An American ex-serviceman once fronting for international private security agency, Group-4 Securitas, in Dhaka, revealed not so long ago, "The most volatile, the most vicious, the most brutal, the most dangerous and the most tenacious fighters among Muslims are not to be found in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Somalia or Afghanistan, who almost always capitulate before regrouping.
They are to be found in Dhaka. They just don't give up. Period.
This is hardly surprising.
For, this rare quality of not to give up, truly, is the hallmark of the underdog.
For a glimpse of the dark underbelly of Dhaka watch the 2020 Netflix flick #Extraction. It gives a not-seen-before peek into the mindlessness of Bangali Brutality (with due apologies to the Hindu Bengalis hugely outnumbered in a count of composite populations of the two Bengals -- India's West Bengal and Bangladesh: 80 million Hindus to 180 million Muslims).
You can appreciate the assertion better if you have watched the teaser of the jihad (fight) last weekend leading to the hijrat (flight) of Hasina.
During the Hamas raid on Israel on October 7, when several young Jewish women were abducted, raped and murdered, one of the most telling footage was of a puny brown fanatic merrily running through the desert alongside a speeding motorbike, cheering its thuggish riders carrying with them a booty Israeli girl they had kidnapped to Gaza. No global media outfit identified that feral man scavenging for "meat." He neither looked like a Palestinian hunk, nor a starving Somalian, but deceptively similar to an arsonist at the Bangladeshi prime minister's residence last Sunday, making his debut on international TV only to carry home the fugitive premier's peach and mauve bras.
The vulgar brutality of the Bangali Mossolmam in smearing blood and gore is not a recent mutation triggered by an evolving jihadi narrative across all of South Asia. Where the jama'iti publicists failed behind the hijab of the Jamia crowd at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh through the winter of 2019, they stomped home to victory ahead of the revolutionary-biplobi on the Dhaka University campus this summer.
For almost a millennium now, violence has been endemic to the Bengali narrative, despite the tall talk of civility, culture and civilisation.
Ever since Nasiruddin, the youngest son of the Slave Sultan Balban, first carved out an independent, more prosperous and a militarily more powerful kingdom in 13th century Bengal, bordering Ayodhya-on-the-Saryu, at the expense of his father, ensconsed as Sultan in Delhi, India's then Turkish heartland, the Bangali has skilfully deployed every piece of munition, even words (batela), as weapon of violence... often against fellow-religionists, in the name of freedom, when no other weapon was at hand.
Which is how half-a-century ago, the language agitation of East Pakistan turned into a full-scale war of attrition against the Pashtun-led Pakistani Khan Sena, and their local Bihari mohajir sympathisers, with the Bangali mossolman dressed in nothing more than a lungi, wielding machetes, muskets, three knot three English rifles of WWII vintage and country bombs (enthusiastically egged on and aided by India).
Still earlier, one of the most gruesome progroms in recorded history was the Noakhali massacare of Hindu sons of the soil a good quarter century before the birth of Bangladesh, ahead of the 1947 Partition of India.
Yet, the history of Bangali violence did not begin at Noakhali. It was ever present in the sacrificial pits of the Sunderban delta.
Around two centuries ago, around the 1820s or so, a thug turned Wahabi proselytiser from the Central India named Sayyid Ahmad (not to be confused with the founder of Aligarh Muslim University), enticed hordes of ferocious Bangali footsoldiers to trek nearly 2000 km (1300 miles) along the Ganga and Indus corridors to Mahaban, Swat, in modern Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) to indoctrinate Pashtuns in the ideology and art of jihad, first against Ranjit Singh's Sikh empire and subsequently against the British. Ahmad's incentive to the Bangali warriors was "fair Pashtun brides." The lure of heavenly maidens, hoor, worked well till the Pashtuns realised the incentive on offer to the faraway Bangali and put Ahmad to sword.
You can read a graphic account of that Bangali psychological dominance over the Pathan in British civil servant WW Hunter's journal, The Indian Musalmans.
Perhaps, that episode overwhelmingly accounts for the Pashtun-Punjabi-north Indian Muslim's lingering visceral dislike for the Bangali, contemptuously referred to as kalu (black). A fair-skinned upper caste Muslim aquaintaince from UP, otherwise a foremost champion of Muslim universalism, liberty and human rights, never refers to herself as UPite, but Muslim, and never refers to her maid as Muslim, but Bangali.
As for Sayyad Ahmad, the wahabi may well have been hurriedly despatched to paradise by his Pashtun war dogs 200 years ago, but his doctrine of jihad thrives in Swat till today, fired by the zeal of the descendants of the first crossbreeds of Ahmad's Bangali-Pashtun encounters, among them, Hafeez Saeed and Masood Azhar, whose terror training camp in Balakot-Mahaban was bombed by India as recently as 2019.
Small wonder then, despite emerging as the fastest growing economy of South Asia, far richer than Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even outpacing India's growth story, the first slogan to emerge from Dhaka in the wake of Hasina's flight, was: Bangla hobey Afghanistan (Bangladesh will emerge as Afghanistan).
Into this cesspool of ceaseless violence drained by rivers of blood, where pink lilies once danced in crystal clear tanks in the prime minister's lavishly landscaped private garden, populated by swans, geese and goldfish, in steps now a much-respected 'saviour' as caretaker-gardner in a desperate effort to present the country's manicured lawns once again to the outside world.
An assortment of peaceniks, commies, spirited revolutionaries, sincere-and-kind-hearterd citizens, lotus eaters, the idle-opinionated, punters, crystal ball gazers, soothsayers and apologists for the Brutal Bangali are betting on the puny grey-haired bhadralok sworn to community-wide kitty-party economics, to rescue Bangladesh out of the bogs.
For the record, Muhammad Yunus has the right credentials. He has supported the ouster of Hasina who hounded him, praised the agitationists, not uttered a word of disappointment at the tearing down of founding father Mujib's statue, and condoned the torching of Mujib's storied residence and vandalisation of Parliament with studied and studious silence. He is pro-West, liberal, economist, and a Nobel laureate to boot. He is Bangladesh's only presentable face to the world from among a community largely made up of cooks, crooks, illegal migrants, would-be jihadists, and generally well-meaning unemployed marsh dwellers threatened by climate deluge.
Will Yunus work? Will Yunus succeed? Even if temporarily so...
Is he really The Man of The Moment for Amar Sonar Bangla?
In a nation hell bent on emulating Afghanistan, not America, Yunus may well turn out to be B'desh's Ashraf Ghani, yet another eminent economist minus the Nobel, flying away to asylum with or without sacks full of national reserve dollars in yet another army chopper at the moment of reckoning, in the face of imminent jihadist takeover.
If you take a good look at the map of the world, from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, an entire contiguous and continuous landmass of people of transcontinental proportions, right from Tunisia, through the Levant, and all the way till the Chittagong Hill Tracts is now a swathe of terror, i-nterrupted by two i-slands, Israel and India, both surrounded on all sides by the banners of jihad. Bangladesh was the last in that giant jigsaw that has finally fallen into place.
East of it, right till the Pacific, is Sinosphere.
When the jihadis and the commies come together, as they have now, sharing the ideology of expansionism and common social/ist underpinnings, as already evident, you can hear the clarion call of World War III.
In the rarefied atmosphere of Washington DC, where I have pitched tent, the early warning signal is that the GREATEST WAR EVER may be as close as 2026.
Will India sit out that war? Or is the Ghazwa en route to Hind?
© Shubhrangshu Roy
7 August, 2024.
The author might have been born in Dhaka, still not Bangladesh, to a spy who may or may not have had a hidden hand in its making.
The newspaper post below is incidental and entirely cosmetic. 👇
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus chosen to lead interim government in Bangladesh after push from... Read the full story here.
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