A headline in The Daily Star reads: "Arson attack on bus kills 9; Bomb hurled on transport in several city areas". On the night of June 4, 2004, a double-decker public bus full of passengers in front of the Sheraton Hotel in Dhaka blew up in flames. "The fire caught my wife Yasmin and burnt her alive before my eyes on the upper deck," said Abdur Rahim, bursting into tears. Six people were incinerated inside the bus, and a burnt man jumped to his death; two others, including a two-year-old child, died at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
"This sort of incidents (sic) take place before every hartal and you also know the perpetrators," said Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ashraful Huda, careful not to name the Awami League, the opposition at the time, who were destined to be his future boss.
More recently, in January 2015, according to journalist David Bergman, 61 members of the public perished in hartals, most of them burnt to death. On 14th January 2015, for instance, five people were burned alive when a petrol bomb was hurled on a long-haul bus at Jagirhat in Rangpur. This was a blockade, or siege, a variation on hartal, when entire cities are cut off from the rest of the country using violence, usually arson. The bus was torched despite traveling in convoy with 30 other buses under police protection. (Bergman's blog is, among many, blocked in Bangladesh. The reader needs a proxy.)
"We don't do politics. We are common people. Why should we be the victims?" asked Al-Amin, a survivor. "If they wanted to torch the bus for political reasons, they could have done that after getting the passengers out of the bus. Why did they attack common people like us?"
On February 2, 2016, again a bust was set ablaze in Chouddagram in Comilla, burning alive seven people and injuring around 26 passengers. This time, a case was filed against the leader of the opposition, Khaleda Zia. In court, her lawyer alleged that the arsonists had been ruling-party leaders out to ruin the image of his client. Of course, neither of the two Begums (ladies) had been anywhere near the scene of the crime (they never are, having devoted followers to do their noisome deeds), so it's her word against the other's. Both of them are perfectly capable of ordering such attacks: they have evil dispositions.
In South Asia, we don't identify with black people in America: we are brown outside, white inside ("coconuts"). During the Sepoy Mutiny, it was the English-speaking babus who took the British side. Outgroup favouritism (coined by Jim Sidanius, a - black - social psychologist) has been the hallmark of our behaviour ever since.
"In any town in India," writes George Orwell in Burmese Days (1934), "the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. It was doubly so in this case, for it was the proud boast of Kyauktada Club that, almost alone of Clubs in Burma, it had never admitted an Oriental to membership." Thus, Orwell gives brick-and-mortar shape to the psychology of the ruler-ruled relationship that was the Raj, where a couple of hundred thousand British soldiers controlled teeming millions.
Dr. Veraswami befriends our anti-hero, Flory, and urges the latter to let him join the Club to escape the machinations of U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada.
"And you do not know what prestige it gives to an Indian to be a member of the European Club. In the Club, practically he iss a European," observes the good doctor. The members naturally object to having a 'n-word' in their midst. "He's asking us to break all our rules and take a dear little n-word-boy into this Club."
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