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Bangaldesh: Attempted destruction of sculpture depicting a group of white storks

Rally secular forces and resist the bigots

30 November 2008

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New Age, December 1, 2008

Editorial

Secular forces must organise against bigots

THE attempted destruction of the Balaka sculpture in Dhaka’s Dilkhusha area on Saturday night by a radical Islamist group adds to concerns over the growing impunity with which religious extremists are attacking political, cultural and social freedoms in our society. Just over a month ago, a group of bigots tore down a monument to commemorate mystic and folk philosopher Lalon Shah, claiming that representations of living beings is forbidden in their medieval interpretation of Islam. The following day, the military-controlled interim government decided to remove the monument that it itself had commissioned. The government has refused to reverse its decision since, despite widespread popular demands for restoration of the sculpture. Its refusal to stand up to religious bigotry may very well have emboldened the obscurantist forces to launch an attack on another sculpture in the city.

The law-enforcement agencies did act to prevent the destruction of the Balaka sculpture and some of the perpetrators were arrested, so reported the national media on Sunday. However, the interim government’s apparent policy of political religious hardliners, accentuated earlier this year by its backtracking on the women’s development policy in the face of week after week of protests by obscurantist forces and more recently by its inaction with regard to the assault on a freedom-fighter by some Jamaat-e-Islami activists at a so-called freedom fighters’ convention, makes this a case of too little too late. The incumbents’ tendency to use kid gloves to deal with the religious hardliners was also apparent in the immunity that the figureheads of the Jamaat-e-Islami have enjoyed during the corruption investigations that the government has carried out in the past two years.

The destruction of the Baul monument and the latest attack on the Balaka monument could be signs that the Islamist radicals may be convinced of their political impunity. While the targets are cultural representations of Bengali history and tradition, the ultimate aim of the bigots seems to be to invade the political sphere and block the freedoms that a secular society inherently enjoys. This latest incident should be a wake-up call for all democratic and secular sections of society to rally in a broad resistance of the medieval dogma that these radicals preach. At the heart of this resistance must be a political movement to protect democratic freedoms, bringing to bear popular pressure on the major political parties to either embrace secular thinking or be rejected by the masses.