[ALOCHONA] EPW: Book Review: The Decline of the Muslim League in Pre-Independence Bangladesh, 1947-1954

 

Post-Colonial Bureaucracy and the Subalterns

Iftekhar Iqbal

Economic & Political Weekly

Vol XLV No. 25

June 19, 2010

http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/14884.pdf

 

Iftekhar Iqbal (iftekhar.iqbal@gmail.com) is with the Department of History, University of Dhaka.

 

State against the Nation: The Decline of the Muslim League in Pre-Independence

Bangladesh, 1947-1954

by Ahmed Kamal (Dhaka:University Press), 2009;

pp i-xviii + 257, price not known.

 

Historians have studied the interregnum between the birth of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh as that of a clear-and-simple exploitation of the Bengalis in East Pakistan by the West Pakistani ruling elite. This discourse of exploitation is built along a number of convenient and visible state-centric arguments: economic, political, cultural and sometimes racial. In this archaic, almost abstract form of nationalist debates, one misses the pictures of everyday, localised and spatially contingent politics of exploitation and resistance – a phenomenon common in both colonial and post-colonial south Asia. Ahmed Kamal's State against the Nation is an attempt to capture a slice of this historical continuum and the author does this with style.

 

High Politics and the Bureaucracy

Kamal looks at aspects of governance and resistance through the example of the rise and fall of the Muslim League in East Pakistan, covering the eventful seven years between 1947 and 1954. The book has nine chapters including an introduction and epilogue. The first chapter documents the euphoria about independence and the Muslim League that played a key role in its achievement. The second and third chapters focus on the dynamics of politics of "food" and "dearth", respectively. (The reader could have benefited if the author had clarified the rationale behind the two different chapters on food and dearth – topics that crossed each other in terms of the extent of food insecurity, food governance and sporadic resistance by the hungry.) The fourth and fifth chapters engage with the questions of agrarian politics and aspects of water related bureaucracy and the resultant popular response. The last chapter is on the police – a topic that has generally evaded the historian's gaze. A particular strength of the book is its dense empirical data, a majority of which is drawn from the National Archives of Bangladesh in Dhaka. This data allows the author to present his argument with clarity and conviction.

 

A central theme that runs through the chapters is the way the state continued to adhere to the colonial style of governance – centralised bureaucracy, crude indifference to democratic aspirations, and the suppression of local knowledge of environmental resources. For these seven years, Kamal does not dismiss the Muslim League as a monolithic power player, but sees sporadic signs of high politics of nation-building and desire for participation in the wider political process among the rank and file of the party. Kamal argues that it was the bureaucracy, still loaded with a colonial mindset and practices, which stood between the high politics and grass roots political participation. Eventually the party's political elite gave in to the bureaucratic order and in concert with the bureaucracy, appeared to be the most mindless force against the nation. Kamal meticulously narrates the way in which the alliance of bureaucracy and high politics of the Muslim League used the state apparatus against popular aspirations and activism in East Bengal.

 

Persisting Colonial Structures

It was no wonder that within two years of the Muslim League rule, the Awami League (initially the Awami Muslim League) was born as a resisting political platform, which later led Bangladesh to win its freedom. But Kamal does not see that the emergence of a new political force put an end to the bureaucratic nature of the state even in independent Bangladesh (pp 234-35). So the configuration of the discourse of inflexible bureaucracy and state's mechanical treatment of its citizens specifically within the seven-year rule of the Muslim League raises the interesting question of what led to the persistence of colonial structures and practices in all forms of the nation state? Obviously no historian would argue that the two century- long colonial legacy would be wiped out only within seven years, but the question is why did it persist in the years after the downfall of the Muslim League and well into the present time? Kamal's narrative is brilliant in the sense that it goes beyond the binary of the elite and the subaltern by pointing to the fact that the anti-Muslim League coalition contained a creative mix of both elite and subaltern political elements that foreshadowed the birth of Bangladesh. Yet the question of the state's constant violations of national political and economic well-being in its Pakistan and Bangladesh phases, particularly when the elite and the subaltern shared the same political space, is not so much explained as it is narrated in State against the Nation. Kamal does not explain the forces that kept informing the dominance of bureaucracy.

 

The birth of the Awami League in 1949 and the formation of the United Front Alliance in 1954 represented the highest point of convergence between the liberal and the radical. The lowest point of fracture between the two political streams took place in 1957 when Maulana Bhasani quit the Awami League to mobilise the mainstream Left. This divergence took place on the question of foreign policy of Pakistan. Suhrawardi opted for western power blocks and Bhasani for the opposite direction. How do we locate the persistence of a rigid bureaucracy in post-colonial Pakistan when the liberal polity had the upper hand? If the colonial state's centralization of governance mechanism was informed by the threat it perceived from the popular nationalist resistance of which the Left was a strong element, then what informed such bureaucratic authoritarianism in Pakistan and in independent Bangladesh?

 

The Left had a hard time in the later Colonial years, during the Pakistan as well as early Bangladesh period – and that occurred in a "cold war" condition in which the western power block seems to have influenced the ruling elite across the developing world. These external dynamics greatly informed the persistence of a centralised bureaucracy even during the time of "liberal" governments.

 

This macroview of history needs to be linked to the more local and national dynamics of governance and resistance. Post-colonial power politics in the new nation states were not left merely to the internal agencies. Kamal's narration of the national and micro-politics of suppression and resistance could have been far more engaging if the impact of the global developments during the period were put in perspective. Considering the lack of focus on the asymmetric relations between the internal political dynamics of the nation state and the international politics, Kamal's book may prove to be one of the last lamp posts in subaltern studies, but perhaps the first of its kind in the historiography of Bangladesh.

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