MY JERICHO
This meeting was held on March 06, 2019
The drastic and dramatic events of 1971 in which East Pakistan became Bangladesh are well known: the flood, the Awami League election victory, Sheikh Mujib’s declaration of independence, the onslaught of the Pakistani army, flight of ten million refugees.
Professor Gowher Rizvi, who lived through these “gruesome” events as a young student in Dacca (Dhaka), recalled seeing bodies in the street and that four of his own teachers were killed as the Pakistani army targeted intellectuals.
The whole thing happened, it transpired, to preserve Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomatic ‘back-channel’’ through Pakistan to China.
India intervened, Bangladesh achieved independence. Which only goes to show you are better off having Indira Gandhi and George Harrison on your team (she was shot, he was stabbed) rather than Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung.
Gowher Rizvi has spent 23 years in Oxford, at Trinity College then Nuffield as well as another decade in Bangladesh. When he returned his daughter, who had been a student here, recommended Jericho.
“There is not very much you can’t like about it. I do not think anything can surpass Oxford. It has become more cosmopolitan in the time I have known it.”
His father had become a member of the ‘heaven-born’ Indian Civil Service during the period British rule in 1938. Gowher Rizvi attended a military public school.
In 1952/53 they were still studying the Geography of the British Isles and English History, taught by Catholic priests. In the colonial-style school the headmaster was a New Zealander and the boys played rugby.
“I saw the fag-end of Empire’s academic life. The tutors emphasised objectivity – but in a very subjective way.”
At Oxford, the Indian Majlis, founded as a gathering for Indian students in the 1920s, became the South Asian Majlis. He overlapped with Benazir Bhutto: “she was younger”.
She was blown up. Her father was hanged.
‘The West and the Rest’ course became ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’ and is now ‘Global History’, a very competitive course.
Things did not go smoothly for independent Bangladesh. Having survived the Pakistani military, Sheikh Muijb was killed along with most of his family in a military coup in 1975.
“We then had the long struggle against military rule.”
Mujib’s daughter Sheikh Hasina had been abroad at the time of the bloodbath and lived to be elected Prime Minister of Bangladesh in 2009. Gowher Rizvi is one of her advisors, travelling back two or three times a year.
“People can gauge the performance of the government since 2009 – every area of life has been transformed. A country Henry Kissinger described as ‘a basket-case’ is today an example of development.
“People have access to food, education, free basic healthcare and means-tested social security. Voters are not fools.
He denies material progress has come at the price of loss of liberty.
“There are 39 private TV stations and 450 daily newspapers, many sharply critical of the government.
“People no longer want to work in restaurants.”
Cradling a baby, symbolising the future, he summed up. “Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world. It is the same population density as if the whole population of the world, seven or eight billion, went to live in the United States.”
Of the most recent disaster, the flight of a million Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing from genocide in predominantly Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) to Bangladesh he says: “almost all states now are multicultural, you can’t unscramble the omelette.”
He sees little difference between longtime Oxford resident Aung San Suu Kyi, herself daughter of murdered Burmese nationalist leader Aung San, and the Burmese military.
“She says Bangladesh is not allowing the Rohingyas to return to their homes [in Burma] because the Bangladesh government benefits from relief money.”
Mahatma Gandhi said he was a politician trying to be a saint, not a saint trying to be a politician. The trouble is some politicians have stopped trying.
Report by: Roger Howe
My Jericho offers a series of independent events organized by Jericho resident John Mair. Many are at at St Barnabas. Others are streamed on YouTube.
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