Photo: Reuters

The arrival of Anna bhai and his ‘Gandhigiri’, ironically copying a Bollywood storyline of Munna bhai and his embracing of Gandhi in dealing with national problem, has undoubtedly captured the imagination of the world. But not everybody is a fan. Arundhati Roy has almost called him a fake and the people who are seething in anger are just staying quiet for the right time to criticise him. But Anna Hazare definitely has arrived with Indian media and the middle-class hailing him as the new Messiah.

My prediction: this jubilation will be short lived and Team Anna will regularly venture into territories which will become problematic for democratic governance. However, even though I think his solutions are not well thought through (such sweeping power to an unelected body can never be good for democracy), he deserves a huge bow. At the least, the movement has made certain section of the citizens feel empowered and created a huge demand for change from the way business is being done. That is no small feat.

Sure, the most vocal supporter of his are the elite middle-class but that is also the group who are the most disaffected, risk averse and indifferent but if moved into action, this is the group that can make the most impact. Anna’s team seems to have emboldened this group and forced them into taking part in the movement.

In the meantime, in facebook chatters and iftar parties, Bangladeshi middle-class is clamouring for Bangladeshi Anna and some of our civil society leaders are feeling emboldened by Anna’s success. Ilias Kanchan will go for fasting for safer roads after Eid. So will Tarana Halim if the corrupt practise of giving unauthorised license does not stop. Syed Abul Maqsud, who never wears Western clothes protesting the Iraq invasion, will spend his Eid at the Shaheed Minar demanding resignation of the communication minister.

Regardless of the success or failure of Bangladeshi Annas, Anna Hazare has set an example that in a democracy, outside the partisan circle, citizens can truly be a force to reckon with in issue oriented politics.

In Bangladesh, the political circle regularly dismisses this group or those who are perceived to be leaders of this group as out of touch with the mainstream. Anna, whose career in public sector, is marked with hands on service in rural India, is a remarkable exception and as a result could not be so easily dismissed by the political class in India.

All in all, a good sign — anything that takes the civil society out of the roundtable scene cannot be bad. But getting acceptability among the people will be a long journey. Do they have the stomach for this arduous task? Or will they go for shortcuts like they have in the past which damaged their credibility for which they are still paying for?

But are we ready to mobilise our very own Anna? Before any change takes place, the demand for change has to be there. We have to believe that we can make a change before the real mobilisation starts. We also have to believe that business as usual is simply not acceptable. But how does one start?

There is no accurate answer to that. But may be too often we confuse our rights as citizens as our right to vote only. However, this is rather a continuous process. Before asserting one’s rights in a constituency, one has to establish the ownership first – ownership to this state and its people. Voting or owning a passport does not create that ownership. Rather paying taxes does. As soon as we realise that as taxpayers we are paying for the services, we will start demanding better services. As long as we continue to believe it’s a freebie, we force ourselves for the kind of services or the lack of it, we get.

If my last year’s tax fair experience is any indication to go by, we are surely heading that way. To my surprise, I saw long queues of ordinary citizens happily waiting to pay taxes. When I enquired inside with the officials, they told me that the majority of this group are first time taxpayers and their average returns were for Tk 2000-3000 from very average earning groups. This to me seemed like a welcome change and also seeing the kind of pride associated in their faces while paying taxes also told me that the ownership is being established. With such ownership, the assertion as citizens will begin and mobilisation will follow.  As for leadership?

This won’t just depend on leadership. This will depend on the ecosystem for democracy as well of which a critical component is the media. In the team Anna movement, the media played almost a cheerleading role giving the movement a national face. The traditional media in Bangladesh, however, is going through a bit of an identity crisis.

The electronic media lacks any imagination or investment on content. One cannot distinguish one channel from the other. 10 years after the start of the first private television channel, one cannot name any new journalists other than the early Ekushey TV stars such as Munni Saha and J E Mamun. There are blips of hope, flashes of brilliance here and there but the industry flushed with corporate money is too much under rocky terrain to be perceived very dependable. New initiatives also seem to peter away without explanation. The Daily Star started the opinion poll on government’s performance only to stop after a year.

Changes, however, are happening in the social media scene. Recently, there has been encouraging signs of development in the new media scene. Due to the government’s reduction in broadband pricing, the spread of Internet is dizzying. Bangladesh now has almost eight million internet users – an astounding 1300 percent increase in just two years. If you consider that facebook alone has 1.4 million users in Bangladesh and the highest circulating daily has a circulation of 500 thousand, you can safely conclude that more and more people are consuming news from new media than the traditional media. The Arun Chowdhury scandal and the police involvement in killing of a boy in Companyganj were captured in mobile phone camera before it made it to the traditional media. Beyond camera reporting, citizens seem to be mobilising around more specific issues in Bangladesh. Particularly the one surrounding bad medical practice in Bangladesh has taken a momentum.

And as for leadership — sometimes, leadership comes from unexpected corner, but when it does and it crosses the tipping point in that ecosystem, like it did for Anna, powerful things can happen. Undoubtedly enough, the assertion of taxpayers’ civic rights is starting to happen in South Asia. In the Indian version of ‘Anna and the King’, the king was too late to recognise it. In the Bangladeshi version, however, the script is yet to be written.

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Asif Saleh is a co-founder and contributor to Drishtipat Writers’ Collective.

One night, however, the TV was not on air. Instead, we were introduced to a different monster – a live one, and it was none other than the man of the house. The husband was beating the wife while their 7-year-old daughter was begging mercy for her mother. I had never seen anything like that before. There was swearing followed by slaps, kicks followed by more swearing, slaps and kicks and it went on and on.

“Abbu, ar na, abbu, please ar na” – I still can hear the girl screaming at the top of her voice trying to save her mother, a respected teacher at Eden College.

Since the incident, I never tried to watch the green monster on their TV; I’ve seen that in real life. But a few days later, I saw the couple again. The husband was sipping tea and the wife reading a newspaper. Life went on as if nothing had happened.

Shhhhh… The culture of silence continues. Mum’s the word.

10 years later, I went abroad for higher studies. I took a job at the International Student Office at the university I was studying. I was the first point of contact for all the international students and so I knew the small group of Bangladeshi students there. We used to hang out as well. One of the most crowd-pulling members of that group, a PhD student, had just gotten married. He married his long time girlfriend. There was celebration, bodhuboron amid much laughter and fanfare.

Then, after a while, there was that phone call in my office:

“Asif, I don’t know if you can do something about this but he is very abusive. He kicked her out of the house and had her shiver in cold for hours.” One of the local bhabis was calling for help on behalf of the newly-wed girl, without her permission. “He beats her because he cannot control his anger,” she added.

Bewildered I asked, “But I thought this was a love marriage and they were together after a long separation”.

“He just has a strong temper” – was the rationalisation.

So I secretly sent her a note about the possible help she can get should she decides to leave him. But she didn’t. A few weeks later they both came to a party. We acted as if nothing had happened. She was putting on a smile of a lovely wife while he was cracking jokes and lecturing on how Bangladesh could be saved.

Life went on for the immigrant NRBs.

Shhhhh…The culture of silence goes on. Mum’s the word.

17 years later in 2010, I have moved back to Dhaka. A friend working at a very prestigious institute calls up.

“I have been trying to reach you for some time. You cannot tell anyone about this but you need to help me. I was living with a monster for 10 years. I was beaten unconscious once.”

How long did it continue, I asked?

“It started after a couple of years of marriage.”

“You are a highly educated, economically independent woman. Why did you stay with him for such a long time?”

“I thought it was going to be okay. He would apologise after every incident and everything would be fine for a couple of months and then it would start again. Finally, I had the courage to leave him. Now he wouldn’t leave me alone. But please don’t tell anyone. This is not very pleasant.”

Shhhhh… Still the culture of silence continues. Mum’s the word.

I don’t know the epilogue to the first two incidents I mentioned as I am not in touch with them. But I bet it is not much different from the third incident where the woman painfully woke up to the reality that once an abuser, always an abuser.

It has been 30 years since I saw the Eden College teacher get beaten black and blue by her husband in front of her daughter. A lot has changed. Colour TV is now available even at slums.

And yet, on some important matters, how little has changed!

The optimist in me would get excited in the statistics that 80 percent of the divorces in Dhaka last year were initiated by women — signalling that at least some women are realising that enough is enough. But I know I will be a fool to think that they are the majority. If Rumana Monzur too had shown the courage a little earlier, probably — just probably — her eyes would not have been ruptured to the point of going blind.

Hers was an extreme case, perhaps, and the ‘shobhbhyo shomaj’, as one newspaper called it, has been stunned by the sheer brutality of the crime. But this very ‘shobhbhyo shomaj’ would regularly pressurise the woman to ‘compromise’ (maniye cholo) in the other not so brutal (to-be-more-brutal) cases.

It took a monster to bite the nose off his wife to wake us up to the reality that we have a very serious problem in our society. But in all likelihood this culture of silence and ‘maniye chola’ will continue — sometimes for the children, sometimes for the society.

But how long? How long will it take us to realise that staying in an abusive relationship is more harmful to the children than not staying in it? How many slaps will it take before we realise that we have a problem here that will not go away unless we take an initiative?

Yes, I am talking to you — you, the parents of the abused daughter, who think that looking the other way would make the problem go away. I am talking to you, the patient wives, who think these ‘little incidents’ of the ‘hot tempered’ husbands must be ignored for the sake of a peaceful coexistence.

All you people — take a cold, hard look at the battered and brutalised face of Rumana Monzur and ask yourselves — whose face are you saving?

Shhhh….don’t answer. Mum’s the word.

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Asif Saleh is a co-founder and contributor to Drishtipat Writers’ Collective.