Tarek Fatah was born in Pakistan and recently passed away in Toronto, Canada. I knew him since my arrival in Canada as an immigrant in 2002. He was the mentor, guide, and philosopher of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), established in Toronto not long after 9/11 in December 2001. The MCC aims at establishing a “progressive, liberal, pluralistic, democratic, and[Read More…]
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Abdul Momen in Washington on Monday, April 10th (Blinken had asked Momen to meet him) to discuss the current state of affairs in Bangladesh; in particular, the modus vivendi for the next parliamentary elections, as well as violence against and intimidation of the media and civil society, especially under the[Read More…]
Since the end of World War II, the US and its allies have been directly responsible for 81 percent of all unjust wars, illegal occupations of countries, civilian deaths, violations of human rights, destruction of entire nations like Vietnam, Cambodia, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and many more. So, the most embarrassing question for the US and its allies is[Read More…]
The frustration of those who lost hope of any retaliatory action against human rights violators in Bangladesh has finally been eased, at least partially, by the recent US Treasury Department’s action against a few law-enforcers in the country, well-known for gross human rights violations. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury has designated[Read More…]
I got this on WhatsApp this morning: “If you ever feel useless, just remember … USA took 4 Presidents, thousands of lives, trillions of dollar and 20 years to replace Taliban with Taliban.” Keeping aside the humour and sarcasm, one must admire Americans’ candidness, once they know what they are talking or writing about. However, the bulk of Americans are[Read More…]
We know it’s fashionable to hypothesize that democracy is “dying” in the post-Cold War world. It’s true not only for some of the postcolonial democracies in the Third World, and some “new democracies” Eastern Europe, but of late, seemingly, it’s also true about the United States. I refer to the cover story of Foreign Affairs, “Is Democracy Dying? A Global Report”[Read More…]
This is an appraisal of Islamophobia, mainly in the West, and the so-called Westophobia among Muslims from a different viewpoint. I believe that since all wars are “trade wars”, the ideological conflicts between Islam and Western civilizations are primarily motivated by economic reasons, so they are “trade wars” by other means! I have mainly cited examples from the US and[Read More…]
In view of the prevalent political deadlock, growth-oriented economic development, or growth-without-development – which is simultaneously stagnating and misleading due to inflated GDP growth estimate by the Government – and the absence of the rule of law and accountability of the government, especially since 2007, Bangladesh finds itself in a political cul-de-sac. Why so? The prevalent stalemate under a one-party[Read More…]
At the end of the Cold War in 1990, we all heaved a big sigh of relief, as the two superpowers didn’t destroy themselves and the world! What was seemingly “inevitable” – the Third World War – didn’t take place. Despite having some major military conflicts and proxy wars between the Western and Communist blocs – the Korean, Vietnam, Cambodian,[Read More…]
Although neither the puppet and illegitimate government of Sheikh Hasina nor the pro-Indian Deep State, which has been running Bangladesh for the last twelve years, gathered enough courage to broadcast or publish the transcript of the video interview of Lt General (ret) Chowdhury Hasan Sarwardy with a US-based journalist, Kanak Sarwar, on 14th July, yet the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) department[Read More…]
Bangladesh since its birth has gone through too many intra-military and intra-civilian conflicts to mention in one breath. As on 14th July, Bangladeshi Lt General (ret) Chowdhury Hasan Sarwardy revealed in a bold and candid video interview from Dhaka with Kanak Sarwar, a Bangladeshi American journalist in New York (who fled the country of his birth and now lives in[Read More…]
We know things are not going well in regards to India’s relationship with China. On 5th/6th May, China captured around sixty square kilometre of Indian territory in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh, which is strategically important to all the three countries in the region, China, India, and Pakistan. On 14th/15th June, around twenty Indian soldiers, including a colonel, were literally[Read More…]
Dear Dr. Momen: I write this to draw your attention to your recent interview with an Indian weekly The Week , published on May 31, 2020, which all of our common friends and other Bangladeshis at home and abroad have found very gratuitous, objectionable, as it grossly undermines truth, and tarnishes the image of Bangladesh, which you represent as the[Read More…]
Dear Mr. Shringla: I write this open letter to question you most respectfully why you told a seminar in Dhaka on 2nd March that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by Indian parliament last year was misunderstood by many, also in Bangladesh. Although I can’t disagree with you more that: “This is a proactive legislation that has been undertaken on[Read More…]
This is my eyewitness account of events, which took place in erstwhile East Pakistan, exactly 51 years back in January-February 1969. Although not fully comparable with what 1789 signifies for France, yet 1969 signalled the beginning of some revolutionary changes in the history of Pakistan. It witnessed the end of Ayub Khan’s decade of “guided democracy”, and the end of[Read More…]
As late as the 16th century, the Chinese indigenised “mandarin”, a variant of Sanskrit “mantri”, Malay “mantiri” via Portuguese “mandarim”, which stands for minister, counsellor, or a very high government official. Chinese mandarins were highly educated, well-groomed, powerful, and influential people having sharp intellect and immaculate mannerism. Their attire, mannerism, and language represented the mainstream of Chinese high culture encompassing[Read More…]
This is a review of an academic article by Ali Gowher (aka Gowher Rizvi), who is the International affairs Adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. I strongly believe Rizvi’s partisan vies and unsubstantiated assertions have marred the quality of the academic exercise. Had Mujib’s Soviet-style one-party dictatorship (the BAKSAL regime) survived a decade or so, what is Bangladesh[Read More…]
One may or may not like cricket – not the worm, but the game – or even, could be someone like a typical Frenchman or woman who doesn’t understand the game, or pretends he/she doesn’t have any clues as to what British men (and now women too) do with a ball, two bats, and six sticks, inserted into the[Read More…]
“Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction.” — Gustave Le Bon “Mass politics occurs when large numbers of people engage in political activity outside of the procedures and rules instituted by a society to govern political action. Mass politics in democratic society therefore is[Read More…]
This article is a sequel to my last piece “Blaming Muslims Again! Terror Attacks in Sri Lanka” (Countercurrents, April 23, 2019). As so many absurd and conflicting stories and claims by experts, laymen, victims and purported perpetrators, 9/11 gave birth to so many conspiracy theories, similarly, this Easter Sunday terror attacks in Sri Lanka have also brought us to the[Read More…]
I am very disappointed at countries and individuals who have not verified the truth about who was behind the latest rounds of terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka before finger pointing at Islam and Muslims for killing around 300 innocent people in Colombo. This insensitivity, if not prejudice against Muslims, reminds me of what leading newspapers and analysts in the US[Read More…]
Within hours of Australian White Supremacist Brenton Tarrant’s gunning down of forty-nine Muslims at two mosques at Christchurch during Juma prayer on 15th March, tens of thousands of short and long postings on the event came out in social media. In the following twenty-four hours, hundreds of op-eds came out in newspapers in so many languages across the world. As[Read More…]
The Oxford Dictionary defines shame as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour”. It could be self-inflicted, or an act committed by others leading to a loss of self-respect or self-esteem. “Shame on you” is something no respectful human being wants to hear from anyone. Self-respecting victims of shame sometimes kill[Read More…]
Education has almost everything to do with changing, modifying, and improving the levels of people’s culture (although “improving the cultural level” is a loaded and controversial expression). To remain politically correct, we may assert that education helps us broaden our world view, liberate ourselves from age-old, prejudicial ideas and practices promoted and nurtured by pre-modern feudalism, colonialism, and stagnating postcolonial[Read More…]
Dear Gowher: In hindsight, I think I should have written this letter ten years back, days after you became the International Affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. I am sorry, I failed miserably to perform my duty as a friend towards a very good old friend on time. I should have advised you what I thought and still[Read More…]
As the Jamaat-e-Islami’s founder Maulana Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979) despised democracy, so do all his adherents. Soon after establishing the Jamaat in 1941, he admired Mussolini and considered him to be his role model. He also called himself the “Amir” or “Dictator/Fuherer” of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The JI chiefs in Bangladesh and Pakistan are still called “Amir”. So, the JI is[Read More…]
The “Language Movement” of erstwhile East Bengal/East Pakistan and Bangladesh today was more than a language movement, it was a cultural-political movement for Bangladesh. No wonder, even after the Pakistan Constitution of 1956 had guaranteed Bengali as one of the two state languages along with Urdu, East Bengalis continued to mourn the deaths of half-a-dozen martyrs, who got killed by[Read More…]
Renowned British economist and a Labour Party member of the House of Lords, Lord Meghnad Desai on January 23rd wrote a letter to the Guardian, as a rebuttal to Simon Murphy’s investigative op-ed, posted from Gazipur Bangladesh, “Inhuman conditions: life in factory making Spice Girls T-shirts”, published on January 20th in the same paper. Lord Desai’s letter is simply a[Read More…]
Since his recent Gestapo-style abduction, rather than arrest, Shahidul Alam of Bangladesh is no longer a stranger to people, well-beyond the boundaries of his country. Twenty-odd Bangladeshi law-enforcers – all in plainclothes – stormed into his house, destroyed the cc cameras on the premises, neutralized the security guards, and picked him up around midnight on August 5th. By now twelve[Read More…]
Since terrorists mostly outsmart law-enforcers and their victims, counterterrorism (CT) is an arduous tightrope walking. Effective CT requires governments, law-enforcers, and all potential victims of terrorism to understand what terrorism is all about. However, false flag operations, cry wolves, and politically motivated persecution of wrong people, and even invasions of the wrong countries have become very challenging to successful CT[Read More…]
Extrajudicial killings of dissidents and outlaws by states is as old as civilization. The recent world history is replete with such killings. As Hitler had his Waffen-SS and Gestapo, so had Mussolini his Blackshirts to do the job. In the recent past, the last Shah of Iran had his Savak, and the Pakistani occupation Army in Bangladesh had its al-Badr,[Read More…]
Another school shooting by a 17-year-old White student at Santa Fe yesterday (18th May 2018), and another round of “prayer” by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Republican Governor of Texas, and other important and not-so important Americans! They admired the courage of some students, teachers, policemen, and mourned the deaths of ten victims of the attack, which was 22nd of its[Read More…]
As there are multiple narratives about the Partition of 1947, so are there multiple theories about the emergence of Bangladesh. One school of thought tells us there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of Bangladesh; its birth could be averted had the main actors, Bhutto, Yahya, Mujib and some others behaved differently. The other narrative highlights the fundamental differences[Read More…]
Dear Iqbal: You, and I, and all our common friends know we are very close and good friends since our Dhaka College days (1964-1966). You also met my parents, and they always liked you a lot. My late mother, not long before her death in this September, asked me about you. She mentioned seeing you on TV, and even[Read More…]
Thomas Friedman is a big name in the realm of journalism and the study of Globalization. He’s known for his anti-Republican liberal views, and for his pro-Israeli sympathies, especially among Arabs and Muslims. I sometimes agree with his strong opinions, especially his critiquing America’s counterproductive foreign policies. I liked one of his comments on the stupidity of spending billions[Read More…]
India’s immediate past President Pranab Mukherjee (82) in his The Coalition Years, 1996-2012 – his twelfth book – tells his own tale about the last 16 years of his experience in active politics until 2012, when he became the President of the Republic. He was in active politics for 43 years (1969-2012), holding important positions as MP; Leader of[Read More…]
While democracy has become problematic in several countries, on 5th January 2014, Bangladesh crossed the threshold of “illiberal democracy” to enter the domain of “authoritarian dynastic democracy” under Indian tutelage. The symptoms of the disease called “Orwellian State” are already visible here. The fictional Big Brother of Nineteen Eighty-Four is already breathing on the neck of Bangladesh, from across[Read More…]
To some, the title of my column today might be utterly ridiculous, as it suggests it’s time for Bangladesh to have a foreign policy. They might raise eyebrows at my suggestion that, Bangladesh is going without any foreign policy, since 2009. To them, Bangladesh has a sound foreign policy under a seasoned career diplomat as Foreign Minister, and an[Read More…]
I believe “genocide” is the right word to describe the ongoing mass killing, rape, and expropriation of Rohingyas in Mayanmar. Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) first used the expression in 1943, to denote the mass killings, rapes, torture, extortions, and marginalization of Jews and others in Axis-occupied Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. As Lemkin has defined genocide,[Read More…]
Since almost all US presidents from Truman to Obama – with the exceptions of Ford, Carter and Clinton – had blood on their hands, one possibly can’t single out Donald Trump for not being the exception. One may possibly disagree with me for including Kennedy and Obama in my list of US Presidents as war criminals. I wish I[Read More…]
North Korea has remained a pain in the neck for the “Free World” since the beginning of the Korean Crisis in 1945. The Cold War is over, but the crisis in the Korean peninsula, and the trumped-up nuclear threats from North Korea to its neighbours, and now even to the US, aren’t over. The end of the Korean War[Read More…]
It’s an important question if the removal of Nawaz Sharif from office is just another Pakistani Prime Minister’s meeting his nemesis, or it’s another unceremonious removal of a head of government for all the wrong reasons and excuses! We know, since the assassination of the first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, no Pakistani Prime Minister has been[Read More…]
Consecutively on 13th and 14th June, major disasters hit Bangladesh and the United Kingdom. On the morning of 13th, landslides killed more than 150 people, and four army personnel, in Chittagong and Chittagong Hill Tracts districts of Bangladesh. And in the early hours of the 14th, a fire in a 24-storied apartment complex, the Grenfell Tower, killed around 80 people[Read More…]
Although there’s no reason to take Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour, and his ambivalent and nasty assertions seriously, yet we can’t ignore his latest gimmick, the circus he staged in Riyadh in the name of defeating Islamist terrorism on May 21st. To paraphrase Shakespeare, Trump’s so-called Islamic-Arab-American Summit was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. The whole thing was[Read More…]
Interestingly, “interesting” is an English expression, which may hide one’s actual opinion about something one considers “interesting”. What I read in Bangladesh media in the last one month is very “interesting” to me. Stories that I read are absurd, bizarre, entertaining, frightful, and sickening. I learnt from media reports and articles that there’s nothing immoral, or impossible in Bangladesh today.[Read More…]
Every society has certain taboos – cultural/religious, social, and political – set apart and designated as restricted or forbidden to associate with, or even to bring in ordinary discussion. The Rohingya issue (for some strange reasons) seems to be such a taboo in Bangladesh. Both people and government here don’t want to go beyond certain limits to have a[Read More…]
There are contradictory opinions about who on last Tuesday April 4th used chemical weapons, which killed more than 80 civilians including children in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun in Syria. Some pundits impute the deadly Sarin gas attack to Bashar al-Assad, while others believe terrorists belonging to the al-Nusra Front, which is an al Qaeda surrogate and friends with[Read More…]
It has happened again! In the wake of the latest rounds of ISIS terror attacks in Bangladesh, authorities in the country have again started denying the existence of any ISIS terror network there. Rejecting any ISIS involvement in terror attacks in Bangladesh as “propaganda”, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Kamal poses the question: “Why will the ISIS come here?” One wonders if[Read More…]
A recent move by the Government to allow child marriage is tantamount to excluding many Bangladeshis from the benefits of growth and development. Women are likely to become the main victims of the recently enacted Child Marriage Restraint Act-2017. It allows a Bangladeshi boy or girl to get married before reaching the minimum age limit – 18 for women[Read More…]
Corruption became so integral to Bangladesh that consecutively for five years (2001-2005) it remained the most corrupt country in the world. However, we hear things have changed for the better. On the one hand, the country has become self-sufficient in food; on the other, it’s no longer the most corrupt nation on earth, officially! Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s human development index has[Read More…]
As there’re multiple causes and factors behind most events, so is Donald Trump’s election victory not attributable to any single factor. However, there is always the “most important factor” behind everything. Here, neo-fascist racism played the most important role in the election of Trump. One may attribute his victory to the so-called Obama Legacy or Factor. We know Trump is[Read More…]
Recently, Muslim mob attacks on Hindu houses and temples in Nasirnagar (Brahmanbaria) and elsewhere in Goplaganj, Chittagong, and Sunamganj districts in Bangladesh have drawn wide media attention, within and outside the country. I can’t agree more with Daily Star’s editorial (Nov 2) that Government inaction would only embolden the bigots; and that: “any mix of politics and faith cannot[Read More…]
It’s absurd! It’s preposterous to suggest that around 40 per cent of Bangladeshis favour suicide terrorism. Yet this is what some American think tanks and “expert analysts” have recently come up with in their reports, to the detriment of Bangladesh’s reputation. Muslims in Bangladesh – around 90 per cent of the population – are peaceful, liberal, devotional, and even[Read More…]
Signs are ominous! On Thursday Oct 13, US Tomahawk cruise missiles destroyed pro-Iranian / anti-Saudi Houthi rebels’ radar sites in Yemen, “retaliating after failed missile attacks this week on a U.S. Navy destroyer”, U.S. officials claimed. Washington has again complained about Houthi missile attacks on a US naval ship on Saturday, Oct 15. Meanwhile, Iran has deployed two warships off[Read More…]
Americans since the founding of the United States seem to be in a perennial state of narcissist obsession. Narcissism is all about excessive self-love, extreme interest in oneself, arrogance, selfishness, and a grandiose view of one’s own talents, virtues, and righteousness. This collective disorder of self-glorification is not a new phenomenon for Americans. French historian/diplomat Alexis Tocqueville pointed out this[Read More…]
“Is America Any Safer” is the cover story of this September’s Atlantic magazine. CNN and other media outlets are also commemorating the catastrophic terror attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001. Reflecting their collective delusions of persecution, and exaggerated self-importance, Americans in general are perplexed about certain things with regard to 9/11: a) what went wrong with their[Read More…]
Locals and foreigners in Dhaka formally grieved for the victims of the Gulshan Attack one month after the incident. The local and international reaction to the July 1 terror attack at Gulshan has been far more intensive than the collective reaction to all the previous terror attacks in Bangladesh since 1999; there had never been any such mass grieving for[Read More…]
Joya Chatterjee’s path breaking work, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947, shows how decisive was the minority Bengali Hindu community’s role in the secondary partition of Bengal in 1947, so is Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2011) another seminal study of the minority Punjabi Hindu community’s important role in the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan
I find my White American students – even the very bright ones – totally confused, the moment I ask them if White police brutality against Black people in America amounts to terrorism. Most White students attribute the killings of black people by White police as undesirable, accidental, or simply due to bad judgment by the proverbial “bad cops”. Mostly Black[Read More…]
Bangladeshi politicians, analysts, intellectuals, and media should do the following three things for the sake of durable peace and order in the country: a) stop denying the existence of terrorism, as there is hardly any country without terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, in the post-9/11 world; b) fight terrorism not only with force but also through education and mass motivation; and c) do not think of gaining political leverage by falsely implicating political rivals or personal adversaries as terrorist agents. Terrorists gain most in divided and fractured countries. Examples abound.
Of late, terrorists or unknown assailants have killed freethinking writers and bloggers, a couple of foreign nationals, and two LGBT activists in Bangladesh, around 36 people since February 2015. And almost ritualistically, killers have been bragging about their acts, and proclaiming to be al Qaeda, ISIS, Ansar al-Islam, or Ansarullah Bangla Team affiliates. Interestingly, some Bangladeshi politicians claim (a) various[Read More…]
A Bangladeshi MP – who paradoxically represents the ruling coalition as well as its opposition in the parliament – recently played the proverbial role of the judge, jury and prosecutor. He and his associates publicly tortured and humiliated a headmaster of a local school at Narayanganj, for his “blasphemous” comments against Islam. I don’t want to discuss the alleged blasphemy[Read More…]
Karl Marx, among other critics of imperialism, had some kind words for British colonial rule in India, especially in regard to the prevalent rule of law in the colony. The civil and criminal laws, as evolved in Bangladesh – as in all the former British colonies, worldwide – are based on the British Common Law. However, barring a handful of[Read More…]
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My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
