Let us celebrate Chaitra Sangkranti
The word ‘sangkranti’ implies the moment of transition that has no beginning and no end; the notion is not linear, but cyclical. The sun moves through space and every month crosses each of the signs of the zodiac, known as rashi, and completes twelve cycles of the year. So there is no ‘new’ year but return of the cycle, or the ‘chakra’. In the cyclic movement, every point is literally the end of the cycle as well as the beginning. There is no new beginning, and therefore no ‘past’ in the linear sense of the term. The word ‘sangkranti’ captures this notion of the eternal return of (Read More )
Mass Line, Repressive Media, and State Terror
“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Poet and writer Farhad Mazhar is not intimidated by the propaganda campaign being orchestrated by a partisan section of the media community. It is engaged in this activity to create the kind of political condition that would incite the regime to punish him. This particular section of the media fears the poet’s social critique which exposes the contradictions of the mass media, constitutional arrang (Read More )
Eve’s Monologue undermines women’s movement
Every day we have to read or hear about some rape and also killing after rape occurring in different areas of the country. Rape and killings are direct physically attack on a woman’s body but violence against women is more than that. These other forms of violence caused by social, economic and cultural factorsand various development policies are often ignored not because that they are not directly physical or invisible but they must be made so to justify systemic violence. Injecting Depo-Provera into poor women’s bodies or implanting Norplant under her skin for population control and keeping garment workers under lock and key (Read More )
BANGLADESH: State's unpardonable failures deserves credible investigarion
The entire governmental machinery of Bangladesh, with its retinue of law-enforcement units, intelligence agencies, and security forces, has totally and abysmally failed to protect minority communities in the South Eastern region of the country. A large number of monasteries, temples, houses and establishments of the Buddhist communities of the area, and even those belonging to some of the Hindu communities, have been subject to open arson and looting. Starting on September 29th, 2012 for 3 straight days the rampage continued in Cox's Bazar and Chittagong districts. The devastating attacks began at Ramu sub-district town on the evening of 2 (Read More )
Climate ‘negotiations’ and the World in peril...
From Copenhagen to Cancun: Low expectation prevails
The COP 16 of 2010 UNFCCC climate conference began in Cancun from 29th November for 12 days amidst much lower expectation of achieving significant commitment from the developed countries for lowering the emissions. After the failed climate conference of the COP 15, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009, there is not much to expect from Cancun. The struggle of the environmental activists and the delegates of the developing countries resulted only int (Read More )
An Interview with Critical Political Scientist Norman Finkelstein
Israeli Domination and the Workings of Ideology
Norman Finkelstein is one of the leading American critics of Israeli foreign policy. As a political scientist he wrote extensively on the exploitation of the holocaust as an ideological weapon and on the crisis in Palestinian occupied territories. He received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
He has a long history of teaching political theory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even though he clearly met publishing and teaching standards, he was denied t (Read More )
Financial Crisis & Garment Workers of Bangladesh
Garment Workers work harder but less food to eat
This paper presented by Farida Akhter at the workshop 'South Asia Regional Workshop on Global Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Women: A Human Rights Perspective'; it took place on 22-23 August 2010 in Delhi, India and organised by UNIFEM, PWESCR and HEINRICH BöLL STIFTUNG. It was prsented as a Bangladesh country perspective on the impact of the current crisis on women, their livelihoods and human rights.
Bangladesh Economy in (Read More )
World Population Day 2010
Reliable and Accurate Data on Population for Whom?
The 11th of July is World Population Day. The United Nations Population (UNFPA) has selected the theme "Everyone Counts", which according to them "will underscore the importance of data for development". The main issue raised through this theme is of "fostering an understanding of why reliable, disaggregated data is so crucial to progress and encourage people to participate in the census and other data collection efforts".
No one denies the need for reliable and accurate data. But the question is why UNFPA has realised the (Read More )
An Interview with Anti-Racist Feminist Sunera Thobani
Mapping the Questions, Politics and Location of Resistance
Sunera Thobani teaches at the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. She is also past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), Canada's largest feminist organization. The first woman of color to serve in this position, she made anti-imperialism and anti-racism central to the women's movement. Her book ‘Exalted Subjects’ places new emphasis on the question of indigenism, race and citizenship within the context of Canada, and makes (Read More )
Budget 2010-11
Performing 'Digitally' and in 'Shadows"
'Purana Kashundi Ghata'
Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith presented the National Budget for 2010-11 fiscal year digitally in the parliament on June 10, using power point for the first time in Bangladesh. His digital performance, a virtual exercise on a virtual reality, streamed through screens and print media in order to fool the common citizens with high and ambitious figures of growth rate. It is a piece of amusement of course. Post-budget responses by various organisation (Read More )
After 9 Days Amar Desh published again...
Latest on Mahmudur Rahman
DHAKA. 10 June 2010. Bangladesh Judiciary is perhaps coming to senses to restore its dignity that was lost in the public eye when the declaration of Amar Desh was cancelled on 1st June;Consequently, privileged by administrative decision, the regime displayed brutal terror of armed police battalion to arrest Mahmudur Rahman.
In such dark scenario, the bench of Justice Nazmun Ara Sultana and Justice Sheikh Hasan Arif stayed for three months the government's decision to close down Amar Desh ordered and implemented by the District Commissioner. If judicial gesture of some benches reiterates the commitmen (Read More )
Punishing the dissenter
Concerns about Safety of Mahmudur Rahman
The chronology of events that led to the arrest of Acting Editor of Amar Desh is scandalous by the very nature by which government abused executive power misused legal instruments and scrapped constitutional rights.This will create serious problem in the efforts of the people to enable rule of law. Despite already precarious situation of Bangladesh, people intends to see a reasonable space within the present nature of power to practice democratic values. Silencing the dissenting voice is also embarrassing for Bangladesh development partners who often sermon on human rights, freedom of (Read More )
Lalon, (Con)textualized
On Lalon: 'Divinity' is political
DEPART in its inaugural issue of January 2010 (Volume 1 Issue 1) published an interview of Farhad Mazhar. DEPART says, "Farhad Mazhar answers five questions on Lalon and his school of thought that forms the apex of artistic and philosophical practices centered on what once was Nadiya in the geographic sense and now has taken over the philosophical landscape of Bangladesh". We are reproducing the interview here, (Read More )
Threat to Seeds is Threat to Peoples’ Sovereignty
The Question of "Seeds"
This is one of the most important essays for the readers and activists who are connected to Chintaa. For activists thinking and organising for a post-imperial post-capitalist global community, this essay is fundamentally important because of the emphasis on the question of local and indigenous cultural practices, farming techniques, and strategies for the creation of economies of resistance. This essay shows why Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agricultural Movement) is not about having a rhetorical stance against imperialism based on an E (Read More )
'And seed shall set you free...'
On the politics of seed, handlooms and rural development
[ We are reprinting here a very sympathetic interview of Farhad Mazhar with the national daily 'New Age' to provide our readers a glimpse of how the mainstream thinking views radical and alternative thoughts and practices in Bangladesh. It also demonstrates the difficulty to set a converging space where a more productive dialogue could be set into motion to conceptualise and practice an anti-imperilist and anti-capitalist lifestyle movement such as Nayakrishi Andolon in the era of 'neo-liberalism' (Read More )
‘The Bangladesh government’s position is a betrayal to all these people’
Tipaimukh and Bangladesh-India Relation
Eminent intellectual Farhad Mazhar talks to Mubin S Khan about the Tipaimukh Dam and the role Bangladesh could have played
The Indian government’s plans to build the Tipaimukh Dam which will affect the north-eastern districts of Bangladesh, has now become a major issue of concern in our country. How would you assess Bangladesh government’s response to the issue so far?
The current government, not surprisingly for some of us, does not have the ‘national interest’ of the people of Bangladesh in mind. The (Read More )
Democracy & Secularism
Democratic state by Definition cannot be anything but secular
[Originally published in Independence Day Special Supplement of New Age (26 March 2009), a leading English language daily in Bangladesh]
"For historical reasons, urban middle-classes are largely communal because of the legacy they carry from colonialism and their inability to reckon with anything which is ‘strange’ to them, even the indigenous tradition is nothing more than ‘native’ culture in colonial sense; in their discourse they are discussed as ‘ (Read More )
Development and Developmentwalahs
It is time to say ‘Sorry’
Taking a hard look at the capitalist concept of development. Farida Akhter suggests a way out of what she sees as a vicious cycle.
The developmentwalahs love to point to people as poor and areas as underdeveloped. These terminologies are created to suit the needs of those who continuously create poverty and underdevelopment. The history of development, and particularly rural development, shows that development has very little to do with enhancing people’s power. The (Read More )
Who Wants Bangladesh?
The present government is termed “the government of change”. Do you think the changes have begun?
‘Din badal’ is the script of a mobile company, the advertisement in the time of political decadence and signifies our slavery to transnational corporations and neoliberal ideologies undermining our national interests, security and sovereignty. Even the so called ‘muktijuddho’ ( war of liberation) has become a commodity to sell products and services of (Read More )