Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (25 page)

Bangladesh may be destined to be run by an old-fashioned Turkish-style national security regime composed of both civilians and military officers, in which the civilians dominate in public and the military draws red lines behind closed doors. “In the long run, we are hostages to democracy,” Mahmudul Islam Chowdhury, a former mayor of Chittagong, told me. “Your Westminster–Capitol Hill system won’t work here. But we’re poor and need aid and so are required to hold elections.” He explained that democracy in India works because there are so many states where different political parties dominate, so state and municipal governments thrive alongside the federal one in a multi-tiered system. But in Bangladesh the central government cannot risk an opposition party gaining control of any of the few big cities; thus all power is hoarded in Dhaka. The result is a vacuum that village committees have filled at the bottom level of government, and NGOs and Islamists struggle to fill in the vast and crucial middle ground.

Barisal, a major river port in southern Bangladesh, is a poster child for that vacuum: a middle-sized city that reeks of garbage and untreated sewage because of the absence of any viable treatment plants and the drying up of canals. This, in turn, is related to the unauthorized building of high-rises that brings ever more people into the urban core. Ahmed Kaisea, the district environmental director, was another official who told me that “the laws are just fine, there is just no enforcement.” I had walked in on him without an appointment. He did not seem busy. His phone never rang, and there was no evidence of a computer. With electricity cuts throughout the day, use of the Internet is severely limited here. He was like many a bureaucrat I encountered, with an office but little effective control.

Because cities require more infrastructure than do villages (sewage,
street lighting, traffic signals, and so on), the uncontrolled growth of cities like Barisal—because in part of the environmental ravishment of the countryside—makes it increasingly harder for government institutions, such as they exist, to cope.

Whereas Bangladeshi villages are defined by the struggle to find dry soil, cities are defined by the rickshaw economy. There are several hundred thousand bicycle rickshaws in Dhaka alone, a city of more than ten million people. Many of the drivers are migrants from the flood-prone countryside who pay the rickshaw
mustans
(mafia-style bosses, often associated with the political parties) the equivalent of $1.35 per day to rent the rickshaw. From an average passenger a driver collects 30 cents, and ends up making around a dollar a day in profit. His wife will often earn a similar amount breaking bricks into road aggregate, while their children sift through garbage. Such is a typical Bangladeshi family. This is an economic environment perfectly suited for the growth of radical Islam, which offers both answers and spiritual rewards for suffering that a mere conviction in voting periodically cannot. The miracle is not how radical Bangladesh and much of the third world is, but how moderate they remain.

The social cohesion that does exist on the national level is the result not of democracy but of linguistic nationalism. This is an ethnically homogeneous country where—unlike in Pakistan or Iraq—Islam is not required as a glue to hold together disparate ethnic or sectarian groups. What is more, national identity is built on violent struggle. In 1947, Muslim Bengalis rose up against the British and against India to form East Pakistan. Next came the 1971 liberation war against Muslim West Pakistan, which saw widespread rape and executions in Dhaka by a West Pakistani military hell-bent on imposing its Urdu language on the Bengalis. From East
Pakistan
(the “Land of the [Muslim] Pure”)
Bangladesh
(the “Land of the Bengali”) was created. Thus language replaced religion as the organizing principle of a society.

But that organizing principle is not inviolate. Because it occupies most of the landmass of the Asian Subcontinent, India enjoys a demonstrable geographic logic; not so Bangladesh. As small as Bangladesh is, again, it is vast in its own right. “Whoever comes to power in Dhaka—democratic or military—neglects us here in Chittagong,” Emdadul Islam, a local lawyer, complained to me, voicing a sentiment common in the
southeastern port city. “We have our own Chittagongian dialect, a mixture of Portuguese, Arabic, Arakanese, Burmese, Bengali, and so on. Historically,” he went on, “we are as linked to parts of Burma and India as we are to the rest of Bangladesh. Who knows what will happen when Burma one day opens up and we have new road and rail links with India and southwestern China. Give me my fundamental rights and dignity, and I’ll love this soil. If not, I don’t know.”

He was not calling for secession, but he was indicating how this artificial blotch of territory on the Indian Subcontinent—in succession Bengal, East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh—could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, religious extremism, and nature itself. After all, look at all the kingdoms that Chittagong had once belonged to: Samatata, Harikela, Tripura, Arakan, and so forth. Chittagong and southeastern Bangladesh were as organically connected with the story of Burma through the ages as with that of India.

He spoke of a new mini-state composed of Chittagong and the Hill Tracts, lying between Burma and a Greater India; with the Barisal and Khulna regions of southwestern Bangladesh merging with Kolkata in India. He mentioned the thousands of Chittagongians who work in nearby states as part of a rich mini-diaspora. He was not a firebrand, just a man thinking out loud late at night, as the rain pounded in a nearby alley, about things that the very chronic instability of this country made it natural to think about.

I was regaled with a history as voluminous as the file folders tipping up toward the ceiling in the lawyer’s office. Chittagong’s identity, it turns out, is defined by the Bay of Bengal and by the larger Indian Ocean world much more than by Bangladesh. Though briefly part of the independent Muslim sultanate of Bengal in the early fifteenth century (and sporadically in the sixteenth), for most of the fifteenth through seventeenth century “the city and its hinterland were dominated by the kings of Arakan,” a predominantly Buddhist kingdom more closely aligned with Burma than with Bengal. Chittagong was a principal South and Southeast Asian port for Muslim pilgrims traveling to and from Mecca, as well as a base for Portuguese renegades operating their own commercial and military enterprises beyond the reach of the Portuguese authorities in Goa on India’s Malabar coast.
⁵
“Behold Chittagong,” Camões writes, “the finest city of Bengal.”
⁶

Sometime in the Middle Ages, from across the Indian Ocean, came
twelve Sufi saints,
auliyas
(protectors), who preached Islam and helped establish the city. Foremost among them was Pir Badr Shah, who, according to legend, floated from Arabia on a slab of rock to rid the city of evil spirits. A symbol of the wave upon wave of Arab traders who plied the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Southeast Asia, bearing spices, cotton fabrics, precious stones, and minerals, Badr Shah carried with him an earthen lamp that spread light “on all sides far and near,” to ward off the darkness of evil and to help sailors.
⁷
This lamp may have been confused with a beacon fire atop a nearby hillside that he lit to guide his fellow sailors into the harbor. In any case, he is worshipped by seamen along the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal as far south as Malaysia.

The earthen lamp and the slab of stone now lie in a rusted glass case under fluorescent lighting, next to the saint’s draped sarcophagus, inside a brass cage under a moldy domed roof in the old fort area of Chittagong. Around it are machine-made carpets, simple mats, and green tiles of the kind common to many a kitchen or bathroom. In other words, there is nothing particularly aesthetic about this tomb, yet at sunset it is packed with worshippers. Men naked to the waist in soiled
longyis
, bathed in sweat and rainwater, danced around it. Sari-clad ladies lay on the stone floor, quietly insisting to the saint. Everywhere I saw candles and flowers. It was as though I were inside a Hindu temple. Pir Badr Shah is holy to Hindus as well as Muslims. His very person may be confused with that of Hindu deities. Buddhists and Chinese revere him as an inferior god. The same delicious confusion of worship holds for the tombs of the other Sufi saints in the city. Chittagong is a window to a world much larger and more cosmopolitan than Bangladesh.

Yet there is little architectural sign of it. Dank and mildewed, Chittagong constitutes miles upon miles of low-end signage eaten away by rust. There is no structure other than a handful of mosques that you could identify with any particular historical style. Rather than architecture, I saw only a makeshift assemblage of necessaries—the minimal construction required to meet the needs of the moment. The people who built such structures obviously lacked the luxury to be able to leave a permanent legacy, let alone something beautiful. For them, this slapdash construction represented a step up from the village from which they had migrated. Like the tomb of Badr Shah, Chittagong was ugly but also dynamic. Its history and folklore embraced a vast terrain, yet in other ways it was so void of tradition that little could be taken for granted here.

From a rooftop, Chittagong looked as if it had been dabbed in tar and charcoal dust, as the monsoon mist blocked out the views of the nearby picturesque Hill Tracts: “the mountains that seem to touch the sky,” in the words of a seventeenth-century Portuguese traveler. With me was Tanbir ul Islam Siddiqui, the founder of an NGO called Change Makers. Change Makers had one overriding goal: to make Bangladeshis aware of their own constitution. Bangladesh has a perfectly fine constitution, but because it had been violated so many times over the years by both military and civilian rulers, its very existence was an embarrassment to those in control; thus they treated it almost like a state secret. It was hard for ordinary people to obtain a copy. And so Change Makers was dedicated to distributing their own constitution to Bangladeshis. Tanbir had no illusions about what he was up against.

Looking out at the grainy tableau of Chittagong, he told me: “Debates about democracy, military rule are for us. For the elite. All most people down there care about is their daily rice, while they take refuge in their saints. If the military keeps the port running, keeps the buses and factories running, they are content. The real struggle is not who rules, but to make people care about who rules.”

Whereas Chittagong sits on the Bay of Bengal, the port itself, from which the city has grown, lies nine miles up the Karnaphuli River. Because of irrigation schemes and waterlogging upriver, there was not enough water flowing downstream to dilute the salt ingressing from the bay on account of rising sea levels. It was the same story as in other parts of the Bangladeshi coastline. The result was a buildup of sediments that made the river too shallow for an increasing number of ships. What’s more, the port was in desperate need of a new road network for trucks to meet the ships at dockside. Thus, despite its perfect location—a midpoint between the Middle East and the Far East, what had made Chittagong such an attractive entrepôt for centuries—the port has an uncertain future.

With China building deepwater facilities in next-door Burma, the decades to come could see this part of Bangladesh serviced by truck traffic from Burma. Fifteen years of elected government in Dhaka had little to show for itself in Chittagong. Without major dredging of the river and a new road system, history could move southeast to Burma. Dhaka was only the latest place from where rule over this city emanated, and it had failed Chittagong.

The port could also be dredged and upgraded by private companies. In particular, the Chinese had their eye on Chittagong, helping in the construction of a container port. One morning I watched as local workers streamed into the premises of a South Korean firm that had virtual sovereignty over a large tract of land by the harbor, inside which South Korean standards of efficiency, precision construction, and so forth were maintained. From here jute, textiles, leather, tea, and frozen fish were exported to South Korea, while Bangladeshi laborers, working for low wages compared to those in South Korea, assembled sportswear for export around the world. The failure of government need not lead to even a virtual change of the borders, but to a ceding of responsibility to the private sector.

India and China were nervously watching the destiny of Bangladesh, for Bangladesh holds the key to the reestablishment of a long-dormant historical trade route between the two rising giants of the twenty-first century. As the Chittagong lawyer indicated, this route would pass through Burma and eastern India before needing to traverse Bangladesh on the way to Kolkata, thus giving China’s landlocked southwest its long-sought-after access to the Bay of Bengal and the larger Indian Ocean.

But whether this happens may hinge on the interrelationship between the environment and politics in Dhaka. A stable Bangladesh is necessary for this trade route, even as the trade route may lead in the course of time to a weakening of national identity. It is the very melding of languages and cultures—forces of global unity which disregard borders—that makes many lines on the map ultimately temporary.

Indeed, as I headed south from Chittagong along a narrow slice of Bangladeshi territory between the Bay of Bengal and the Indian and Burmese borders, all I kept hearing about were Burmese refugees and the trouble they were causing. The southeasternmost part of Bangladesh was knee-deep in the awful reality of Burma, whose day of reckoning as an oppressive military state, beset with ethnic problems, seemed not far off. This remote part of Bangladesh marked nearly the end of Indo-European civilization, the easternmost bastion of Asia where Persian loanwords were still integrated into the language. Here, rather than a basket case, Bangladesh was a refuge from much worse turmoil next door.

The landscape, half drowned in water, looked more like Southeast
Asia than the Indian Subcontinent, with a right-angled intricacy of paddy embankments, spiky tangles of greenery, and rigid banana leaves stabbing the cloud-curtained sky. Balloon-like jackfruit hung obscenely from trees. There was a sooty, vaporous quality to everything, sifted as it was through water and mud. Many of the paddy fields were empty, the victims of salinity.