As a new Bangladesh under Tarique Rahman spreads its net of global connections, it seems paradoxical to recall that one of Pakistan’s last deputy high commissioners in Calcutta, now Kolkata, was most upset with my economic explanation for East Pakistan’s unrest. “Are we only peasants?” he snapped, offended at the agrarian rationale for restiveness, and for giving more credit to Sher-i-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq, prime minister of undivided Bengal (1937-1943), than to Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, for East Bengal’s politicisation.
Despite their shared origins, Kolkata and Dhaka have not followed similar paths since Independence. The former tends to find solace in past glory and the achievements of veterans. Rabindranath Tagore is the all-time hero. So is Amartya Sen. The third Nobel laureate, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, may rule the future. Modern Bangladeshis probably attach more importance to proven organisational skills than to cerebral accomplishments. Muhammad Yunus, the economist and politician who founded the Grameen Bank and pioneered microcredit and microfinance, for which he received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize — the first Bangladeshi awardee — is an outstanding example.
The starting date for the revolution in both Bengals was the day that British rule ended – August 15, 1947. But while East Pakistan completed its land redistribution by 1951, the parallel process in West Bengal dragged on for nearly six more years. The single most important reason for this delay was that while the beneficiaries of land reform in East Pakistan were poverty-stricken Muslim peasants under Hindu landlords, West Bengal’s ryots, landowners and professional men who dominated Congress politics, were all Hindus. So were those rebels with a cause, the jobless millions who later swelled the Naxalite ranks.
The West Bengal Land Reforms Act, which regulated holdings and aimed at equitable distribution, did not become effective until February 1956. The East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act of 1950, which eliminated zamindari, was passed on February 16, 1950, and finalised in 1951. The two developments reflected the differing composition of the social and political leadership in the two Bengals. In East Pakistan, Huq’s ruling Krishak Praja Party and the Floud Commission (1939-40) introduced major land reforms. Additionally, noting Muslim economic backwardness, Huq’s government reserved 54 per cent of job opportunities in the provincial administration for the community.
In West Bengal the so-called Hooghly Group, led by politicians like Prafulla Chandra Sen (chief minister, 1962-67) and the powerful Tammany Hall-style leader, Atulya Ghosh, became powerful after Partition, influencing post-Independence politics. Land reform under the 1953 West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act, whose objective was to facilitate official land acquisition, was frustrated when ownership was capped at the individual level instead of the family’s, thereby encouraging massive benami property transfers.
By highlighting and sharpening economic differences in the countryside, this also sowed the seeds of the Naxalbari insurgency, India’s deadliest and most violent political movement in recent times, which Union home minister Amit Shah claims to have at last brought under control. Mr Shah complains — not without some justification — that under Marxist and Trinamul Congress patronage, Kolkata has degenerated into a “Jhoparpatti ka Sheher”, or city of slums. Its vast municipal corporation is accused of having become even more heavily corrupt and dysfunctional under the stranglehold of political goons.
A report in the Harvard International Review once claimed that the effects of the Bangladesh genocide of 1971 “still resonate in the present” and that “genocide is a persistent problem”. American social activists want Resolution 1430 “Recognizing the Bangladesh Genocide of 1971”, which US Representative Steve Chabot introduced in the US House of Representatives in 2022, to become law. The BJP’s Tathagata Roy quotes Rafiuddin Ahmed, one of B.C. Roy’s ministers, a renowned dental pioneer who was also a Muslim, as writing in The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity that “a dominant feature of the 19th century Islamisation was the attempted rejection of virtually all that was Bengali in the life of a Muslim as being incompatible with the ideas and principles of Islam”. No wonder a Bangladeshi politician confessed that his choice of ancestor lay between an Arab pirate and a namasudra convert. The “Ekushey February” language revolt left Bangladeshis feeling that West Bengal’s submissiveness had surrendered the linguistic battle to Tamils.
Given Mr Yunus’ American connections — with both Bill and Hillary Clinton being special friends — it is not surprising that he shies away from ideology and instead invokes common sense and pragmatism. “All human beings are born as entrepreneurs” is probably his most famous, philosophical statement, arguing that naturally creative and resourceful humans are not born to seek jobs. He believes that everyone has the capacity to create their own opportunities.
Given this adventurous spirit, his Dhaka has moved away from its earlier provincial image of emulating the metropolis. No longer do Dhaka Club employees boast of matching the city’s equivalent of Kolkata’s famed Calcutta Club. The new pride in the city and its amenities even sounds abrasive. When I ordered smoked hilsa (a delicacy the British left behind, the hilsa being a freshwater South Asian fish) for a foreign guest at what veterans in Dhaka call “The Intercon”, the snooty Bangladeshi maitre d’ offered me smoked salmon instead. “We don’t serve local fish!”
With over a million residents abroad, and politically important in countries like the United Kingdom, Bangladesh is the sixth largest migrant sending country globally, and the eighth largest remittance-receiving nation. At one time, Calcuttans proudly told each other that the great Lenin himself had predicted “the road to world revolution runs through Peking and Calcutta”. He hadn’t, wrote Geoffrey Moorhouse in his not unsympathetic account of the city. But Kolkata had moved on by then to conclude that all god-fearing Communists knew that it was Dhaka that the road really traversed.
But Calcutta or Kolkata, the city’s revolutionary vision seemed to come true briefly in 1948 when Soviet commissars, Australian ideologues, French trade unionists, Viet Minh soldiers, Yugoslav revolutionaries and Malayan Chinese guerrillas flocked to the grandiloquently titled “Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence” in a cluster of hutments that American troops had used as a wartime hospital. Inspired in Calcutta, they secretly fanned out to ignite the flames of revolution in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
That revolution failed, leaving Dhaka with the Yunus-Rahman heritage of American-tinged pragmatism while Kolkata still struggles with ancient isms.
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