Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

SOUTH ASIA IN MOTION

EDITOR

Thomas Blom Hansen

EDITORIAL BOARD

Sanjib Baruah

Anne Blackburn

Satish Deshpande

Faisal Devji

Christophe Jaffrelot

Naveeda Khan

Stacey Leigh Pigg

Mrinalini Sinha

Ravi Vasudevan

NUSRAT SABINA CHOWDHURY

PARADOXES OF THE POPULAR

Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chowdhury, Nusrat Sabina, author.

Title: Paradoxes of the popular : crowd politics in Bangladesh / Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: South Asia in motion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018057612 (print) | LCCN 2018059912 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503608863 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609471 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609488 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements—Bangladesh. | Crowds—Political aspects—Bangladesh. | Political culture—Bangladesh. | Bangladesh—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC HN690.6.A8 (ebook) | LCC HN690.6.A8 C4685 2019 (print) | DDC 303.6095492—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057612

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover photo: Tongi Railway Station, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Md. Akhlas Uddin | Getty Images.

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services in 10.75/15 Adobe Caslon

For my crowd

in Dhaka, Phulbari, and Chicago

CONTENTS

Notes on Translation and Transliteration

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Picture-Thinking

2. Seeing Like a Crowd

3. Accidental Politics

4. Crowds and Collaborators

5. The Body of the Crowd

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Throughout the book, I have followed the standard spelling for Bangla words as they are written in Bangladesh. I have avoided the International Phonetic Alphabet for the ease in reading for both Bengali and non-Bengali readers.

All translations from Bangla, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book exists because some very kind people in Phulbari shared their homes and lives with me. When the finish line seemed distant, their stories, only some of which have made it here, helped me to stay the course. My teachers at the University of Chicago—particularly William Mazzarella, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Joseph Masco—played key roles in the process. At our first meeting, William asked me who my interlocutors were. I got flustered. I didn’t think my work—and by extension, I—was important enough to have interlocutors. Fifteen years later, I am happy to realize that William is now one of my most cherished interlocutors. In the way only he can, he keeps on pushing me to think and write, always leading by example. Dipeshda had been my reason to go to Chicago. He remains so as I take every opportunity to land in Hyde Park for some solid adda. Still, it was in the classroom that he was the most thought-provoking. I thank him for his wisdom and friendship. Joe Masco opened up new intellectual horizons and urged me to write. Anne Ch’ien made sure that I got in and out of Haskell Hall in one piece. Paradoxes of the Popular owes everything to them.

Phulbari has given me a book, but more important, a host of friends without whom my life in Dhaka is now inconceivable. Anu Muhammad took me along on my first trip to Phulbari and many more since. Hopefully, the book somewhat makes up for those bumpy rides on Hanif Enterprise. Zonayed Saki made my fieldwork his personal mission and made sure I got it done. I thank him for his friendship. Zaeed Aziz has always gone out of his way to help my research and writing. He also introduced me to Mahmud Hasan Babu, who welcomed me to his home (thank you, Chacha and Chachi!) and kept me constant company in Phulbari. I thank Babu for prodding me to meet more people and to ask more uncomfortable questions. I hope he will be amused to occasionally find himself in the following pages.

I finished the manuscript in Amherst, which was enabled by the support and good cheer of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Amherst College. Chris Dole, Deborah Gewertz, Vanessa Fong, Amy Cox Hall, Alan Babb, Jerry Himmelstein, Hannah Holleman, Ron Lembo, Leah Schmalzbauer, Eunmi Mun, and Karen Graves have been the most wonderful friends and coworkers. Chris was the only person to read the manuscript in its entirely and convinced me that it was a book. It must be kismet that Hannah and I started teaching together. Her love, friendship, and food have sustained me these past years. Pinky Hota’s house is my refuge in the valley. I thank Pinky for her friendship and intellectual sustenance, and for bringing Akila into our lives.

As my neighbor Emily Dickinson would say, My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them. I have had an opulent life in that regard. Mandira Bhaduri, David Bleeden, Steve Burnett, Mark Geraghty, Shefali Jha, Jesse Knutson, Fatema Tanzia Hossain, Mona Mehta, Nazmul Sultan, and Rihan Yeh have been parts of the journey that led to this book. I hope Rihan knows how much I have learned from her as a scholar and a human being. Thanks to Mandira, I have a much-needed home in Hyde Park. I am grateful to Shefali for the laughter and the songs. I thank David for his continued friendship, and his kindness toward the cats. Nazmul and I met after I had left graduate school, but it’s only fitting that he’s now a part of my Chicago clan. Nazmul’s brilliance is matched only by his wisdom beyond years. I hope this book, a result of our ongoing conversations, makes him happy, though I know at times my thinking won’t meet his exacting standards.

My conversations with Taslima Akhtar, Aminul Islam Bablu, Akku Chowdhury, Omar Faruque, Saiful Islam Jewel, Ahmed Kamal, Naeem Mohaiemen, Seuty Sabur, and Faruk Wasif at various stages of this project have made it richer. Khaled Sarkar in Dhaka and Saiful Islam in Phulbari have graciously given me permission to use their amazing photographic and artistic work without any recompense. My conversations with the following people—some spread over many years and some brief—have deepened my thinking about the book and much beyond. I am grateful to Kamran Asdar Ali, Amrita Basu, Joshua Barker, Jessica Cattelino, Frank Cody, Lotte Hoek, Matthew Hull, Ritu Khanduri, Alejandra Leal, Rosalind Morris, Thomas Newbold, Moishe Postone, Danilyn Rutherford, Austin Sarat, James Siegel, Pauline Strong, and Colleen Woods. I also thank Thomas Blom Hansen, Marcela Cristina Maxfield, Sunna Juhn, and two anonymous reviewers at Stanford University Press for their editorial guidance. An Overseas Research Travel Grant from the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and faculty travel funds from Amherst College provided indispensable material support for research and writing. It is because of the generosity of the Dean of the Faculty’s office at Amherst College, frequently mediated by Austin Sarat, that this book looks and reads the way it does. So, thank you!

My parents, despite their uncharacteristically busy lives, have successfully instilled the love of reading in their daughters. I see this book as a little thank-you note to them for opening up the wondrous world of words. Whatever work I have managed to do is directly correlated with what my sisters have done to keep our family happy and sane. Both have made sure that Shantinagar remains my permanent address. As I put finishing touches to the manuscript, between the two of them they are taking care of two elderly parents, three kids, a hospital, two households, and about a dozen pets. I simply don’t have the words to say what this has meant for my survival—both professionally and personally. In the past decade, Totinee, Zafir, and Zubin have been my reasons to hop on the plane to Dhaka as often as I could. Shantinagar is home also through the labor and love of many other people, especially Saleha Bua, Kaderer Ma Bua, Rina, Belal, and Aziz Bhai. Ayaji would have been all too happy to hold this book even if she couldn’t read it. She taught me how family had not much to do with blood. For this, and so much more, I am infinitely in debt.

Just as I was getting done with the book, Yogi waltzed back into our lives after two years. I hope that her prodigal return promises more magic. Sufi hung around and made sure that I would finish the PhD, get a job, write a book, and set aside time to play, preferably with him. All this he did without knowing, thereby giving me a true gift. I have promised him these last lines in a failed attempt at reciprocity.

INTRODUCTION

IN AUGUST 2006, a small township in northwestern Bangladesh became an unlikely focus of national attention. Tens of thousands of residents of nearby villages gathered at the center of Phulbari, about 180 miles from Dhaka, to protest possible open-pit coal mining. Most of them were there to expel a multinational energy company, then called Asia Energy Corporation, that was planning the country’s largest development project. Three men were shot to death on August 26 in the confrontations between the paramilitary guards and the angry protesters.

We are not discussing politics; we are discussing energy. One burns and the other creates, a local organizer joked loudly—deliberately, it seemed, in order to be overheard. We were walking out of an activist meeting in Phulbari a few months after the agitations against potential mining became violent. The activist’s comment, at first, sounded like a neat allegory of the heightened crises around energy and democracy marking Bangladesh’s entry into the twenty-first century. The young man’s words, however, were more than a clever summary of the urgencies on the ground. They revealed a curious and counterintuitive valuation of energy (jwalani) and politics (rajneeti). Said with more than a touch of irony and loud enough for others to hear, the activist’s words were especially telling within the stifling political climate of a nationwide emergency that was declared in early 2007. Protests in Phulbari that were interfering with a glib rhetoric of foreign direct investment and development were under strict state surveillance. Spies, or low-ranking agents of the state security apparatus, followed around a renowned public intellectual with whom I had tagged along on my first trip. As we were paying visits to the families of those who were wounded or killed in the 2006 shootings, the organizers’ mobile phones kept ringing. I counted at least ten phone calls asking for my name and other coordinates of identification. A meeting at the local press club was abruptly adjourned because of a warning issued by a security agent who was hovering at the doorway to see us out. The freshly minted Emergency Power Ordinance and Emergency Power Rules banned any activity deemed political and allowed for arrests without warrants.

The same day I had started on my second daylong bus ride to Phulbari, the leader of the opposition in the parliament and the president of the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina, was arrested. The caretaker government imprisoned first Hasina and then, within three months, her political nemesis, Khaleda Zia, the most recently incumbent prime minister and the head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The two leaders, who have alternatively represented a two-party, clannish political culture since the fall of military dictatorship in 1990, had never before been sent to prison.¹ It was no surprise that for the activists and regular folks in Phulbari, a lot was at stake in this collective performance of nonpolitics.

Energy fit into a patently toothless rhetoric of sustainable development, but politics became suspect. Its seeming abjection had invited the military-backed, technocratic government. By late 2006, more than sixty political party workers were killed in street fights that started with a disagreement on the terms of national elections. The impasse between the two main parties eventually led to the army takeover. One burns and the other creates. In everyday use, however, energy is what is supposed to burn, producing power as a valuable by-product. The etymological intimacy between the Bangla words for energy (jwalani) and to burn (jwala) highlights the paradox at the heart of the comment, namely, politics taking on the role of energy. The former’s once-creative potential was now relegated to a natural resource like coal that was widely believed to forestall an energy catastrophe. Politics burned, though producing nothing but ruin. Talking about energy in the bazaars and tea stalls was acceptable, but political organizing around it was subject to state scrutiny and at times tough intervention.

Despite the celebration of nonpolitics during this two-year period that brought into sharp relief the cultural logics of everyday democracy, it is rather the inexhaustible energy of politics that has marked the decade since. Within a few months of the emergency, a confrontation between the students and army jawans (soldiers) at the University of Dhaka campus led to one of the most powerful oppositions to the caretaker government. Thousands of students and a number of their professors at public universities were jailed for instigating what appeared to be contagious violence. Despite the ruthless treatment by the state, the student protests revealed the first cracks in the façade of the military government supposedly without political ambition, and therefore, without corruption.

In 2013, a much larger crowd gathered at the heart of the capital city hardly a mile from the University of Dhaka campus. With an elected government firmly ensconced and another national election on the horizon, the country was in the throes of an urban and admittedly middle-class uprising in Dhaka. At Shahbag, a busy crossroads near the national public library, the national museum, and two renowned hospitals, a group of young activists—some with party affiliations and many without—came together to challenge an early verdict of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT). The Awami League government that had assumed power in the wake of the emergency set up the ICT. As part of its campaign promises, it had vowed to try the alleged collaborators of the 1971 war of independence. A long time in the making, the legal body had been at the receiving end of both warm praise and trenchant criticism. Many rights advocates and family members of the victims of war crimes had been demanding fair trials for the individuals responsible for siding with the Pakistani state and committing or abetting in war crimes. They saw in the founding of the ICT justice long delayed. The actual workings of the tribunal, with its various procedural loopholes and allegations of political appointments, made it one of the most controversial governmental steps in recent memory (Bergman 2016; D’Costa 2015; Sadique 2015).

The sudden outburst at Shahbag surprised political commentators, party bigwigs, and the general public. It questioned the seeming laxity in the ICT’s judgment of war criminals, which to many reeked of strategic negotiations between the government and Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest religion-based political party. It stood to lose the most from being sympathetic to the idea of an undivided Muslim Pakistan at the time of the war. Some of its senior members were accused of collaborative activities. Protesters took to the streets demanding capital punishment. What was once a fight for justice within weeks came to be seen as a struggle between secularists and Islamists vying to be the voice of the nation. A powerful backlash against Shahbag and its blatant secularism came from an ad hoc religious right that read into the message of Shahbag a threat to religious identity. As in Phulbari and during the army rule that followed, the crowds in Shahbag initially challenged the legitimacy of the trial and by extension the state, and while doing so, also gradually began to stretch the boundaries of the political cause for which they had originally come together.

These uprisings mostly took shape outside of party political structures. This is unusual for Bangladesh, known for the centrality of party politics, which, though not divided along caste or ethnic lines as in India, is deeply polarizing (Suykens 2017). The scope of the protests was not delimited by organizations or institutions. Nor did they primarily use infrastructure—as both object and medium—to lay claims on the state, as seen elsewhere in the global south where technopolitics is often the language of the poor (Larkin 2013; Schnitzler 2016). The protests have been public in the sense that they took over public spaces for their articulation. In this they have been formally akin to some of the spontaneous assemblies that dotted different parts of the world this past decade (Hamdy 2012; Mittermaier 2015; Navaro-Yashin 2013). The protests in Bangladesh—whether against corporate capital, land grabs, military rule, or war crimes trials—defied easy labeling, their form and content veering between progressive, secular, patriotic, religious, reformist, violent, radical, and reactionary. As bookends to the Phulbari movement, the student dissent during the emergency and the protests that came years later in Shahbag highlight the scope, and the constitutive paradoxes, of popular sovereignty in Bangladesh.

The following ethnography attends to the minutiae of these protests by locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass politics. It tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and at times accidental configurations of the crowd. It starts with a movement against open-pit coal mining and ends with the agitations against a war crimes tribunal. The events span both rural and urban Bangladesh, specifically between the years 2007, when the state of emergency was declared, and 2013, when the self-consciously secular demands of justice for war crimes and the backlash against them reached their peaks.

THE BANGLADESH PARADOX

Few places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world’s most densely inhabited. Here, population is a hoary governmental problem, but unruly urban traffic has become the most obstinate affliction. Native speakers use the term bhir along with and as often as the English jam. The first refers to crowds of people; the second, an immobility caused by too many vehicles and too few roads. A growing number of Bangladeshis waste personal time and exhaust public resources being stuck in traffic in an ever-more atomized capital city (Hobbes 2014; Rosen 2016). They fall into or get trapped in a jam, as the Bangla expression jam e pora makes clear. Jammed-up roads are the indelible image of Dhaka’s agony. They may also be its single greatest cause, Jody Rosen (2016) wrote in the New York Times about a city that would be ranked the world’s second least livable two years later (Chaity 2018). But a jam is also the effect and the condition of possibility of needs and desires that coalesce and turn the streets into sites of work, politics, fun, and survival. Rosen describes the chaos as pervasive and permanent: Bangladesh is the 12th most densely settled nation on earth, but with an estimated 160 million citizens it is by far the most populous, and the poorest, of the countries at the top of the list. To put the matter in different terms: The landmass of Bangladesh is one-118th the size of Russia, but its population exceeds Russia’s by more than 25 million (Rosen 2016).

Comparisons of scale are strategies to put an out-of-the-way place on a familiar map. They make the global south legible to the Euro-American reader. They also point out how comparisons can be hopelessly misleading. Rosen finds herself in Dhaka on a day of hartal, a tried-and-true model of public protest (Suykens and Islam 2013). As a political tool, it aims to halt the regular movement of people and things. Depending on who is calling the strike, the traffic during hartal can be relatively thin. But surely relatively thin is relative, Rosen discovers quickly, as she ranks Dhaka crowds above those of Mumbai and Cairo. This density is exaggerated when the cities and townships accommodate a different kind of traffic: the flow of a michhil, a procession powered by the movement of people, or janata, the other Bangla equivalent of the crowd but with a difference.

Many South Asian languages share some variance of janata (janta in Hindi, for example). In Bangla, janata is different in its political potentiality from the cognate term, janogon or the people. The former is a close approximation of the crowd, the multitude, or the masses of social and political theory. The latter is more normative and is mostly at the service of official language, as in We, the people, which begins the constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.² To speak of janata is to note the historical and regional specificities of mass politics. More than a mere vernacular iteration of the crowd, it is a repository of the nuances of postcolonial sovereignty, where the popular and the uncivil come together (for more on civility and popular politics, see Mitchell 2018).³ The crowd as janata is the ethnographic and analytical focus of my book.

Bangladesh, one often hears, has been a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance. Its fate seems to be lodged within a global despair around the collapse of the social and political hopes that had forged anticolonial imaginations and national sovereignties (Scott 2004). The resultant anxiety of exhaustion, as David Scott (2004) describes it, is manifest in the paralysis of will and vacancy of imagination, corruption, authoritarianism, showy self-congratulation, and instrumental self-interest. In spite of the rampant feelings of despair familiar to those who think and write about Bangladesh and many more who live here, the narrative of crisis comes with a few significant caveats. This may be why paradox often recurs as a motif when discussing Bangladeshi politics, economy, and history.

There are at least a couple of ways in which the Bangladesh paradox has become a way of thinking about the nation’s becoming as well as its feats and failures in the first five decades. The first relates to progress in the economic sector simultaneous with the political instability, environmental disasters, and poverty. At least since 1991, the year that marked the end of roughly fifteen years of authoritarian rule of different stripes, the advances in social and human development indicators in Bangladesh have surpassed those of the neighboring countries. Regime changes, even when relatively frequent, have had little effect on the microeconomic policies and political commitments to social development (Mahmud 2017; Riaz 2016; Sen 2013). Per a September 2017 report in the Economist, Bangladesh edged past Pakistan with a slightly higher gross domestic product (GDP). The irony of the erstwhile eastern wing taking over the richer, western part from which it had broken away decades ago was not lost on the writer of the Economist article: A country that once lacked cloth for shrouds now exports more ready-made garments than India and Pakistan combined. Bangladesh has transformed itself from being a dawdler to a leader in many indices—from gender to GDP—making some experts wonder at the so-called Bangladesh surprise (Mahmud 2017). Once the proverbial basket case, Amartya Sen writes, the country has surprised the naysayers by jumping out of the basket and starting to sprint ahead (Sen 2013).

Bangladeshi nationalism itself has been known to host a series of contradictions (Samaddar 2002). While history (beginning exclusively in or around 1971) remains a fecund site of scholarly and cultural production, it is profoundly out of step with postcolonial miseries. Some of the crucial silences in recounting the rise of nationalism—the repression and criminalization of progressive radicalism within the struggle for freedom, for instance—have yet to be redressed (Umar 2004). The weary tensions between ethnic, religious, and national identities—Bangali or Bangladeshi—inform rhetoric and policies, though mostly opportunistically by political leaders or a politically ambitious intelligentsia. The eclipse of the left within the first few years of independence has been partly ascribed to a regime of power set up with the help of bureaucrats, the coteries within the established political party, the politics of international aid, and the armed forces. The problems with the nationalist idea that Ranabir Samaddar identifies include, among others, an autonomy movement that overnight catapulted into a freedom movement, the ongoing suffering of ordinary citizens, and the leading role of a party that was at best a movement, more often a crowd, but never a party capable of waging a war of liberation with a social agenda of its own (Samaddar 2002; see also Lewis 2011; Umar 2004). Even Bangali Musalmaner mon—the Bengali Muslim mind—has presented itself as somewhat of a paradox (Sofa 2006). At the start of the new millennium, much of this had prompted at least one eminent literary figure to ask, "Amra ki ei Bangladesh cheyechhilam? (Is this the Bangladesh we had wanted?") The rhetorical question—and surely the pathos in it—has found many iterations in local commentaries since the book of the same title was first published (Azad 2003).

In this book, I foreground paradox, at one level, to account for these historical and sociological contingencies that have generated a curious mix of optimism and despair, a distinctively postcolonial combination where the early zeal of anticolonial nationalism has been routinely banished to the waiting room of history (Chakrabarty 2000; Scott 2004). At another level, I do so in order to attend to the foundational contradictions within popular sovereignty, of which the crowd is an exemplar. The paradox of peoplehood begins with the very act of representing the people, which has always been a fiction. Its very existence requires a suspension of disbelief, as Edmund Morgan has shown in the seminal Inventing the People: Before we ascribe sovereignty to the people, we have to imagine that there is such a thing, something we personify as though it were a single body, . . . ​a collective entity more powerful and less fallible than a king or than any individual within it or than any group of individuals it singles out to govern it (Morgan 1989: 153). The shift in cosmologies that made possible a transfer of power from the king’s two bodies to the people’s two bodies sustains a number of contradictions, such as the fact that the people are actual subjects as well as fictional sovereigns, and that not just anybody—or mere people, as Morgan would say—can constitute the people (Frank 2015; Kantorowicz 2016; Santner 2011; Wolin 1981). Its sovereignty must not be confused with the unauthorized actions of