Ground Realities
A bowl of rice, a dollop of lentils, some green chilli
We will try to forget what Tapan Chowdhury said about the price of rice, of other things, last week. We will do all we can not to remember the bizarre moment when the entrepreneur-adviser told us that the government had really nothing to do about prices, that indeed it was all a fait accompli no one could roll back. But forgiveness? That is an entirely different proposition altogether.
For now, though, having observed the alacrity with which Tapan Chowdhury's governmental colleagues went on an offensive at damage control, through reassuring the nation that they did not agree with him, we will rest content.
We will pray that in the times to be, this country will truly come by opportunities that will throw up men whose sense of responsibility will not be dulled by their sparks of insensitivity. Let there be no more men and women in office telling us that prices will go up whether or not we like it, that prices have been rising owing to our "increased" capacity to buy the things we need.
And let there not be, at the same time, ministers or advisers who will admonish the media over their role in forcing the resignation of a member of the government, and tell us that such nefarious activities on the part of newsmen makes it difficult for government to function.
Life is not fair, death always stalks us in this much abused, much maligned country. When you have the price of coarse rice shooting up to Taka 33 a kilogram, or more, you know something of the nature of agony. And yet our collective expectation is that our government, this one or the one to be, will take that agony out of our lives and point out for us the path to a reasonably good future.
The Bengali, having lived through calamities of a multifarious sort, with hardly any promise of a respite from such maladies in future, has developed a strange propensity of not asking for too much. Give him a bowl of rice with a dollop of lentils, throwing in perhaps a single green chilli for good measure. He will be content.
But for a long time now, all this yearning for simple 'dal-bhaat' has regularly been undercut. The lentils have gone out of reach; and even the chillis are fast turning into folklore. That leaves you with the rice, which you now say must be bought at stupendous prices if you must eat.
The implications are clear; if you cannot pay, you do not eat. Then what are governments for? Ronald Reagan in distant America once spoke of a government in Washington that would be as good as the American people. Expanded in interpretation, it was a statement that applied to all people inhabiting every spot on the globe.
But then, there was Bangabandhu before Reagan. His focus on the creation of a Shonar Bangla, back in the times when Pakistan served as the new coloniser in our lives, had for its underpinning a state of freedom where Bengalis would have two square meals a day, work hard, and then look forward to a panorama of fields bursting with paddy, ponds where the water would go round in ripples because of all the cheerful fish there, and songs punctuating the nation's pastoral landscape.
But even Bangabandhu knew, when the moment of reckoning came with liberation, that the dream of a golden Bengal called for insistent sacrifice and consistent courage. Note that neither he nor his government told us that there was nothing to be done. The Father of the Nation only asked that we give him three years. We gave him three years.
If today you go into the archives, you will likely observe that in those last few months of Bangabandhu's government, there was promise in the fields, promise of rice and of other foodstuff. We made ready to discard the rusty begging bowl we had carried in our hands for long. We had come through the crisis of 1974, when Henry Kissinger and company would not send us food because we, as a sovereign people, wished to trade with Cuba.
But we will leap across all this question of what might have been. Go into some bits and pieces of global history. You will be amazed at how food, or the lack of it, has left powerful men reeling, even rolling in the mud. In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from office over the issue of what his enemies called poor agriculture in the Soviet Union.
Long ago, men and women died in Ireland because food was nowhere to be seen. Potatoes went missing and so did lives. But let us come back to Bangladesh, where food has always mattered in the articulation of politics. Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani led quite a few bhooka michhils (hunger processions), even as the monsoon rains poured, in the early 1970s.
Seeing the plight of men and women in heightened degrees of emaciation, in 1974, a bitter poet exploded with his "bhaat de . . . noile ebar maanchitro khabo (give me rice … or else I will gorge on the map)." How many more references do you need to comprehend the misery of those who would like to eat and cannot because of those rocketing, spiralling prices? Men in government say they know where all the shadowy hoarders and profiteers of food stay huddled. Well, let those who govern go after these villains. Why must that be such a hard job to do?
In the 1960s, we marched through the streets of this country, when it was not yet a country, demanding food, clothing and shelter. Onno chai bostro chai banchar moto banchte chai. That is what we belted out of our lungs even as we went forging dreams of a golden future. The goal was simple; we wished for ourselves a world where dignity mattered.
All these decades on, when you are startled by the outstretched hands of the poor at the railway stations and traffic lights and outside the mosques, you ask sadly why that food and that clothing are still elusive affairs. Government, we keep quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is always a thriving, throbbing affair. Is it really? And then we stumble on the reality. It is once more an American, this time Jimmy Carter, we go back to in order to find an explanation for our misery. There is a malaise abroad in the land, he told his people in 1980, and went on to lose the election.
Our malaise has been there, always. We have passed from youth to middle age in its sinister shadows. At our elections, we have consistently elected politicians who have offered us visions of a future resting on a dal-bhaat imagery. And we have consistently been disappointed.
Empty plates have largely been our fate, much like the vacant stare where dreams should have been every time we walk into the market place, knowing only too well that we are in the wrong place, and being wrong-footed all the time. Have you ever watched a poor villager, torn bag in hand, spending hours at a weekly haat not knowing what to buy because his low resources do not match the high prices those food sellers demand?
Go to ancient China for wisdom. Long years ago, Confucius spoke for all struggling men; and his words resonate in our souls, despite everything advisers may tell us about rising prices. "Coarse rice for food, water to drink, and the bended arm for a pillow -- happiness may be enjoyed even in these," said he.
We rest our case.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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