be found in every city of South Asia. His story of pittance, nauseating corruptions of politicians and businessmen, the desperation in the eyes of deprived and caricature of democracy in the most voluble scandalous scenes is heart wrenching but is a necessary tale to be told.

Balram’s ascendancy from “Darkness” to “Light”, from being born in an impoverished family, seeing his mother’s untimely death and funeral, his rickshaw puller father’s eventual succumbing to same fatal fate to Tuberculosis, death without any medical help in a government run hospital shaped Balram’s life’s frame of reference in strokes of surreal reality. As his father was being “permanently cured of his tuberculosis”, Balram learned about healthcare for the poor:

“Why isn’t there a doctor here, uncle?” I asked. “This is the only hospital on either side of the river.”

“See, it’s like this,” the older Muslim man said. “There’s a government medical superintendent who’s meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he’s having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.”

“That much!” I said, my mouth opened wide.

“Why not? There’s good money in public service! Now, imagine that I’m a doctor. I beg and borrow money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I taken an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital.” He raised his feet onto an imaginary table. “Next, I call all the junior government doctors, whom I’m supposed to supervise, into my office. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, ‘Dr. Ram Pandey.’”

He pointed a finger at me; I assumed my role in the play.

I saluted him: “Yes, sir!”

He held out his palm to me.

“Now, you – Dr. Ram Pandey – will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this.” He made a tick on the imaginary ledger. “You can keep the rest of your government salary and go work in some private hospital for the rest of the week. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you’ve been there. You’ve treated my wounded leg. You’ve healed that girl’s jaundice.”

“Ah,” the patients said. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they?”

Balram’s view of education system had a good overview too from his early childhood when Munna (Balram’s nick name) learned how his schoolmaster was stealing the government allocated lunch money for the students. “There was supposed to be free food at my school – a government program gave every boy three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at lunchtime. But we never ever saw rotis, or yellow daal, or pickles, and everyone knew why: the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money. The teacher had a legitimate excuse to steal the money – he said he hadn’t been paid his salary in six months. He was going to undertake a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages – he was going to do nothing in class until his paycheck arrived in the mail.........No one blamed the schoolteacher for doing this. You can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet. Every man in the village knew that he would have done the same in his position. Some were even proud of him, for having got away with it so cleanly.”

In not so long ago, myriads of castes were normal in India, however, as we are progressing through 21^st century, there is difference now. Aravind Adiga’s protagonist sums up the differences in caste system – “in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes; Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.”

Balram Halwai’s persistence to get away from his impoverished village paid off. He found a driver’s job. His employers were the powerful landlords from his village Laxmangarh. Here is a description of Balram’s employer that sets up the plot of this “dark” story that the writer eventually unfolds: “......what the Buffalo did to his domestic servant. The one who was supposed to guard his infant son, who got kidnapped by the Naxals and then tortured and killed........The servant said he had nothing to do with the kidnapping; the Buffalo did not believe him and got four of his hired gunmen to torture the servant. Then they shot him through the head. Fair enough. I would do the same to someone who let my son get kidnapped. But then, because the Buffalo was sure that the man had deliberately let the child be kidnapped, for money, he also went after the servant’s family. One brother was set upon while working in the fields beaten to death there. That brother’s wife was finished off by three men together. A sister, still unmarried, was also finished off. Then the house where the family had lived was surrounded by the four henchmen and set on fire.”

About the election, Balram Halwai had received valuable lesson from his father before his death: “It’s the way it always is..........I’ve seen twelve elections – five general, five state, two local – and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves – isn’t that something”?

And when someone from “Darkness” goes “mad” after listening to all the heart pumping election slogans, and wanted to fulfill his basic civic duty, voting, shocking surprises waited for him:

“He began walking straight to the voting booth at the school. “I’m supposed to stand up to the rich, aren’t I?” he shouted. “Isn’t that what they keep telling us?”

When he got there, the Great Socialist’s supporters had already put up the tally of votes outside on a blackboard: they had counted 2,341 votes in that booth. Everyone had voted for the Great Socialist. Vijay the bus conductor was up on a ladder, hammering into the wall a banner with the Great Socialist’s symbol (the hands breaking their shackles).....Vijay dropped the hammer, the nails, and the banner when he saw the rickshaw-puller.

“What are you doing here?”

“Voting,” he shouted back. “Isn’t it the election today?”

..........”Vijay and a policeman had knocked the rickshaw-puller down, and they had begun beating him; they hit him with their sticks, and when he thrashed at them they kicked him. They took turns. Vijay hit him and the policeman stamped on his face and then Vijay did it again. And after a while the body of the rickshaw-puller stopped wriggling and fighting back, but they stamping on him, until he had been stamped back into the earth.”

Balram Halwai is a careful observer. He sees his “masters” flagrant corrupting deal making with high level politicians, blackmailing, and outright robbery, and he used the similar blackmailing to get himself a better position, a promotion from “number two” driver to become the “number one” driver and getting into Delhi, the epitome of India, the capital city.

The description of separation between the rich and poor are especially stark when Balram Halwai reaches Delhi.

“There was a good reason for the face masks; they say the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years out of a man’s life. Of course, those in the cars don’t have to breathe the outside air – it is just nice, cool, clean, air-conditioned air for us. With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open – a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road – and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.”

Balram Halwai still fills torn apart, seeing the other side, the “Darkness” so much different than being in the periphery of “Light”, “We were like two separate cities – inside and outside the dark egg. I knew I was in the right city. But my father, if he were alive, would be sitting on that pavement, cooking some rice gruel for dinner, and getting ready to lie down and sleep under a streetlamp, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that and recognizing his features in some beggar out there. So I was in some way out of the car too, even while I was driving it.”

Here is a description of “complicated” political process:

“Look at that.”

“What?”

“That statue.”

I looked out the window to see a large bronze statue of a group of men – this is a well-known statue, which you will no doubt see in Delhi: at the head is Mahatma Gandhi, with his walking stick, and behind him follow the people of India, being led from darkness to light.

The mongoose squinted at the statue.

“What about it? I’ve seen it before.”

“We’re driving past Gandhi, after just having given a bribe to a minister. It’s a fucking joke, isn’t it.”

“You sound like your wife now,” the Mongoose said. “I don’t like swearing – it’s not part of our tradition here.”

But Mr. Ashok was too red in the face to keep quiet.

“It is a fucking joke – our political system – and I’ll keep saying it as long as I like.”

“Things are complicated in India, Ashok. It’s not like in America. Please reserve your judgement.”

The masters in Delhi know how to keep the “servants” in this “proper” place. A vivid scene clarifies it more:

“I’ve lost a rupee.” He snapped his finger at me.

“Get down on your knees. Look for it on the floor of the car.”

I got down on my knees. I sniffed in between the mats like a dog, all in search of that one rupee.

“What do you mean, it’s not there? Don’t think you can steal from us just because you’re in the city. I want that rupee.”

“We’ve just paid half a million rupees in a bribe, Mukesh, and now we’re screwing this man over for a single rupee. Let’s go up and have a scotch.”

“That’s how you corrupt servants. It starts with one rupee. Don’t bring your American ways here.”

Where that rupee coin went remains a mystery to me to this day, Mr. Premier. Finally, I took a rupee coin out of my shirt pocket, dropped it on the floor of the car, picked it up, and gave it to the Mongoose.

“Here it is, sir. Forgive me for taking so long to find it!”

There was a childish delight on his dark master’s face. He put the rupee coin in his hand and sucked his teeth, as if it were the best thing that had happened to him all day.”

Ashok was the youngest brother of Balram’s employer, and being returning from America after his education, was still finding all these master and servant relationships, the briberies of ministers, pollution, the stark contrast between the rich and poor all troublesome. His eyes get on the verge of tears seeing the daily injustice, he tries to protect Balram from humiliation, steadily increases his salary without being asked to do so, and argues with his brothers and wife when they wanted to replace Balram with a more matured local driver. However, as Ashok more and more got involved with shady deal making, briberies, he gravitated towards the inevitability, fall from grace to the “darkness” of deceits and shameful indifference for the plights of deprived.

Balram Halwai understood why the “servants” and the poor don’t rebel against injustice. There is a powerful imagery where the comparison between the sufferings of downtrodden human beings and caged chickens, both witnessing atrocity being committed on their fellow beings, but are completely stunned and cowered to take any rebellious step.

“Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench – the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.

The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

Here is an example of human being, being trapped in a rooster coop:

“Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?

Because Indians are the world’s most honest people, like the prime minister’s booklet will inform you?

No. It’s because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.

.............Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put they key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

...........Why does the Rooster Coop work? How does it trap so many millions of men and women so effectively?

Secondly, can a man break out of the coop? What if one day, for instance, a driver took his employer’s money and ran? What would his life be like?

I will answer both for you, sir.

The answer to the first question is that the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice,.....the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.

The answer to the second question is that only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters – can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.”

Some may claim that Aravind Adiga’s protagonist is too simplistic, naive in portraying a large and complex nation like India, and some may even call him one sided polemist in caricaturing the rich, portraying the upper class in India in hackneyed settings. Some of these claims may have merit to raise these questions. However, White Tiger is a fiction, but it is “built on a substratum of Indian reality.” The author correctly points out the amount of research went into writing this novel, one example he cited is the deaths of thousands of poor Indian everyday from tuberculosis (The Times of India Reference)

India’s economic progress for many, especially for the last decade, is indeed phenomenal. Millionaires and billionaires are increasingly abundant; even in the upper portion of Forbes magazine’s annual chart of the richest men now showcases Indian richest men. Middle class has more purchase power now than ever before. However, the majority of Indian one billion plus population “are denied decent health care, education or employment, getting to the top would take doing something like what Balram has done.”

Even in fiction, for the sake of sticking to the so-called reality, the reality that is framed by a writer’s perception of surroundings, and in most cases, the willingness and unwillingness of seeing and not seeing the surreal ugliness of contemporary moral dilemma, the beguiling tricks that mind can play for self preservation, preservation of status quo, and societal pressure in place for not to explore the very painful subjects that most in our world are facing with but are not exposed in overwhelmingly majority of Bollywood or Hollywood depictions in lush and flushed movies with a few notable exceptions like Slumdog Millionaire, have linear progression from peripheral marginality to willful amnesia or simple blindness.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, albeit polemic, but has the sharpened teeth required to shred volumetric deceptions of the powerful. This is a tale to be shared, cherished and at the same time it is perhaps a forewarning: increasing inequality brings increasing instability, anywhere and everywhere.

From the recent comments of some BNP leaders I think they are taking
the wrong lesson from this election debacle. The people did not vote
for the AL because they started suddenly believing what the party
stands for or that the public have adopted an irrational hatred for
the BNP.

The BNP simply should not have participated in these elections in such
a unprepared and disorganized manner. What would have been the problem
waiting things out? The result could not have been worse than it is
now. Those who advised Khaleda Zia to succumb to pressure have a lot
to answer for but it seems that they are still at the helm of affairs
in the party. These pseudo intellectual types should be immediately
removed from their positions.

However the real reason for the scale of the defeat is something
entirely different and this the AL have realized. It is probably the
AL who are now more worried since the size of their majority puts an
immense responsibility and burden on their shoulders. Simply put the
people of this country are hungry and desperate. Hasina and her party
have made some wild promises and pledges which will be near impossible
to keep without great cost to the nation. If the AL are not able to
deliver within a reasonable time the mood will change very quickly and
retribution could be swift especially if prices continue to go up.

It was largely the female voters and new voters who swung this
election. It is this segment of the population who are most concerned
at the price increases since they have to balance their family
budgets. The BNP corruption and the war criminals issue certainly
played a part but this does not explain the size of the defeat.

The BNP should not make itself the target of the AL by being a
nuisance since public ire will be again directed at it and be even
more unforgiving. The public wants to see the AL deliver on its
promises. The AL will attempt to do so but will eventually make a mess
of things as they usually do. It is then the BNP should act and gain
popular support. Hunger and desperation is now the defining issues for
the public.

In the meantime the BNP should do away with its old advisors and
reorganize the party top to bottom. I had given Khaleda Zia a 10 point
program for the elections. Most of it concerned internal issues that
she can still be implemented. The other issues in the 10 points were
to seek forgiveness and to choose better candidates. The first she did
too late and the second was ignored probably due to time constraints.
Most people I have talked to have said that if madam had sought
forgiveness 1 month earlier then the people would have voted for her.
The problem of the choice of candidates was insurmountable and so the
BNP should have taken more time and not participated in the elections.
By participating the BNP have legitimized the elections process and
the results also. It is no point crying foul now. They will get little
sympathy from the country.

MBI Munshi

We certainly appreciate Sheikh Hasina's call to her party workers for
restraint but the scale of attacks being made on BNP-Jamaat activists
and leaders leaves us gravely concerned. Even yesterday, at least 10
BNP and Jamaat supporters were injured in separate attacks by AL
activists in different parts of Khulna city. In Kishoreganj, Awami
League activists attacked the houses of local BNP men in Kuliarchar
and Katiadi upazilas, leaving 12 injured. Six BNP men were injured in
another attack by AL workers at Parbacharparatala village in Katiadi
upazila on Tuesday midnight. In Sylhet, AL activists set fire to the
house of a local BNP leader at Munshirgaon village in Biswanath
upazila early Tuesday. In another incident, four BNP activists were
injured in an attack by AL workers at Jasherpur village in the upazila
at the same time. On Tuesday, three people were killed and 34 injured
in post-election violence in different parts of the country amid
feelings of pleasure over Monday's dramatic election results.

It is time that the AL chief acts swiftly to stop her party workers
now going on rampage in different parts of Bangladesh. She also should
take note of a report in the daily Independent that BCL workers have
now returned to the campus in jubilation, occupied all student
dormitories of Dhaka University and ransacked several rooms of JCD
activists. Such spate of violence in fact belies her oft-repeated
statement that her party had never resorted to terrorism. But inaction
and silence in the wake of extensive attacks mean `go-ahead' to
vandals and musclemen. `Logi-Baitha' rallies are a grim reminder of this.

All these attacks are reminiscent of the 1996-2001 Awami League rule.
Terrorism, which once spawned in certain pockets, had suddenly spread
to the grassroots after AL took over. This had tarnished the image of
the AL so much so that during the 2001 general election, even party
men like Al-Haj Maqbul Hossain of Mohammadpur and Haji Selim of old
Dhaka area had to promise in their poll posters their firm resolve to
contain terrorism once elected. But then common voters, who had fallen
victim to their acts of terrorism, utterly disbelieved their promises
and voted against them. We welcome Hasina's move to set up a joint
South Asian Taskforce to contain terrorism in the region. We will
acclaim her more if she immediately establishes such a Taskforce
inside Bangladesh to weed out local terrorists as they only breed
seeds of civil strife, which will surely spare none in the society.

http://www.newstoday-bd.com/editorial.asp?newsdate=

Kolkata's largely circulated Bengali daily newspaper Anandabazar
Patrika (ABP) has reported on December 31 that Sheikh Hasina has
invited Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to remain present in
her oath taking ceremony in Dhaka.

According to the ABP report, the grand alliance leader and Awami
League President Sheikh Hasina has made a phone call to the Foreign
Minister of India Pronab Mukherjee requesting him to remain present at
the oath taking ceremony of her next government.

This was reported in the (ABP) in its 31st December issue, which this
correspondent retrieved from Internet. The ABP correspondent Joyanta
Ghosal reported from New Delhi, quoting a source at South Block
(India's foreign ministry), that the Manmohan Singh government did not
want to go ahead with any great expectation about Bangladesh although
the grand alliance of Sheikh Hasina won a great victory.

The report states that Sheikh Hasina means the past illusion of
liberation war particularly to the people of West Bengal. The report
probably for the first time prefixed the word 'Bangabandhu' before the
name of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and said: "Yet the Bangalee Foreign
Minister of India does not want to go by emotion, though the daughter
of 'Bangabandhu' Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is poised to come to power."

ABP report says that after her victory in the election Sheikh Hasina
called the Bangalee Foreign Minister of India, "Dada, you will have to
come to participate in the oath taking ceremony (of my government)
with Boudi." But the Foreign Minister of India has not yet decided
whether he will attend the oath taking ceremony in Dhaka, though he
will surely visit Bangladesh before the elections of Lok Sabha, the
report added.

Several years ago when Pronob Babu switched his responsibility from
Defence Minister to Foreign Minister, the Foreign Minister of the BNP
government was the first among the foreign countries who sent him the
congratulatory message, the report said. The report added that India
had invited Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed to participate in the SAARC
Conference after the installation of the Caretaker Government (CG) of
Bangladesh to power.

The report said that, at that time a journalist, who is close to
Hasina, asked a question to this correspondent as to why India was not
coming forward in support of Sheikh Hasina openly in such a restive
situation. India did not do that. On the other hand, Foreign Minister
Pronab Mukherjee went to visit Bangladesh with relief materials.

During that visit it was seen that Pronob Babu was repeatedly
informing the CG about matters of mutual concern and he never wanted
to poke his nose into the internal politics of Dhaka. As Pronab Babu
says: "This is 2008, not 1971. At that time what India did that was
the necessity of the given circumstances. Now the situation has changed."

The ABP report further said: "Now India's stance is, India would
establish relations with whoever comes to power in the sovereign
neighbouring country. Even Delhi can not say that "it would not keep
relationship if military rule is imposed in any neighbouring country."

The report pointed out that once Indian premier Pundit Nehru opened
dialogue with Field Marshal Ayub Khan of Pakistan. Indira Gandhi was
compelled to initiate talks with Gen. Ziaul Haque after the hanging of
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Again Atal Bihari Bazpayee gave democratic
recognition to Parvez Musharraf by according him red carpet reception
at the Agra Summit just after the wounds of Kargil war. Atal Bihari
Vajpayee government also maintained good relations with Bangladesh
during the rule of Khaleda Zia, and continued bilateral relations.

The report recalled that during the SAARC conference in Katmandhu,
Khaleda Zia listened to Vajpayee's prescription for curing her knee
pain. Again Brojesh Misra did not hesitate to visit Dhaka to warn
about terrorist activities against India."

The report stated: "Pranob Babu, a follower of Indira Gandhi, knows
Sheikh Hasina personally for a long time." It is doubtless that Sheikh
Hasina has an image of a 'daughter of the same household' to New Delhi
and West Bengal. It is obviously easy for India to go for diplomatic
negotiations with the same much known 'daughter of Mujib'. But the
Foreign Minister i.e. Indian government is aware of the limitations of
the future government of Dhaka.

The report further said in the past Hasina had to pay a heavy price
for her 'friend of India image', when she was in power. Hasina also
learnt a lesson from her past experience. This time Jatiya Party of
Ershad is the ally of Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, if Jamaat-e-Islami
is the ally of Khaleda Zia's BNP. Like the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jatiya
Party also announced that they would introduce blasphemy law in their
party manifesto. And it was Ershad who declared Islam as the State
religion when he was in power. As a result the other religious
communities became second class citizens.

The report further added: "Sheikh Mujibur Rahman wanted to lead the
country towards the path of secularism. Delhi is doubtful about the
ability of the 'daughter of Mujib' to renounce the influence of the
fundamentalist forces, when the party of Ershad is her ally. Jatiya
Party of Ershad also bagged 27 seats; so it will have some kind of
control. Besides, there will be a control from the cantonment, whoever
may come to power, under the given political situation of Bangladesh.

Sheikh Hasina is also not beyond the control of the military, though
she is not like Khaleda. Keeping all these in mind India wants to
strengthen the relations with Bangladesh because of recent conflict
with Pakistan. The objective is that Pakistan can not use Bangladesh
as the field of its anti-India activities. Referring to the act of
terrorism on the soil of Bangladesh Pronab Babu has made it crystal
clear. He said, "The problem will be raised when new government will
be installed. Let us see how far we can achieve."

The Ananada Bazar Patrika report further stated: "This was the only
hope of Delhi that the military and Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh have
not been strengthened as in Pakistan." This time it is also clear in
the elections' result. The military wanted a fragile government.
People have voted en-masse in favour of the alliance of Sheikh Hasina.
The Jamaat-e-Islami has become obscure as it is seen in the results of
the votes. Yet it is not that the extreme forces of the party of
Ershad would try to hold the country inside 'veils'. Will Hasina be
able to complete the trial of the killers of Sheikh Mujib by
neglecting those extreme forces? Will Hasina be able to chant the
slogans of development by discarding the anti-Indian card, when
Norendra Modi is not stepping back from demolishing temple in the
interest of development ? South Block is waiting to see that."

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