The protests in Dhaka’s Shahbag Square mark the appropriation of non-violence as a strategy to achieve a violent goal
The protest the Bangladeshis have mounted at Shahbag Square in Dhaka raises several perturbing questions, which we in our understandable glee over Islamists being cornered, have ignored to ask. The first: Can we describe as non-violent a movement which peacefully pursues a goal essentially violent in nature?
The goal of the Shahbag protest demands the hanging of all those arrayed in the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) for killing people during Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971. It was sparked off at the ICT awarding life imprisonment to Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Mollah, goading a disappointed people to bay for his death. The trial and subsequent protests also has lessons for Nepal, where a Truth and Reconciliation Bill to address war crimes has become a vital bargaining point over the formation of an election government.
As the gathering at Shahbag swelled to mammoth proportions, death became the leitmotif of the protest. It surprised none to see them erupt into thunderous applause at the news that another Jamaat leader, Delawar Hossain Sayedee, had been sentenced to death. It would seem the protestors at Shahbag won’t return home until all the nine accused of war crimes have been sent to the gallows.
Whether or not the Bangladeshis succeed in achieving their goal, they have certainly turned the philosophy of non-violence on its head. Nobody had ever thought that there could come a time or a movement which would have people protest peacefully, not even lifting a hand or issuing dire threats, yet demand death for their opponents, as those accused of war crimes are for Shahbag. In this limited sense, the protest in Dhaka mirrors the agitation against rape in Delhi in December.
No longer do goons or revolutionaries want to mow down their rivals. Even peaceful protesters, our modern-day Gandhians, desire the death of their opponents. Indeed, Shahbag marks the appropriation of non-violence as a strategy to achieve a violent goal.
Perhaps the celebration of Shahbag without reservation is linked to the nature of debate till now on what constitutes a non-violent movement. For long, its proponents have concentrated on debating the legitimacy of means/methods to achieve goals universally valued – for instance, independence from the foreign yoke, or ushering in of a democratic rule by overthrowing a dictator. They argued that a goal, however cherished and valued, did not justify all conceivable methods to realise it. Some were deemed outside the pale. Truth and peaceful protest were considered as important as the avowed goal, which an illegitimate method – violence – could sully and debase.
Shahbag seems to have reversed this equation: does a peaceful protest become illegitimate because its goal is violent? This question assumes importance as the Shahbag protesters neither want radical change in the judicial process nor a more skilled battery of prosecutors. Irrespective of the quality of evidence presented – which David Bergman, who manages bangladeshwarcrimes.blogspot.com, believes is questionable on many counts – Shahbag adamantly wants the accused hanged. It’s a demand decidedly unreasonable, even murderous, which, in turn, renders the peaceful protest likewise.
A non-violent movement, historically, doesn’t seek vengeance. In fact, it aims to break the cycle of violence-vengeance, persuade the oppressor about the illegitimacy of his or her method, and mounts moral pressure on him or her to transform themselves and rectify their mistakes. These principles guided Mahatma Gandhi in his endeavour to convince the British about the immorality of enslaving a people. Perhaps the Bangladeshis should recall the fast he undertook to stop the communal rioting in Noakhali and Kolkata, demanding neither imprisonment nor hanging for the perpetrators of violence, quite content at its cessation.
Obviously, it could be argued that in a democracy, which Bangladesh is, the popular will must prevail. Though we can’t tell for sure whether Shahbag expresses the majority sentiment, the overwhelming victory of the ruling Awami League in the last election which it fought on the promise of bringing war criminals to expeditious trial, could be cited as an expression of the popular will. Nevertheless, it isn’t just a case of quibbling to point to the significant difference between putting war criminals on trial and insisting they must be hanged.
In demanding the latter, Shahbag has pushed Bangladesh closer to mobocracy than strengthening democracy. What would we say if the Jamaat, acquiring power ten years from now, were to gather thousands of Islamists at Shahbag to accuse the current crop of leaders of conspiring to send their leaders to the gallows in 2013 and demand they be hanged?
We secularists are delighted because Shahbag appears to us a blow for secularism and moderate Islam. But, really, do the Bangladeshis need to consecrate the progressive idea of secularism in blood? This doesn’t mean the wounds of Bangladesh should be allowed to fester. Perhaps its leaders should examine the method Nelson Mandela adopted to bring a closure to the history of bloody race relations in South Africa.
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