Anonymous people and the insidious logic of petrol bomb terror

POLITICAL violence is as old as the memory of our nationhood stretches back. Between the rise and fall of regimes, what appears again and again is the cycle of political violence. Given this habitual co-existence with violence, it is all too easy for us to take the recent petrol bomb phenomenon as a continuous chapter in the rather darkly illustrated history of political violence. Such a generalisation, however justified, glosses over the insidious logic of this petrol bomb phenomenon. The logic of the petrol bomb terror, as I will try to show below, registers a qualitative break from the previous forms of political violence. 

There is something extraordinary about the widespread attacks on public transportation across the country. With the risk of simplifying it, it could be argued that the ordinary forms of political violence have a palpable object -- they erupt over evident contests over interests. In quotidian life, the clash among political factions and parties over the control of institutions subjects ordinary citizens to violence and suffering. Granted, the terror involved in, say, taking siege of residential halls or forcefully extracting money from businessmen, result in obvious cases of political violence. However, while the victims of such politically-grounded violence suffer in multiple ways, the logic behind ordinary political violence revolves around the questions of interests and power. In other words, these forms of commonplace political violence are primarily a result of the clash over power and material interests, while the mass public is the necessary collateral damage of such violent processes. In contrast, the public is no longer the collateral damage, but the very target of the petrol bomb attacks. The anonymous people, to put it simply, are chosen as victims precisely because of their identity as the public. Most political violence in our recent history happened on the basis of group-identity. Curiously enough, the targets of petrol bombs are neither singled out because of their specific socio-cultural identity nor are they chosen on the basis of their political affiliation. Their identity, as it were, is the very absence of any specific identity. The other name of this apparently nameless entity is the people, or what we call janata in Bangla. 

The choice of public transportation is significant both for practical and symbolic reasons. In a city like Dhaka where public space is quickly dwindling, streets and public transportations are the crucial spaces that bring together strangers and generate images of 'publicness.' It is no exaggeration to say that streets and public transportation symbolise the very idea of the public. Not surprisingly, public transportations on the streets have been a site of political intervention for quite some time. Hartal, for example, is a political strategy that seeks to mount pressure on the authority by way of keeping the vehicles off the streets (forcefully or not). During hartal, the political activists often choose to vandalise vehicles with the aim of reinforcing the strike. Yet, despite this formal similarity, it would be mistaken to compare hartal-related violence with the petrol bomb attacks. Vandalism associated with hartal generally targets vehicles, not the passengers inside them. In addition, hartal violence is often for the sake of forcefully reinforcing strike -- it is not necessarily violence for the sake of violence. On the contrary, petrol bombs are directly aimed at the helpless passengers called the people. To an extent, the petrol bomb attacks are violence for the sake of it.

Historically, streets are at the forefront of all sorts of politics in Bangladesh. Whether it is a mass movement or an inter-political-party contest, the contention inevitably spills over to the street. And this is understandable. Given the weak nature of our political institutions, streets are the most significant sites of political mobilisation and pressure-generation. The politics of occupying streets often gets violent, resulting in forceful intimidation of the public. Even in 2006, when the political order faced a problem akin to the contemporary one, the then-opposition party, Awami League, attempted to force the government to accept their demands by way of occupying the streets, however forcefully. The BNP and other oppositional parties -- perhaps owing both to the authoritarian grip of the present government and their failure to effectively mobilise activists so as to take control of the streets -- are failing to provide any semblance of popular legitimacy to their protest. The resultant vacuum has taken an insidious trajectory. Instead of building the oppositional movement on and around the street, the oppositional elements have chosen to attack the street and the public who occupy them. This development is as anti-democratic as it can get. I conclude with such a bold statement for two reasons. 

Firstly, this petrol bomb strategy is seeking to destabilise the ruling order not by confronting the regime itself, but by way of attacking the mass public with terroristic means. Secondly, this strategy amounts to nothing but a desire to destroy the political agency that the people hold. The underlying strategy that informs the petrol bomb phenomenon is not difficult to discern. The petrol bomb violence, and the fearful environment it is giving birth to, is expected to produce a situation that facilitates interventions from extra-political actors. This underlying direction registers a profound distrust not so much in the ruling regime, but rather in the people themselves. This is the most terrifying flame of the disastrous petrol bomb fire. The images of the burnt bodies of the victims are haunting enough. But the anti-people logic of the petrol bomb phenomenon is going to leave an even deeper scar in our already disfigured democratic body. 

Mired in this intricate situation, the government is taking recourse to the brute forces that can never address the political crisis at the heart of the problem. Mirroring the opposition party, the government is effectively failing to garner any political legitimacy from the people who themselves have become the new target of terror. Nothing can be more shameful for a democratic polity than the act of appealing to a higher authority that is not the people. Worse still, the petrol bomb phenomenon is making room for the extra-political authorities by attacking the people themselves. This is a grim instance in our political history. The law enforcement forces are not going to rescue us from this political nightmare. What is needed is the subversion of the inherent political logic of the petrol bomb phenomenon, a task that can only be accomplished in the very name of the nameless targets of petrol bombs.

The writer is a PhD student in Political Theory at the University of Chicago.