Bangladesh has a squally passage ahead; India, which has the friendliest ties with the Government in Dhaka, must step up its strong support. Fire in a neighbour's house can spread into one's own
A large number of people, particularly in Bangladesh, are shocked by the fact that all except two of the terrorists perpetrating unspeakable acts of savagery during their capture of a Dhaka restaurant on the night of July 1 to July 2 were from affluent families and have been to some of the best schools in the country. Most people have in mind the stereotypical image of a terrorist as amadarssa-educated young man from a disprivileged background, brainwashed and trained to becoming a cruel killing machine. The fact is that poverty and inadequate education steeped in religious extremism are not the only causes of terrorism.
This becomes clear on reading Eric Hoffer’s, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and Erich Fromm’s, The Fear of Freedom, both definitive books explaining why people surrender their judgements and will to mass movements and leaders preaching doctrines calling for root-and-branch change. Their analysis is relevant here. The Islamic State of Syria or levant (ISIl), or Islamic State (IS) as it calls itself, is a militant mass movement waging wars as well as perpetrating terrorist acts.
According to Fromm, the most powerful factor is the search for security. An infant’s world is coterminous with his or her mother’s which envelops his or her with a feeling of security. One becomes aware of the insecurities and dangers threatening one as one grows up, develops a sense of self, and becomes an individual aware of his aloneness and vulnerabilities. The way to overcoming this feeling of loneliness and insecurity “is to relate spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of one’s emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities.” Many, however, cannot do so and seek security in sadistic domination or masochistic submission.
Fromm writes, “The annihilation of one’s individual self and the attempt to overcome thereby the unbearable feeling of powerlessness are only one side of the masochistic strivings. The other side is the attempt to become a part of a bigger and more powerful whole outside of oneself, to submerge and participate in it. This power can be a person, an institution, and God, the nation, conscience or a psychic compulsion.” By thus surrendering one’s self, “one gets a new security and a new pride in the participation in the power in which one submerges. One also gains security against the torture of doubt.”
Erich Hoffer shows how insecurity leads one to mass movements when he writes, “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but from the refuge it provides from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence.”
Insecurity is a purely personal feeling in an individual; its causes vary according to people. Certain causes, however, are present in societies in general at certain junctures. These range from the fear of attack by wild animals or enemy tribes, to warfare, arbitrary arrest and extortion by feudal lords and, from the 16th century, tyranny by kings as well as republican dictatorships. These also include fear of banditry, natural calamities like floods and famines and, during the last century or so, economic phenomena, particularly recessions.
What kind of insecurity could haunt the sons of affluent families who turned into the terrorists who killed savagely in DhakaIJ It could not have emerged from a threat to their lives and limbs; nor from abject poverty threatening them with starvation. One cause could be the fear of being less successful than their fellow students and others in their social milieus. The other could be insecurity resulting from doubts about being able to achieve the goals they had set for themselves. The third could be insecurity about not being able to sustain emotional relationships with others — mainly girls in the case of young men in their late ‘teens and early twenties’.
The wider societal causes which influence goals and attitudes, relate to the spread of market capitalism, soaring on the wings of advertising. It has made the enjoyment of a high level of consumption the primary goal in life and has projected success in one’s chosen field as the principal means of achieving it. Competitiveness, the much-proclaimed engine of market capitalism, has become sharply ingrained in the psyche of people. This, in turn, has bread selfishness and a proneness to leave the hindmost to the devil. Eric Hoffer writes, “The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointment.”
It is important to note here what Seuty Sabur, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bangladesh’s BRAC university, has stated in an article in The Wire on July 5. She has written, “With the neoliberal turn in the early 1980s, we saw major shifts in the economy and lifestyle in Bangladesh. It was not only the MNCs and NGOs penetrating the economy, but the corporate education system as well…. English-medium schools mushroomed in Dhaka. Many members of the aspiring cosmopolitan middle class thought these schools would be the playground for global citizens, and a gate pass for achieving a higher status. Surely this served as entry to a lifestyle which was alien to these parents.
These were the generations of children who were literally ‘looking london, talking Tokyo’ in their dreams; a world which was inaccessible for most of their parents. Many of these children never managed to get out of the country; they were the ones who were left behind, stuck in the private universities as our students. Either their parents were trying to protect them from ‘politics’ and archaic education systems in public universities, or adulthood in a foreign land — which is perceived to be decadent. The post 9/11 world order made their departure for higher studies even more difficult.”
Hoffer writes, “There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfilment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favour a radical change.” So do many young people in Bangladesh and fundamentalist Islamist organisations like the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, IS and Al Qaeda.
One does not know their number. But then it does not take many to spread terror. The attack in Dhaka on July 1 and Kishoreganj Eid prayers on July 6, show that Bangladesh is in for a tough time. India, which has the friendliest ties with its Government, must further step up the strong support it has been providing Dhaka. Fire in a neighbour’s house can spread into one’s own.