Barbaristans zindabad: Ugly face of Bangladesh, Pakistan (and India)

It might seem not that obvious at the outset but Bangladesh’s Xulhaz Mannan and Pakistan’s Sabeen Mahmud had much in common. Both were fiercest of free spirits, kindest of souls, fully immersed in keeping dialogue and debate alive at a time when democratic space in their respective countries had been shrinking to pea size. Sabeen’s T2F and Xulhaz’s Roopbaan were milestones in their own right – lighting up Karachi and Dhaka, two cities at two ends of the subcontinent that is spiralling into a vortex of darkness. 

But Sabeen Mahmud and Xulhaz Mannan had that commonality because we are talking about them in the past tense. They have both been slain, their murders as staggering in mercilessness as the enormity of their impact on the sociocultural skyline of Karachi and Dhaka. Exactly a year apart, their deaths – on April 24, 2015 and April 25, 2016 respectively – are gruesome reminders of just how entangled the subcontinent is with the politics of hate towards difference, laughter, love and humanism.

With India and Pakistan locked in an unwinnable battle of brinkmanship, the only bridge that joins the two people is an excruciating yearning for peace. And Sabeen Mahmud was exactly that – a “peace niche” (that is what she called her non-profit organisation). Reading the obituaries that were published last year, in the wake of her murder by “unidentified assassins”, we are compelled to see the parallels between the situation not just in Bangladesh, but perhaps, also in India. After all, the murders of rationalists Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi were the triggers behind 2015’s yearlong “intolerance” debate.

Sabeen Mahmud, too, was felled for speaking her mind out. Her T2F, The Second Floor – a café-cum-cultural venue – since its inception in 2007, had quickly become Karachi’s countercultural hub. It was where students, academicians, intellectuals, dissidents, artists, poets, writers, activists, and citizens with modicum of conscience congregated to scrounge for democracy in a country under the thumb of an unbelievably powerful military-industrial-terrorism complex.

Also, it had free Wi-Fi. It had music from iTunes. Sabeen Mahmud was a “Mac junkie” in a country where YouTube was banned until about a year back.

For years, Mahmud had been brushing off death threats with one oft-repeated sentence:  “Fear is just a line in your forehead.” But on the night she was gunned down, by “clean-shaven youth on a motorbike” who fired indiscriminate bullets into her car, she had crossed the Pakistani Rubicon. She discussed Balochistan.

Like India’s Kashmir, but far more oppressively silenced, Pakistan’s Balochistan problem is one of ruthless occupation, crushing of dissent and movement for self-determination. Both religious extremists and Pakistan’s supremacist military intuit that to listen to Balochistan’s pain, to allow in criticism, to give ear to the bloodied screams of Balochistan’s lost, disappeared twenty thousands, is to admit defeat and fail the hardline nationalism test that gives the military-industrial complex its terrifying legitimacy.

Mahmud hosted at T2F an erstwhile cancelled seminar called “Unsilencing Balochistan: Take 2”, which the Pakistani government had promptly banned at a prominent university. Mahmud, characteristically, defied the state knowing fully well that the move landed her squarely before the firing squad, literally. She paid with her life, much like the fallen stars of Pakistan’s civic and political resistance – Rashid Rehman, Perween Rehman, Shahbaz Bhatti, Salman Taseer and innumerable others.

Cut to 2016, April 25, and global media was flooded with a familiar sounding story with that same, sickeningly same, South Asian signature inscribed all over it. This time it was in Dhaka.

It’s getting difficult to keep count of secularists falling victim to Bangladesh’s religious (Islamic, in this case) fanatics. Xulhaz Mannan, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) staff worker, and editor of Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine Roopbaan, was hacked to death, along with his friend Samir Mahbub Tonoy, by Dhaka’s ubiquitous harbingers of death – the “machete-wielding men”. Two days back, on Saturday, April 23, Rezaul Karim Siddique, a professor of English Literature at the University of Rajshahi in northwestern part of the country, was killed in a similar manner, with “80 per cent of his throat slit”.

Ansar al Islam, or Ansarullah Bangla Team, an extremist outpost with allegiance to Al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility of Mannan’s and Tonoy’s murders, for “practicing and promoting homosexuality”. Mannan – living openly as a gay man for decades in a country that has its double whammy of  “Section 377” criminalising same-sex love and hardline interpretation of Shariah on the issue – too had been warding off death threats. He was more interested in spreading the rainbow love than to crumple into a rag-bag of fear and hopelessness.   

Interestingly, unlike the murdered “atheist bloggers” such as Avijit Roy, Neeloy Neel, Ananta Bijoy Das, Washiqur Rehman, Mannan and Siddique were not professed deniers of god and disavowers of religion, but were, in fact, moderates. Siddique even donated to mosques and madrassas, while Mannan's focus on LGBTQ people’s right to dignity didn’t leave much scope for advocating atheism.

The spate of murders in Bangladesh – the “hit-list of 84” was published by the notorious Ansarullah Bangla Team few years back – has left everyone benumbed. The low cost, high impact assassinations have now crossed over to that side of the fence where they fuse and blur with each other in the great forest fire of statistics. They are just figures to be cited, drily.

What were the crimes of these felled men and women, in Bangladesh and Pakistan? As Manan Ahmed Asif, a Pakistani-American historian at Columbia University, puts it: “The crime of the intellectual is to create the scene of the crime. The scene of the crime is a space — whether concrete or metaphoric — in which dialogue can exist. Their crime is in expressing or harbouring dissent. And the punishment is always death.”

Whether it’s a national security state fused inextricably with cultural or religious nationalism, or a terrorist organisation wielding AK-47s or just rusty machetes, the enemy is always the soothsayer. Economic prosperity and/or the sacredness of the nation-state and/or faith are weights hinged on crushing silence and deafening complicity of most. But writers and dissidents are reminders of a lost autonomy, that civic-political-intellectual autonomy at the heart of a democratic republic.

The lover of the individual, the lover of fellow human beings, cannot rest his/her love on soul-sucking mega entities like jingoistic nation-state and difference-erasing organised religion. Sabeen Mahmud and Xulhaz Mannan had become enemies of the nation-state that feeds off its own citizens, that nourishes its bloodlust with the marrow of individual spark, soul, sensibilities and sympathy.

A subjugated citizen, even if the subjugation is from one’s “own government”, is not a citizen: he/she is a colonial subject. The premise of decolonisation was individual freedom – political rights and duties that involved each and every one, equally. The postcolonial intellectual would have been the ideal citizen, not a perfect enemy. Unfortunately, the opposite is true in postcolonial nation-states such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

Whether it’s in New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata or Hyderabad – resonances with Dhaka, Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad are getting stronger by the day. It’s the cries and whispers of a subjugated people, a citizenry locked in the prison-house of their respective majoritarian, faith-encumbered nation-states. Secularism is passé even in the conceptual echelons where decisions are made. Whether it’s Islamism on either side, or Hindutva in the centre, their militant concoctions have poisoned the air around, snuffing out differences of any and every kind.

Exactly at a time, when Indian newschannels are showing “exclusives” on Balochistan’s horrific secret, failing to make the associations with the unrest in Kashmir, or with the witch-hunt against students and academicians in our premier universities, is equally gnawing.

How do we “differentiate” between them and us? Until the truth facing us all reveals itself – we are not all that different after all. Sabeen Mahmud and Xulhaz Mannan gave their lives to make precisely that point.

But do we have it in us to listen?