Gowher rizvi biography of mahatma gandhi

Of all the back-of-the-beyond places I’ve visited on the Subcontinent, the most unusual are the so-called “enclaves” along the India-Bangladesh border. They are little parcels of Indian or Bangladeshi territory that are wholly enclosed by the territory of the other country. A little bit of history on how they came into being:

The Raja of Cooch Behar and the Nawab of Rangpur, the rulers of two minor kingdoms that faced each other near the Teesta River, staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits — pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost — back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur to Bangladesh — including the people who lived on the two kings’ 162 “chit mahals,” or paper palaces. Their villages, caught on the wrong side of the border, are now small islands of India surrounded by Bangladesh or vice versa.

The enclaves, along with many of the other border issues between India and Bangladesh had been the subject of diplomatic discussion for years, and at the time I visited, officials of the Border Security Force, who have the unenviable job of policing this porous boundary, did not expect much progress.

Amazingly, this issue looks like it will finally be resolved. India and Bangladesh are expected to sign an agreement exchanging the territories, the obvious common sense solution, during the visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Dhaka next week.  This small diplomatic victory has no doubt been helped by the seriousness of the people involved: Shivshankar Menon, India’s national security advisor, for whom rationalizing this border is an important step in controlling the flow of arms, militants and counterfeit currency into India; Gowher Rizvi, a brilliant political scientist who has been advising the Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina on foreign affairs; and

This is a review of an academic article by Ali Gowher (aka Gowher Rizvi), who is the International affairs Adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh. I strongly believe Rizvi’s partisan vies and unsubstantiated assertions have marred the quality of the academic exercise. Had Mujib’s Soviet-style one-party dictatorship (the BAKSAL regime) survived a decade or so, what is Bangladesh today in terms of having an unelected, brutal and corrupt one-party dictatorship under Mujib’s daughter Hasina since 2014 could be a déjà vu moment for the country because we all would have revisited BAKSAL tyranny under Hasina! No wonder, Gowher Rizvi, who was a passionate admirer of Mujib’s one-party dictatorship, is serving the Hasina regime with no remorse or guilt. Hence the importance of this review of Rizvi’s old but not irrelevant article, today!

For the overwhelming majority of East Bengalis in March 1971, establishing the popular will of the people or democracy was the main rationale behind their demand for independent Bangladesh. And that had General Yahya Khan respected democracy by transferring power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the majority party Awami League, there would have been no Bangladesh, definitely not in 1971. However, Bangladesh has enjoyed very little democracy since its emergence, even under elected civilian governments. When Mujib returned to liberated Bangladesh in January 1972 from a Pakistani prison, the war-ravaged country was in a very bad shape. His administration had a Herculean task to rebuild the country. Even bare survival and sustenance of bulk of the population were very difficult. As Gowher Rizvi writes in 1976: “[While] there was no gold reserve in the State Bank: the country embarked upon its independent career with only 12-pound sterling in the vaults of the Reserve Bank”; and the problems of acut

Dear Gowher:

In hindsight, I think I should have written this letter ten years back, days after you became the International Affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. I am sorry, I failed miserably to perform my duty as a friend towards a very good old friend on time. I should have advised you what I thought and still think would be a good piece of advice to someone who was going in the wrong direction. I know, it’s too late to write this letter when you have already reached that undesirable place, and not only that, you are also enjoying the place and everything about it. You have virtually become inseparable from the place and your associates who live there.

However, I strongly believe that your associates – I won’t call them your friends, because friends are selfless well-wishers, which they are not. They are simply fortune-diggers, delusional, power-drunk people, who can do anything –actually they are doing everything – to remain in their paradise. I am so sad to tell this bluntly on your face, your presence has actually emboldened them to remain there in the main ally of power. They are possibly telling themselves: “If Dr. Rizvi can do it, we all should do it with greater vigour and determination”!

Why I think I should have written this letter soon after you stepped on the stairs of the fake citadel of glory, as I believe what Umar bin-Khattab, the second Caliph of Islam said about one good quality of a good friend: “Whosoever shows you your faults is your friend. Those that pay you lip service in praise are your executioners!” Sorry, I was delusional as I thought soon you would regret with utmost remorse about what you were going to do! Sorry for my naiveté
and stupidity!

Before I spell out the purpose of this letter – which in no way is an attempt to take you out from the place which has become your permanent abode and haven, where the bartender offers the best of drinks, apparently free of any charges!

MY JERICHO

From West Bengal to Jericho

This meeting was held on March 06, 2019

The drastic and dramatic events of 1971 in which East Pakistan became Bangladesh are well known: the flood, the Awami League election victory, Sheikh Mujib’s declaration of independence, the onslaught of the Pakistani army, flight of ten million refugees.

Professor Gowher Rizvi, who lived through these “gruesome” events as a young student in Dacca (Dhaka), recalled seeing bodies in the street and that four of his own teachers were killed as the Pakistani army targeted intellectuals.

The whole thing happened, it transpired, to preserve Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomatic ‘back-channel’’ through Pakistan to China.

India intervened, Bangladesh achieved independence. Which only goes to show you are better off having Indira Gandhi and George Harrison on your team (she was shot, he was stabbed) rather than Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung.

Gowher Rizvi has spent 23 years in Oxford, at Trinity College then Nuffield as well as another decade in Bangladesh. When he returned his daughter, who had been a student here, recommended Jericho.

“There is not very much you can’t like about it. I do not think anything can surpass Oxford. It has become more cosmopolitan in the time I have known it.”

His father had become a member of the ‘heaven-born’ Indian Civil Service during the period British rule in 1938. Gowher Rizvi attended a military public school.

In 1952/53 they were still studying the Geography of the British Isles and English History, taught by Catholic priests. In the colonial-style school the headmaster was a New Zealander and the boys played rugby.

“I saw the fag-end of Empire’s academic life. The tutors emphasised objectivity – but in a very subjective way.”

At Oxford, the Indian Majlis, founded as a gathering for Indian students in the 1920s, became the South Asian Majlis. He overlapped with Benazir Bhutto: “she was younger”.

She was blown up. Her father