Dhaka’s Rohingya dilemma

Bangladesh’s people and government feel morally pressured to take in the refugees. Hard realities, though, make it difficult

argue against letting the Rohingya in, are in a state of profound moral agonising at this point. Images of Bangladesh’s coast guard and its navy turning away Rohingya approaching the country’s shores and probably compelling them to drift out to the Bay of Bengal have been deeply unsettling for people. Demands are being made regularly, for the government to pursue the issue on the strength of global interpretations of the status of the Rohingya with the Myanmar government. The difficulty here is that Myanmar, despite presenting itself to the outside world as a fledgling democracy, remains unmoved by the plight it has pushed the Rohingya into. So far, the Bangladesh government has been unable to do much other than summoning the Myanmar ambassador to the foreign office in Dhaka to register its concerns about the new repression unleashed on the Rohingya.

There is yet another twist given to the situation by certain quarters in Bangladesh. The emphasis is on the repression perpetrated on “Muslim” Rohingya which, in other words, is as much as suggesting that Yangon has embarked on a systematic policy of repression against a particular religious component of its population. Be that as it may, what has certainly confounded Bangladesh’s government and people is the absolute silence of Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi on the issue.

Media reports and comments in Bangladesh have roundly condemned her refusal to take a positive stand on the Rohingya issue, with irate writers demanding that she be stripped of her Nobel Prize for Peace. In her years in incarceration, Suu Kyi enjoyed mass adoration in Bangladesh and it was only natural to expect, once her National League for Democracy won the election and assumed office, that she would influence a change in the approach to the Rohingya situation. That she has said not a word, and indeed she has carefully stayed clear of addressing these persecuted people as Rohingya, has rankled, and convinced, people in Bangladesh that the Myanmar military continues to call the shots and that Suu Kyi, despite holding office, wields little authority. C R Sasikumar

Last but not least, the government and the people of Bangladesh, even as they sympathise with the Rohingya, are unable to ignore some bitter realities of the recent past. From among those Rohingya who have been in Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong for the past couple of decades has emerged a new class of Islamist militants hostile to the growth of liberal politics in the country. Most of these new militants came under indoctrination by such fanatical groups as the Jamaat-e-islami. Other elements of bigotry have been in the picture as well. None of this has been pleasing to the government and the people of Bangladesh. Add to that the corruption involved in a supply of Bangladeshi passports illegally to large groups of Rohingya, who then made it to West Asia as wage earners. That would have been overlooked had it not been for many of the Rohingya getting booked for criminal activities in Saudi Arabia and other countries.

The embarrassment for Bangladesh was therefore on two counts. In the first place, no one had any clue as to how these Rohingya — and all of this occurred in the times of the government which preceded the present one — were able to come by Bangladeshi documents. In the second, the Rohingya, in the guise of Bangladeshis, committed criminal acts in the Middle East, leaving the country red in the face.

In the conditions which prevail today, morality suggests that Rohingya fleeing persecution in their country be let into Bangladesh. At the same time, a sense of reality points to the terrible burden that could be put on Bangladesh’s resources if they are allowed entry, with hardly any guarantee that they will soon, or ever, go back home. After all, the Myanmar authorities would like nothing better than to see the backs of an ethnic group they have doggedly, and infuriatingly, looked upon as Bengali Muslims who had illegally settled in Rakhine State. As the old cliché goes, Bangladesh is on the horns of a dilemma.

The writer is associate editor, ‘The Daily Observer’, and a senior columnist in Bangladesh IN MANY WAYS, writing about idolisation is like dancing about architecture. That is to say, it is never really possible to explain idolisation as the sum total of what we see. The emotions that manifest as millions of threads that entangle Jayalalithaa’s being with her supporters defy categorisation. It is not really possible to speak of the love for Jayalalithaa through resorting to our usual categories that are meant to explain admiration. The first of these — and the one most frequently invoked — relates to the materialist explanation. Here, the sacrificial grief for Jayalalithaa is presented as an outcome of her image and role as the saviour of the poor: The poor feel an immeasurable debt of gratitude since she improved their lives through cheap food, electronic gadgets and other welfare schemes. This is both true and not wholly reliable as an explanation. For such activities are also the mainstay of political strategies deployed by those who do not enjoy even a fraction of the adoration garnered by Jayalalithaa.

Then, there are explanations that speak of her public presence as a fighter against odds, an idea about herself that Jayalalithaa herself favoured and put out for mass consumption. She fought to secure her personal and political space in the life-world of her mentor M.G. Ramachandran, battled tirelessly against a masculinist public culture that invariably sought to slight her through gendered evaluations rather than her incalculable abilities as a politician, and she fought to overcome the stigma of being “just an actor” who had strayed into politics. But isn’t Mayawati also a fighter, a single woman, had a political mentor, and has gone through greater struggle given her more disadvantaged caste and economic background? And yet, Mayawati — for all her popularity — does not generate anywhere near the same level of self-denying (and self-destructing) adoration that gathers around Jayalalithaa.

The mythic proportions of Jayalalithaa’s continuing presence among her followers requires an understanding of the nature of charisma in age of globalisation, post-industrialism and hyper-consumerism. It is odd to even discuss charisma as existing alongside the social and political worlds that characterise contemporary Indian modernity. In traditional thinking, charisma does not sit well with the conditions of life characterised by rules and regulations — however poorly they might be followed — since the routine nature of rules and regulations are supposed to move us away from the individualised and sacred authority of the charismatic leader. Well, at least that is the theory. In practice — the detour that theory must make if it is to offer any grip on actual conditions of life — things cannot be further from the truth. Jayalalithaa’s life-story tells us that the career of the charismatic leader sits comfortably alongside all those contexts that are supposed to undermine charisma such as bureaucracies and legal procedures that are intended to produce all citizens and equal subjects. To understand this apparently bewildering state of affairs, charisma needs to be positioned alongside the processes of globalisation.

The extra-ordinary nature of change in our lives over the past three decades or so can be seen through effects upon family relations, sexual cultures, leisure activities, food habits, the things we buy and wish to buy, residential spaces and urban landscapes, to name just a few contexts. Vast sections of the population are embroiled in such change, for, if they weren’t, it would not be of the proportion that it is. And, what is even more significant, people take part in such change with enthusiasm: We willingly and forcefully wish to move among the new world of goods, technologies, foods and leisure. However, in Indian conditions, we continue to be subject to other pulls: Family, kin, religious and caste networks are also significant aspects of our lives.

What is remarkable is the manner in which we resolve the apparent tension between that which promises us new worlds and those aspects that continue to locate us in older contexts. The tension is not resolved through turning towards family and “Indian traditions”, say, to counter increasing consumerism, rather we have found ways of accommodating two apparently divergent positions. It is the charismatic leader who allows us to have both the worlds of change we desire and comforts of those contexts we view as markers of stability. It is this context that explains a very remarkable paradox as far as Jayalalithaa is concerned: Within Indian culture, the mother (amma) is primarily a figure of sacrifice and home, rather than consumerist abandon in the public sphere.

Jayalalithaa’s significance, sociologically speaking, lies in the fact that while remaining a “mother”, she did not stick to the script of motherhood, and that even while she presented herself as the provider of basic necessities, she also came to be seen as the person who provided access to worlds beyond. The specific history of Tamil Nadu — where significant film figures have become important politicians in a position to exercise the power their onscreen persona promised has, of course, embellished this context.

Charisma in our social context is the ability to link different worlds, rather than the characteristic of a leader that can be placed in an evolutionary framework such that with the advance of modernity, its effects will be diminished. Jayalalithaa’s charisma lay in her ability to offer multiple worlds to followers who themselves exist in multiple worlds: Of worshipping motherhood but also seeking girlfriends, pursuing individualised actions along with family obligations, sacrifice and aspirations to consume. Her charisma offered the idea of choice itself to those whose lives are mostly characterised by helplessness. And if such choices generated anxieties she was also able to assuage them. People are willing to give their lives for it.

The writer is a sociologist