TURMOIL TIMES: (Top) Politically aware students at Dhaka University and Fakhruddin Ahmed, head of the interim government

They sit on the floor in front of the canteen in Dhaka University, cradling their over-boiled cups of tea between the palms of their hands, talking about this and that, between classes that don’t begin or which they bunk with the supreme confidence of an aimless generation. Boys in jeans, girls in salwar kameez and small pieces of fake jewellery, looking down in the well brought-up Bengali way but still smiling at the boys with their kohl-lined eyes. There’s enough emotion in the little seated group to launch a hit Bollywood film or two.

Meet Dhaka’s Rang de Basanti generation. All sociology students, mostly from out of town, they are keenly aware of the political upheaval taking place around them in Bangladesh.

There’s one more thing that binds them together, tighter than the glue of their still-awakening passion for each other and for what they believe they must do, one day, inshallah, for their country. This is their love for Hindi films, or more specifically, Aamir Khan’s Rang de Basanti.

“I saw the film eight times,” says Sazol, his light frame trembling with emotion. “And each time, I cried,” he adds without a trace of embarrassment. I look at him in surprise. “Yes, I too am not afraid to die for my country.”

Sazol said he wanted to be a cop, not a soldier in the Bangladeshi army, with the opportunity to go abroad as a UN peacekeeper and earn real, American dollars. (It was said the Army would never impose martial law in Bangladesh but continue to back the Fakhruddin Ahmed caretaker government, that under UN rules Bangladeshi soldiers could not become UN peacekeepers, a major source of income for thousands of people. It was also said that an officer could earn as much as Taka 30 lakh, or Rs 20 lakh, on a three-year assignment as a UN peacekeeper abroad.)

After his degree, Sazol wanted to become a proper policeman back home, so that he could make a real difference to the everyday quality of life in the village.

But what of the Army-backed political revolution currently taking place in Bangladesh, more dramatic than anything celluloid could ever produce? For starters, the arrest of Tarique Rahman, son of none other than former prime minister Khaleda Zia and the most powerful man in all of Bangladesh, on charges of extorting about Rs 70 lakh from a local construction company. This was a man who ran a parallel government during his mother’s prime ministership until three months ago. Stories about him were legion, including contacts with India’s underworld don Dawood Ibrahim.

The students knew it all. They despised Tarique and everyone else like him, across the political spectrum, for corrupting “aamar sonar Bangla (my golden Bangladesh).” They fully applauded the army-backed political revolution currently taking place. All of them needed to be severely punished, whether it was Tarique, former health minister Khandakar Mosharraf Hossain, or former BNP lawmaker Mosaddek Falu, said to be very close to Khaleda.

Just then another boy walks into the semi-circle. “My father was like them too,” he says. “My father was corrupt, just like all these corrupt men who stole from the poor.” A silence falls between the group. But how did he get to know? The silence begins to grow and grow. “I asked my mother, she told me. I didn’t have the courage to ask my father.”

Elsewhere in Dhaka, too, you encounter the same searching, gritty honesty about life on the edge that is now searching for answers. The city’s newspapers seem to have swallowed large quantities of the truth pill, considering the regurgitation the morning after. Fakhruddin Ahmed, a former World Bank officer, has unleashed the Anti-Corruption Commission, while army chief, Lt Gen. Moeen U. Ahmed, vows to cleanse the place. The triumvirate of the press, the caretaker government and the army is at last a formidable one.

Already, scores of leaders from both the BNP and the Awami League have been arrested, along with bureaucrats and engineers, doctors and lawyers, all those who had made themselves rich by stealing from the poor. The passports of nearly 200 people have been taken away so that they can’t flee the country. Buildings are being pulled down in the heart of Dhaka, because they were found to have used relief material meant for the poor.

Former housing minister Mirza Abbas gave away a two-bigha piece of land, meant for a children’s park in Dhaka, to his brothers and sisters. Over 100 corrugated iron sheets have been seized from a non-governmental organisation run by the wife of former BNP minister Tariqul Islam in Jessore. The bank accounts of former law minister Moudud Ahmed, one of the most powerful men in Bangladesh, have been frozen. A former BNP state minister is being charged because he was found to have 132 flats in Dhaka .

Bangladesh has turned itself into a nation of voyeurs. Every detail about the misdeeds of the rich and famous is hungrily absorbed: Khaleda’s political secretary Harris Chowdhury not only had two peacocks in his house but also an SUV costing $50,000. Mosaddek Falu, allegedly with a finger in every contract, had a penchant for spotted deer. The animals have since been sent to the Dhaka zoo.

Beneath this massive churning, life somehow goes on as usual. At the La Vinci hotel in Kawran Bazaar, a live band is churning out popular English songs. Young men and women are drinking at the bar — although, by law, Bangladeshi Muslims are only allowed to drink if they buy a licence, which allows them to do so for “health reasons.” Of course there are thousands of such licences all over the city.

So does my Rang de Basanti group at Dhaka University approve of alcohol? Predictably, the replies are mixed. Overwhelmingly, though, they believe that good Muslims cannot be defined by what they eat, drink and wear. Certainly, I saw no purdah on the university campus, and very few in the rest of the city.

It’s time now to cross-question me, an Indian journalist from “Dilli” (“is ‘Dilli’ a clean city?” “What is ‘Dilli’ really like?”), about this enormous giant of a country next door called India and its singular inability to understand the crises of identities of neighbours such as Bangladesh.

Ramzan, in his direct, disarming way has asked, “Why is India against us?”

What Ramzan wants to know, of course, is why, according to the Bangladesh press, New Delhi arm-twisted Dhaka into signing an unfavourable Ganga waters treaty during Sheikh Hasina’s regime in 1997 (“The Padma river near my village, once huge, has been reduced to a rivulet,” complains Sazol), or why trigger-happy BSF soldiers kill innocent Bangladeshis across the border every other day, or why ‘Dilli’ refuses to give duty-free access to Bangladeshi goods… or why…

It is a litany, to be sure. Still, I agree, that “Dilli” has been unable to explain its message to Bangladesh, actually since the time both countries fought together for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. Clearly, since the days of the Mukti Bahini and until Rang de Basanti, it seems as if New Delhi and Dhaka have been talking past each other.

Clearly, too, if relations are not worse than they are, it is because people like Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan –— and former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu — are also Indian.

In fact, Bangladeshis, otherwise fiercely Bengali, even speak a faltering Hindi today, as distinguished from the hated Urdu of their Pakistani oppressors. “It is because of our freedom-fighters who defeated Pakistan that we speak our native language, Bengali, today,” says Sazol. The group readily admits that the “Pakistani oppression” is something they have only read or heard about, not experienced first-hand. However, they believe it to be completely true.

The last word belongs to Preity, the only Hindu girl in the group. “We refuse to speak Urdu because it was the language of the Pakistani state,” she says. “We speak some Hindi because we love watching Hindi movies and the saas-bahu Indian TV serials every evening. That is the difference.”