The cause and cure of violence
The causes behind violence are many and varied but in the final analysis they are related, in one way or another, to a single root which is the role of the state. The state has the constitutional responsibility to protect its citizens against crime, and every act of violence is a crime of some kind. The state in Bangladesh has failed and continues to fail in discharging its duty to protect the individual. There is an added dimension to the state's failure which is that instead of bringing the criminals to book, the state appears to be empowering the perpetrators of violence.
Those who have power often get away with impunity. The two reasons why they are favoured are money and political linkage. Moreover, it is not an uncommon experience to find the state, itself, engaged in acts of violence. It can, therefore, be safely said the violence is political in nature although it takes place in the society.
Undoubtedly the state is the most powerful organisation in a country, and violence is a relation of power between the powerful and the powerless, with the former inflicting harm on the latter.
The servant killing his master for stealing money feels powerful while on the job. Even secretive bribery is an act of violence. That violence has been rising rather than declining in this land of ours owing to the state's inefficiency and negligence is an experience shared by all of us.
Historically, the state is known to have emerged out of the social necessity of protecting the individual, but society being unequal and split vertically between the rich and the poor, the state became an instrument of the rich for the exploitation of the poor.
Indeed, the state has never been neutral. Its activities exemplify the advantages of power and illustrate the destiny of the unprivileged.
The executive branch of the state inclines itself towards the powerful, so does the judiciary. Laws are not usually equal, but even when they are equal they fail to be applied equally in an unequal society. As and when the powerless protest against injustice the state machinery beats them up, and goes on improving, continually, its modes and apparatus of suppression.
The psychological silencing of the use of violence is quiet, but is in no way less dreadful and deadening than physical action. We in Bangladesh have been subject to both, with physical violence getting fiercer by the day. Power has its pride, and it is of course true that power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. As power rises, the moral courage to protest declines.
The grisly extent to which state violence can run has been experienced by us in 1971. A number of Pakistani Generals who participated in that genocide have found it, in hindsight, to be foolhardy; but no one within that state had displayed the courage to protest. The worst sufferers were women.
When the new state of Bangladesh came into being, it decided in a gesture of magnanimous gratitude to call the survivors of the most inhuman form of humiliation, Biranganas instead of freedom fighters, being unaware that for the awardees the title could prove to be a burden rather than a decoration.
To ask any of these unfortunate sufferers of what she has gone through even after liberation would be to realise that despite all the progress we are supposed to have made, the society has not changed.
In fact it has become even more patriarchal than before. For this decline the state, which is the custodian of the society, is to be solely blamed.
Today violence on women stares us in the face, starkly. Rape was not unknown, but gang rape was unheard of. Rape is the worst form of violence, its motive being simply the gratification of carnal lust. It crowns all other forms of violence and reveals, symptomatically, the degradation into which the society has fallen.
The gang rapists fall on their helpless prey, abuse her and then kill her. This is a form of cannibalism. The victim becomes an object of satisfaction, and is eliminated with vengeance, not only to destroy evidence of the crime but also to display the power and triumph of the rapists.
Fear does not exist, shame is beyond question. What the Pakistani hordes had done in the 1971 war under state encouragement is being perpetrated by fellow Bengalis under the negligence of the state machinery.
Gang-rape has become a subcontinental phenomenon, putting us to shame. The most obvious reason behind its occurrence is that the split along the gender line is no less clear than the one along the class line. Over the years there has been a feeling of liberation in the society. The fact of the matter, however, is that only the privileged male have gained power, and women, as women, have remained as vulnerable as before.
The 'liberation' of women has exposed them to newer kinds of assaults. The state remains indifferent. Crime, let us not forget, is oftener than not the trade of those who enjoy governmental power.
Organised violence takes place within institutions. College and university campuses have turned into battle grounds for students who beat up, and even kill, fellow students, motivated by the desire to monopolise the power to extort and the privilege to be close to the administration.
The share market has proved to be a happy hunting ground for swindlers who are not unknown to the administration, but are seemingly allowed to operate unhindered because of their political affiliation.
The garment exporters, pampered and idolised for their contribution to the earning of foreign exchange, have turned their factories into veritable prison houses for their workers, who surrender because they feel that conditions outside are even worse. That the prison may easily turn into a death trap is being demonstrated by the burning alive of workers in their work-place.
The government's reaction has disappointed the public, who suspect, not without reason, of a coalition of interest between the factory owners in general and the state powers that be. Public banks have been broken into not by robbers but by 'respectable' borrowers with the connivance of the bankers themselves.
No area of life is free from violence today. All relationships suffer from it and because of it. Mutual respect has been cornered. The patients fear the physician; the clients are as apprehensive of the courts as of the lawyers they engage. The buyer and the seller of commodities find themselves locked in a competition of cheating each other. Personal profit dominates over all other considerations. Profit itself is violence, and plunder is the easiest form of profit-making.
We have fought and won a war of liberation which we had hoped would put an end to the old enmity between the state and the people. The collective dream was that of a society in which the state would function democratically and violence would be reduced to the absolute minimum. This has not come true. On the contrary, violence has increased in a manner and at a rate not known before.
This is because state power has been usurped by a class of the privileged. That class has become richer and richer at the cost of the people. It grabs public property, robs social wealth and institutions and exploits labour power of the individual. And mainstream politics has turned into violence within the ruling class for occupying power.
The verbal violence displayed by the power-hungry political parties speaks poorly of their cultural standard and indicates that even that bourgeois facade of democracy is not safe with them. The warring political parties, however, have one thing in common.
They are intolerant of opposition and are ready to throttle the voice of those who protest. Protesters are not tolerated in Bangladesh today, be they harmless school teachers or small left alliances.
After the defeat of the Pakistani occupation army a chaotic situation had developed. The state tried, and was able to establish a kind of order. But that order had its own anarchy, characterised by the promotion of the material interests of the rich. That is why instead of putting the war criminals -- the Pakistani killers and their local collaborators -- to trial, attention was concentrated on the suppression of leftist elements. Extra-judicial killing began. Then there was the traumatic political assassination in August 1975, followed by coup d'état and military rule.
No one could have believed when we were fighting the Pakistani occupation army that such occurrences were in store for us. Elections were held but the fate of the common man remained as before. Extra-judicial killing has been on the rise and disappearance of individuals has been added to the list of fearful happenings.
Unemployment and underemployment in an overpopulated country like ours are bound to function as a breeding ground of violence. And so they do. What is unfortunate is the state's indifference to the problem.
This narrative can go on, but need not, because all of us are aware of what is happening. The important question is how to bring the fearful spectre under control. One knows of protests at the local and national levels. The civil society, professional bodies and political organisations have been reacting to violence non-violently. These are not ineffective, but are, certainly, limited in respect of the achievement of their goal. The reason is that, as we have noted above, it is the political system itself that is responsible for violence, and the problem requires political action along with social protest.
It is essential that we achieve democratisation of the state, and democratisation requires decentralisation of state power. Quite evidently, the state in Bangladesh which does not believe in it is, as it has always been, a monolithic organisation with all power centralised in the hands of the Chief Executive.
The rulers rule with violence and without accountability. The state has been bureaucratic in the past; it has remained so even after liberation. By its very nature, bureaucracy is deaf and blind to the grievances of the public, whose dissatisfaction results in occasional outbursts of violence.
Decentralisation in itself would not be enough; the elective representations should be made accountable to their electorate. But democracy would not be real unless and until equality of rights and opportunities are guaranteed for all citizens. This would necessitate socialisation of national wealth, discarding the existing policy of privatisation. Society has to be made more powerful than the state, and society itself should promote rather than violate the basic human rights of the individual.
This would require nothing short of a social revolution. The state has changed but the society has remained basically the same as it was in the British and Pakistani periods of alien rule. And in protecting its own vested interests, the state would try with all the power of violence it commands to prevent any radical social change from happening.
It would, therefore, be necessary to confront the state politically through an organised and sustained political movement. That has been a collective necessity and the driving dream, and we must try to achieve that to put an end to violence and make our life and living meaningful. Violence is visible, but it is, in reality, a symptom of a disease that lies within the state itself and also in the society that the state protects, dutifully.
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The writer is Professor Eremites, Department of English of Dhaka University.