Tragedy of errors
Ian Jack
Dacca In the days before the partition of the Indian subcontinent the easiest way to reach Dacca from Calcutta was by train and steamship. The distance is only 100-odd miles and you could cover it in five or six hours. Bengalis from both cities remember the journey fondly. You clattered out of Calcutta past Dum-Dum (birthplace of the soft-nosed bullet) and then over the paddy fields of the delta to a wharf on the Ganges, whence a paddle boat of the Indian Steam Navigation Company would thread its way through sandbanks and the small sailing craft which drifted downstream laden with jute bound for tramp steamers and Dundee. It was, as Bengalis say, a most beautiful experience. It was also an extremely sensible way to travel between the capitals of West and East Bengal.
But, like many sensible travel arrangements, it has disappeared. The Clyde-built steamers still ply across the Ganges delta, a man still stands at their bows to prod the waters with a pole and shout their depth rather like Mark Twain, and the trains still run. But the steamers no longer connect with the trains and the trains stop some way short of the international border. The politics of nationhood have intervened.
In 1947 the Muslim majority in East Bengal thought they had more in common with the Muslims of north and west India than they did with the Hindu majority of West Bengal. They, or their politicians, opted to be a province of Pakistan. This was a mistake. In 1971, after considerable cruelty, bloodshed and Indian connivance, East Pakistan became Bangladesh, an avowedly secular state led by a man, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who kept a picture of the Hindu poet Tagore in his parlour. But then many in Bangladesh, particularly in the army, thought that this was also a mistake. In 1975 they murdered Sheikh Mujib and most of his family. Coup and counter-coup followed. Bangladesh began to embrace Islam more fervently and to spend much more on guns. Its new president, General Ziair Rahman, could behave dictatorially and sometimes bloodily. But he was also a man who saw that the army and Islam ,alone would not keep the people of Bangladesh happy for long. He started to spend money on public works, he preached birth control (the population is likely to double to 170 million by the turn of the century), he encouraged peasants to build drainage canals.
Many in Bangladesh, particularly in the army, thought he was yet another mistake. Several coups and assassinations were plotted and eventually one succeeded. Early one morning, late last month, troops under the command of General Manzoor sprayed the President with machine-gun fire as he stepped from his bedroom in Chittagong. Alas, in eliminating this mistake, General Manzoor had made one himself. The rest of the Bangladesh army did not join him and Manzoor died at the hands of his own men. Or that, at least, is the official story.
When added to the groaning burden of people, poverty and weather, this accumulation of cruel error makes Bangladesh a most distressful country. A French correspondent on the flight from Calcutta to Dacca last week (the air journey takes as long as the old land and water route, thanks to the inconvenience of airports) thought they were a peculiarly morbid people. He remembered the local newspapers during the Bangladesh war. 'Nothing but pictures of dead bodies. OK, one picture of bodies, that's OK, but dozens of pictures, then you begin to think there's something a little wrong with the mind.'
Later that night, as the encoffined body of President Zia lay in state I could sense something of what he meant. Hundreds of thousands of people queued to see it, but their mood seemed more curious than grieving, seeming to prove not so much that Zia was popular, rather that he was dead. Bangladeshis themselves worry deeply about their future. 'You must pray for us,' one elderly journalist said under the fans of the Press Club. 'And you must help us, guide us.' I pointed out that Bangladesh received nearly 1,500 million dollars in aid every year. 'True,' the journalist said, 'but what we need is your experience of demo cratic government, your justice. Everything over the past ten years in this country has been born in blood. We cannot endure much more.'
The usual diagnosis of the Bangladeshi disease is too much poverty, endemic cor ruption and an army grown too big for its boots (though a cousin of the late president Zia added another unusual explanation. It was to do, he said, with the size of the Bengali brain. Bigger or smaller than average? No, he said, longer). Certainly both poverty and the fruits of corruption can be seen on the streets of Dacca, which, contrary to popular mythology, is a pleasant-looking if duff city of broad ave nues and tinkling cycle rickshaws. The poverty provides the beggars and the bare-foot rickshaw wallahs, the corruption shows itself in the smart suits and habits of a group known as the brief-case wallahs, who trade in government contracts.
Or perhaps they are simply honest entrepreneurs. I talked to one businessman over German beer in his large bungalow.
He was smart and snappy and played disco music loudly on a stereo set equipped with little vertical columns of light which flashed up and down with the beat. His wife and children stayed, by Islamic tradition, in the kitchen.
He spoke nostalgically of his schooldays in Calcutta (`Dear old Cal'), of his old Hindu friends and of Indian women ('beautiful and much better educated than our women, they're really going places).
He agreed that it was ridiculous for Bang ladesh to import coal from Poland and South Africa rather than from the mines m West Bengal, and for telephone calls from Dacca to Calcutta;to:be routed via London. On the other hand,' India had flooded the market with shoddy goods during Sheikh Mujib's time and few people trusted India.
I asked the ultimate blasphemy. Was partition not the original, great mistake? He spoke of Hindu landlords oppressing Muslim labourers, Hindu traders exploiting Muslim craftsmen. 'But of course, you're right,' he said. He laughed. 'Of course • but it seemed such a necessary idea at the time.'
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