Imtiaz Ahmed

This study is limited to three South Asian countries - Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. They are similar and different at the same time. In size and population, they are vastly different. But when it comes to political regimes, they are all products of electoral democracies reproducing majoritarianism based on religion, particularly Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka, respectively. This is what makes the study unique. No one will dispute that there is a creeping intolerance between and amongst religious communities in these three countries, with the majority of the people belonging to three different religions. But then, different though they are in religious convictions of the majority of the people, there are interesting similarities when it comes to manipulating the intolerance, indeed, for political gains in each of these three countries.

The paper assesses the milieu in which the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan twenty years back, their return now, and the possible impact in the region and beyond, including Bangladesh. The objective of the paper is not to reach certainties but to invite meaningful discussions without prejudices.

En-gendering security is as much a political exercise as it is a methodological one. Some two decades back I wrote a paper on feminist methodology with a sub-title: “Can Mohilas Speak?” (1995). Apart from re-addressing Gayatri Spivak’s earlier query (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” [1988]), the paper flagged the limits of positivism in understanding woman’s state of insecurity in a world informed and dictated by masculinity or what could be referred to as the purush jat. The follow-up contribution to the critique, albeit with the avowed task of transforming woman’s dismal condition, was done by taking recourse to dialectics, indeed, of a kind that had its roots in the works of Hegel and Marx. A penchant for causality – “everything is caused; whenever this, then that” – could not be avoided (Chenshan Tian, 2005). And that is where, now after two decades, I see the limits of the effort, particularly when it comes to addressing the dialectic of gender relationship and the disempowered status of women in South Asia. And this not because Western dialectical method is at fault (which surely has a tendency of harbouring determinism) or because the utopias put forward by the Hegelians and the Marxists, although qualitatively different in nature, have foundered and transformed into living dystopias but more because of a serious appreciation of the diversity in dialectics, including the contributions of the Chinese and Indian dialectics over the centuries. While the former upheld the dialectics of yin-yang relationship (i.e. balancing the opposites) with ‘continuity through change’ as a style of thought, the latter “developed what is known as the prasangika method, — the method of examining all possible alternative interpretations of the opponent’s proposition, showing the absurdity of the respective consequences and thus refuting it” (Esther Solomon, 1978). Put differently, approaching woman’s state of insecurity from the standpoint of yin-yang relationship and/or prasangika can make a far more meaningful contribution to the task of demystifying masculinity and ensuring women’s rights. Engendering security in South Asia otherwise requires not only re-imagining dialectics in the light of its diversity but also making the methodological quest local, indeed, related to the lived experience of the South Asians.

The theme on which I have been asked to speak has quite a long title, and each word is wrought with complexities and multilayered meanings. I will not venture into discussing all of them but will concentrate on the words ‘new focus,’ for that is where, I believe, limitless possibilities lies.

Let me begin by referring to a debate between a physicist and a poet, incidentally both were noble laureates. I am indeed referring to the Tagore-Einstein debate, where the question debated was whether ‘beauty,’ ‘truth,’ or ‘table,’ or, for that matter, the moon could exist without humans? Tagore answered in an emphatic ‘no’! The debate, however, is worth recollecting:

Einstein: Truth, then, or Beauty, is not independent of man?
Tagore: No.
Einstein: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful?
Tagore: No.
Einstein: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
Tagore: Why not? Truth is realised through man…. Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance, and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality of the table is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric forces, also belongs to the human mind…. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth, which eats that paper, literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner, if there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
Einstein: Then I am more religious than you are!

This is somewhat paradoxical because Einstein, the theoretical physicist, who throughout his life professed and preached the existence of an objective reality independent of human consciousness, failed to convince Tagore, the mystic poet, the existence of the real devoid of human beings. Tagore had a point. What would ‘beauty’ or the moon, for instance, be without humans? We are yet to know how ants or dogs look at the moon? Or, for that matter, whether insects and animals look at the moon just like humans? That is, whether they are able to look at the table functionally or the moon aesthetically? But then, save humans who would provide answers to such queries! Not for nothing did Tagore locate human beings at the centre of life and living. Even at the end of his life at the age of eighty Tagore went on proclaiming unflinchingly: “Manusher proti biswas harano paap, shey biswas shesh porjonto rakkha korbo (I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in humans).”

The implication of this debate, particularly Tagore’s position on the centrality of human beings, is enormous. What this implies is that without human beings, without people, there is no ‘Asia,’ no ‘Pacific,’ not even ‘land forces’! Any discourse on the latter, particularly with reference to the opportunities and challenges of land forces in the Asia-Pacific region, must therefore begin with ‘humans.’ My presentation will take this up in some details.

My introduction to international relations or IR as a discipline was rather accidental. During my college years I had no idea that such a discipline existed in the University of Dhaka or for that matter in Bangladesh. But as the Master sage in the Kung Fu Panda would say, "There are no accidents." Not sure how true is the statement, but my carefree walk in the corridor of the first floor of the Arts Building, where IR department was previously located, changed my formal disciplinary interest. Actually, I ended up on the first floor for seeking an admission in the department of philosophy, but then a distant cousin of mine, who was then a young faculty of IR and at that moment probably sun-bathing in the corridor, stopped me, somewhat puzzled as to why I was walking down from the philosophy department. In those days, there was only one television channel in the country, and that was of course, the BTV. If you ended up in the BTV for an inter-college or an inter-University debate or for some general knowledge competition, you are literally a known face in the city, even rickshaw-pullers would slow down and smile at you! On the top of that if you were a student of the formerly prestigious Dhaka College and made to the merit list then you were no less a celebrity in the making. But foolish though it now seems, you also end up getting affected by all the attention and turning yourself into a little snob! I was no exception. But then my cousin, just like my father, thought that I would remain perennially unemployed and bare-footed (I guess, just like Socrates) if I formally train myself in philosophy. Not wasting a moment, my cousin hurriedly tossed the idea, "Why don't you get enrolled in the IR department?" That was the beginning of it in the year 1976, formally that is, but certainly not the beginning of knowing and discoursing on IR.