Modern times : Smoky scenes in Bangladesh 1

There had been a lot of chaos in Bangladesh as well as in the world market in last couple of weeks. As the mob concentration goes for crisis like sculpture removal from airport road and continuous threats from the religious fundamentalists which can even cause nationwide such unrest so that there will be no elections possible on 18th of December, the world economic depression goes downwards. It is quite easy to mark correlations between the chaos caused by the fundamentalists and the uncertainty of having at last an elected parliament. But to relate it with the world crisis is not that easy. It is more empirical comment than a significant hypothesis. Being an observer of the politics since late 80's, one may go for deductions like, behind every religious fundamentalist uprising there were instabilities in world market as the key factor or almost every big crisis in the world market caused provoked religious fundamentalist chaos in Bangladesh and some other countries with similar economic and political orientations.

The chaos occurred by madrassa students was surely negligible for the government if they wanted to. But they reacted as if there was a severe fundamentalist uprising on the sculpture issue. Now almost every protest against fundamentalism is suppressed by the government. These occurrences show that the government themselves want to prolong such chaos in order to, either strengthen the fundamentalist fascism as reserve forces to be used as trained killers in "right times" or to develop some unrest to postponed parliament elections and go for a long term military regime.

The question is, can Bangladesh be treated as a country with such geopolitical importance where at the moment an independent civil government might be unpleasant for Uncle Sam & co. From my point of view yes. Bangladesh is in, at the moment, geopolitically one of the most important areas. Rise of India and China and perhaps the newly elected Maoist government in Nepal, may increase the geopolitical importance to have a strong control over Bangladesh due to the hegemonic crisis in global governance. A series of forced privatization, without creating any least alternatives, had been occurred in last 7-8 years. Selling off the natural resources began actually in marshal law regime under general Ershad, but has accelerated itself in last 11-12 years. Under democratically elected governments it is almost impossible to stop or to control criticism against this type of selling off. So, from the history, it won’t be that insignificant to see such correlations.

What is to be done? To elect one of those two corrupt parties may look meaningless and also I think which is not untrue, but having another long term military fascism would be the worst choice for Bangladesh. On the other hand if BNP/AL comes into power with the orientation they presently have, there will be definitely further massacres due to religious fundamentalism which could build stronger ground for upcoming military ruling.

There must be some way out. What we need is an elected government without having sympathy for the actual sources and beneficiaries of religious fundamentalism and communalism. Stopping these two forces will remove or at least weaken the barriers of development and stronger democracy.