Rites of Freedom

Freedom eludes us only when we define it to suit our ideological or cultural convenience. It becomes an abstraction. Step back and shed that protective veneer and we cannot miss the multiplying datelines of freedom, as real as blood and bodies on the street, as horrifying as stolen lands and nameless tombstones, and as familiar as uprisings that are both spontaneous and simulated. The theatre of freedom gets all the headlines, but beyond them are individual struggles, lonely and heroic. And a world beholden to a million pathologies ensures that freedom will remain an argument without an end.

In neighbouring Bangladesh, whose birth was midwifed by India, the streets cry out that it is nothing short of a freedom struggle. And an elected prime minister ejected by fear and now an exile may see her fall as the result of a ‘revolution’ stage-managed by the Book and foreign hands. Still, the eruption in Bangladesh tells a familiar story about the temptations of democracy and the limits of alternatives. Sheikh Hasina, who was prime minister for fifteen straight years till her backdoor exit to freedom from the mob, drew her power from hereditary memory and iron will. In the national portrait, she was freedom’s daughter. In her own mythmaking, history was a privilege, and democracy must oblige her special status.

It is the obligations of freedom’s daughter that came in conflict with dissent, which in Bangladesh was fast turning Islamist. Sheikh Hasina was not exactly a Kemal Atatürk in a crisp cotton sari. She did not let the angry god that motivated the ghettos elsewhere intimidate her, even as jihad took its gruesome toll in Dhaka. Where Sheikh Hasina erred was in her treatment of political adversaries as national enemies. The cult of Our Only Lady of Deliverance hovered over a country where democracy had already allowed undemocratic forces to start a campaign, both overt and covert, for a unipolar alternative. Every opposition in Bangladesh was not religious though.

Perfect democracy is a struggle, not a reality. It was the founding sentiment of democracy and Sheikh Hasina’s refusal to demonise secularism in a country with Islam as state religion that stopped the Pakistanisation of Bangladesh. The trouble begins when the Leader succumbs to her own inevitability and sees questions as a threat. Bangladesh’s Iron Lady too let paranoia hide her failures; and such leaders believe brutal force alone can quieten the challengers. In her final days as a besieged leader, Sheikh Hasina followed the footprints of rulers delegitimised by their desperation.

Is post-Hasina Bangladesh democracy’s latest gift to the streetfighters of freedom? It is problematic. In the history of resistance angry streets are a recurring sight. The romance of broken barricades and roadside martyrdom has come a long way from the rebellious spirit of the Sixties and the anti- communist surge of the late Eighties. Even when ideology had been replaced by faith, streets and youth remained a constant in the rage against the Establishment. The Book led to freedom, and for a while, radical Islam found its Che in Osama issuing his commandments from Mount Jihad elsewhere in Afghanistan. What a French scholar calls the Islamisation of radicalism—not the other way round—has not passed its time, even if it does not have a unifying action hero any longer. The streetfighters of Dhaka were not just fighting against a repressive me-alone leadership; some of them were fighting for a scripturally acceptable alternative, and the cult of death only added to their commitment to the Book. Can freedom remain democratic in post-Hasina Bangladesh? Or will freedom have a higher arbiter?

India, in a decade of political remodelling of the nation, has already shed its inhibitions about identity and assertion, and the process has been so organic that the space for alternatives has not shrunk at all. The last general election has been a vindication. Power maintains its morality only when democracy is not seen as a threat by its leadership

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It is as desire or dispute that freedom plays out on the street, and democracies let it happen. What the media calls the far-right thuggery now engulfing England too has freedom attached to it—by the wrong parties of course. The manifestation may be ugly, the cause is one which the West must deal with: immigration, lawful or otherwise. Here again, history is cruel as well as paradoxical. There is no denying the fact that the West’s intellectual history owes a great deal to the free flow of people and ideas. Flights from unfreedom and the dream of a new beginning still permit the history of success and progress. In the hard realism of the present, the rewards of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism cannot neutralise the impulses of national identity and depletion of social resources. The far right has become the sole advocates of the overburdened nation because the mainstream, no matter left or right, has no honest response to immigration. How will the world strike a balance between the struggle for freedom across the border and the resentment against the free flow of immigrants? The desire… the dispute…

Freedom is a bargain too. Ukraine’s defence against Putin’s war machine may have lost the headlines to Gaza, which, in the hierarchy of progressive causes, has a higher traction on the street. Freedom for the October 7 hostages who are still alive continues to be entangled in a war with multiple fronts and the convoluted negotiation process facilitated by a Gulf state that hosts Hamas’ political leadership. In the Levant of tribal memories, morality is divided by the Jordan River, and beyond, it is measured by liberal conscience. Freedom as a dispute persists with such vengeance nowhere else perhaps. The leader of the other war proved to be a negotiator who deployed the skills of his previous profession as a spy in the most dramatic prisoner exchange between Russia and the US. Freedom turned out to be unequal homecoming as a Russian assassin and an American journalist walked out of incarceration—an ironic pause in the updated Cold War.

Freedom, in places where power is sustained by the uses of grievance and the memories of glory, is an argument that the leader alone can win. Not for ever. It takes a country like India, in its 78th year of Independence, to turn the argument into a national urgency for change—without hurting the fundamentals of democracy. India, in a decade of political remodelling of the nation, has already shed its inhibitions about identity and assertion, and the process has been so organic that the space for alternatives has not shrunk at all. The last General Election has been a vindication. Power maintains its morality only when democracy is not seen as a threat by its leadership, which in India has earned its mandate to recast the nation. It matters in a region where its most stable civil society has not abandoned its idealism. Nobody is denied the freedom to dispute that.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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