Fading memories of freedom
As distance grows from their freedom movements, both India and Bangladesh are reshaping what it means to be anti-colonial
The current regime in Bangladesh wants to disconnect the country from its history of freedom struggle against Pakistan. It has removed the portrait of its founding President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from currency notes. It is also seeking new friendship with Pakistan. The people of Bangladesh fought two freedom struggles in the 20th century: the first to liberate themselves from the British, and then from Pakistan. It is a place that won freedom twice within 24 years: in 1947 and 1971.
The ideas of the self and oppressor change periodically. Bangladesh, now 55 years away from its second freedom struggle, thinks Islam is a more powerful bond for the people than language, which had separated it from what was then West Pakistan. Correspondingly, the iconography of the nation is being altered.
India's collective memory of the freedom struggle is also undergoing a transformation. The most powerful political force of India today, Hindutva, sees independence won in 1947 only as a partial victory. Its more expansive version of anti-colonialism sees Islam and western modernity as vestiges of foreign influence on the nation. It is trying to scrape those influences from public consciousness through various interventions. This new decolonisation drive is directed inward: amending curricula, laws, administrative structures, and more. The euphoria of a newly crossed milestone for a nation lasts for a finite time and its lingering sweetness fades with the passage of generations.
The new wave of Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh poses new security threats for India. The Sheikh Hasina government in Dhaka was sensitive to India's security concerns, and that was one of the reasons for the Islamist hostility towards her.
Uttar Pradesh and Maine: sister States?
What is common between Maine and Uttar Pradesh, States in the United States and India, respectively. Nothing really, you might think, but these States have recently barred or disqualified lawmakers from legislatures for what has been determined as unacceptable speech. Free speech and hate speech remain a vexed tangle in liberal politics world over. Maine Representative Laurel Libby has been barred from voting in the House. The Republican had posted a photo of a transgender student who won a girls' pole vault competition after finishing fifth in the boys' category two years earlier. She stands by her position and is seeking judicial intervention to restore her voting right.
In UP, Abbas Ansari, an MLA of a party that is allied to the ruling BJP, has been expelled from the Legislative Assembly after he was convicted in a hate speech case from 2022. He had allegedly threatened the local administration during the Uttar Pradesh election.
Simulating war and diplomacy
Speaking of speech, there is a new status in fabricating information, which is honourably mentioned as 'narrative building,' in strategic commentaries these days. In love and war, all is fair, including lies. Misinformation has acquired such a halo of virtue. For all the frothing at the mouth about democracy being threatened by post-truth politics until recently, these days, strategists around the world are talking about the imperative of winning the 'narrative war' and poisoning the enemy's information pipelines! War itself is akin to a simulated computer game, as Ukraine's recent attack on Russian targets showed. It is only appropriate that there is also a voiceover of a suitable story to go with it.
Many philosophers and thinkers have wondered whether we are living in a simulation. In the emerging landscape of virtual reality and AI, these questions are resurfacing. There are physicists who argue that a table made of wood and a table in VR are both equally real, or equally simulated. If we are already living in a simulated universe, we are creating a simulation within a simulation, as strategy! If what is perceived matters more, the reality as we thought of it until now, will cease to be relevant.
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