Parade-Charade
By Sahana Ghosh (National University of Singapore)
This essay is part of a Vital Topics Forum on “Geopolitical Lives”
After almost two years of a tense lull between India and Bangladesh, with the relentless targeting of “Bangladeshi illegal migrants” in India and bilateral visits canceled by Bangladesh, friendship (maitree) is in the air, laced though it may be with the sounds of protest and the smell of tear gas.
The year 2021 was saturated with declarations and displays of the close friendship between India and Bangladesh by leaders of the two neighboring nations. On January 26, 2021, India observed its 74th Republic Day, with the Bangladeshi Army as its guest of honor. A 122-member marching contingent and band joined in the national parade in New Delhi, a fact prominently highlighted in media coverage of the event (see video above). This is only the second time in independent India that a foreign contingent has taken part in India’s Republic Day parade.
Two months later, on March 26, Sheikh Haseena, the prime minister of Bangladesh, hosted Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, as the guest of honor at Bangladesh’s 50th anniversary of liberation, alongside the ceremonial inauguration of the centenary celebrations of the birth of the nation’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Figure 1).
In these national parades and historical commemorations, audiences have been treated to and tutored in the sights and sounds of, insistently, friendly relations in a region beset with enmity, mistrust, and war among neighbors. If friendship is the ideal form of regional geopolitics in contemporary South Asia, what is its substance, and whose desires does it encompass?
Rather than challenging or critiquing the claims of closeness and friendship, as important protests have, I dwell on the figuration and substantiation of regional geopolitics. This essay is an invitation to think about public rituals as not only reflections of the geopolitical, already settled and elsewhere, but constitutive of it. How can we think about its affective charge, its claims, its excesses, staged in the name of geopolitics?
An anthropological lens constitutes the geopolitical as a multiscalar set of performances, produced and made tangible by a range of actors and in a number of surprising sites. An anthropology of geopolitics is interested in the “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004) through which relations of power are managed over time. Friendship, this essay suggests, is a geopolitical affective economy, maintained in contemporary South Asia through militarism.
Regional Geopolitics as Friendship
Rituals of national commemoration have been richly studied as volatile sites for performing state sovereignty, for cultivating national identity and feeling, and for “staging” the nation (Mookherjee 2011; Roy 2007; Steedly 2013). They are also minefields of authorized history (Chowdhury 2021). But if these consolidate the inside stuff of the nation-state, what of its relation to the outsides, its place in the world?
One aspect of grand commemorative events that has rarely been attended to are the ways in which they stage geopolitical relations for national and regional audiences. I follow Naoko Shimazo’s (2004, 231) call to attend to the “performance of pageantry,” which she models in her important essay studying diplomacy as theatre in the staging of the Bandung conference of 1955. Iterations of the region, bilateral relations, and a particular nation-state’s standing and alliances in the world at a particular political-historical juncture are vital aspects of the “nation branding” (Al-Bulushi 2019) that is staged at these events. If maitree is the theme song of regional geopolitics, for India and Bangladesh, it appears to reconcile to the tune of militarism.
In postcolonial India, the official celebration of Republic Day in New Delhi is marked by a parade consisting of tableaux showcasing the nation’s cultural diversity while celebrating its unity. While the cultural diversity is represented by ethnic and racial stereotypes of tribes and other marginal groups, the unity is unmistakably present as the military might of the state.[1] This might is exhibited through displays on air and on ground—fighter jets speeding to impress, camels in a straight line, female soldiers performing daredevil feats, and elite commandos clad in black in the sky—to leave nothing to the imagination of what India can afford and accomplish with its ever-growing security expenditures. Over the decades, the invited guest leader signals the geopolitical coalitions of the times: from the Non-Aligned Movement to the ASEAN ties.[2]
But 2021 is no ordinary year for national pride, and even the most regular rituals of national commemoration have had to be recalibrated. India’s Republic Day parade is staged, with no foreign leader present and despite an ongoing farmer protest, historical in scale and resolve, that stages its own parade with tractors and an alternative vision of solidarity. The presence of the Bangladeshi Army as chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebration is heralded by pundits as the coming of age of Bangladesh as an “equal partner” to its neighbor. The last time that Indian and Bangladeshi soldiers marched—and fought—together was in 1971, during Bangladesh’s liberation war. Today’s armed forces in Bangladesh have their origins in that historical Mukti Bahini that, as India never fails to remind the world, and especially Bangladesh, received arms and training from India.[3]
For this foundational gift of friendship and recognition as sovereign, India counts on commanding an eternal debt of gratitude. This is the basis of a particular shared understanding of a long-term geopolitical relationship that, as the Bangladeshi foreign minister recently described by distinguishing it from their relationship with China, is not simply “strategic” but “historic.” Military triumph is not only foundational to this friendship, but its historical terms of cooperation set the conditions for the elasticity of this relationship. As with unequal partners in any cooperation, the visions and narrations of militarism-as-friendship are thus bound to be radically different.
At Bangladesh’s celebrations of the 50th year of liberation, elaborate multimedia presentations of the historical development of the Army, Navy, and Air Force are present alongside one of the nation’s crowning glories: its contributions to UN peacekeeping operations. Images of uniformed Bangladeshi women deployed in conflicts across the world attest to the modernity and ability of Bangladeshis to serve with and exceed regional counterparts in noteworthy geopolitical events. This is live broadcast for a domestic audience, a significant diaspora worldwide, and the political leaders of neighboring states. Modernity and sovereignty as militarism, and a particularly gendered version of global competence, is the point staged.
Sovereignty by military might is not the only lesson to be learned at national parades. While the official state version is grandly staged and televised for all to watch, citizens are invited to participate in their own versions of rituals of national commemoration—hoisting flags, marching, singing patriotic songs, staging iconic tableaux, and so on. These commemorative rituals, then, are deeply pedagogic tools: to authorize singular nationalist histories and to disseminate versions of regional history and ties that center respective nationalist narratives. A brazen example of the latter was Narendra Modi’s narration (in Hindi to a Bengali-speaking audience) of the Indian version of 1971 at Bangladesh’s independence celebrations. For Bangladesh, 1971 of course represents the sovereign triumph of the nation and its people over the genocidal Pakistani state and armed forces while, in the Indian nationalist narrative, 1971 is the India-Pakistan war in which India triumphed on both eastern and western fronts.[4] It is within this frame that Indian troops played a heroic role in assisting Bangladeshi freedom fighters to win the war against the Pakistani Army on the eastern front.
Sheikh Rehana and Sheikh Haseena receiving the Gandhi Peace Prize from Narendra Modi, awarded posthumously to Sheikh Mujib. (Press Information Department, Bangladesh)
In a picture dense with symbolism, Modi is dressed in a Mujib coat, awarding the Gandhi Peace Prize posthumously to Sheikh Mujib, received by his daughters Rehana and Haseena.[5] Modi, in his speech, also proclaimed that “today in Bangladesh, the blood of those who fought for their freedom and that of Indian soldiers is flowing side by side” to assert a blood-based kinship with Bangladesh.[6] The paternalism in this imagery is hard to miss, especially when coupled with the affective charge of heteropatriarchal and fraternal kinship invoked to supersede the language of strategic friendship or allyship typically associated with the realm of geopolitics. Viewing geopolitics anthropologically, the filaments of its relationships come into view. Parsed in terms of such relationships—whether friends, kin, or friends like kin—each have to work out their versions of their shared histories in order to authorize the terms of their partnership in the present and for the future.
Ritual demonstrations of this geopolitical friendship are routed/rooted in yet another lesson: that of a common enemy, Pakistan and Islam. Enmity is a vital drive for the affective economy of friendship in regional geopolitics. For India, the friendship with its Muslim-majority eastern neighbor is riddled with anxieties about its distinction and distance from Pakistan. For Bangladesh, radical Islam—now too easily made synonymous with Pakistani influence—is the internal enemy that can be Othered in racial, gendered, and sexual terms (Siddiqi 2019). It is illiberal and out of time and has no place in the aspirational secular modernity.
Meanwhile, friendship works through multiple pedagogies. Human rights activists keep count of deaths of unarmed civilians in the borderlands courtesy of the Indian Border Security Force, and Bangladeshi civil society groups protest the inequality of this friendship where, for instance, India has privileged access to Bangladesh territory and markets for trade and transit while failing to deliver on water-sharing agreements on the numerous transborder rivers critical to the agrarian life of Bangladesh. As the list of these conflicts runs on, the governments of India and Bangladesh regularly confirm their relationship as understanding friends through coordinated border security plans and football matches and cycle rallies between their security forces. It is tempting to dismiss these as hypocritical and superficial. But that would be to gloss over the powerful ways in which these enactments of friendship foreclose critique in the present by asserting a temporality that reaches backward to the foundational moment of 1971 and forward into a future onto which one can always project the unfulfilled desires of the present.
Friendship’s inherent possibility to encompass disagreement is harnessed to elide dissonances between the ground realities and the spectacles at the center. While this is a bipartisan political stance for India, affirming and preserving its historical role as Bangladesh’s benefactor, for an Awami League government in Bangladesh, this consolidates its nationalist narrative of independence within domestic politics and leadership for Bangladesh in the region.
Geopolitics is typically synonymous with the high politics of international relations. Taking geopolitics out of closed-door meetings with high-backed chairs and reimagining the geopolitical anthropologically instead as a set of performances—where speech exceeds singular meanings and relies on gendered affects and promiscuous histories—makes its improvised, unstable, and incomplete nature visible and open to social and cultural analysis. Zooming in on friendship and friendliness allows us to grapple with the promises and the erasures, the hegemonies and hierarchies, the elasticity and the power of such affective politics. Moreover, it opens up the questions of where is the geopolitical at play and who its actors and audiences are as themselves matters of great contestation.
References Cited
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Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2019. “#SomeoneTellCNN: Cosmopolitan Militarism in the East African Warscape.” Cultural Dynamics 31 (4): 323–49.
Chowdhury, Nusrat Sabina. 2021. “A Second Coming: The Specular and the Spectacular 50 Years On: 28.” South Asia Chronicle 10:31–58.
Gupta, Akhil. 1992. “The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism.” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 63–79.
Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2011. “The Aesthetics of Nations: Anthropological and Historical Approaches.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17:S1–20.
Prashad, Vijay. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
Roy, Srirupa. 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Siddiqi, Dina M. 2019. “Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: ‘Muslim’ Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (20).
Shimazu, Naoko. 2014. “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955.” Modern Asian Studies 48 (1): 225–52.
Steedly, Mary Margaret. 2013. Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tripathi, Salil. 2016. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Notes
[1] See Roy (2007) for a detailed analysis of India’s Republic Day parades.
[2] For a transnational history of the Non-Aligned Movement and, more broadly, the decades in which the coalitions of the Third World project were imagined and made possible, see Prashad (2007). Akhil Gupta (1992), in an essay parsing the different forms of nationalism and spatial inscriptions entailed in the NAM and the European community, writes that for the Third World nation-states, the cultural politics and geopolitics of the NAM were intrinsically connected to nationalism and anticolonialism. He notes the paradox of the NAM, where “nationalism should need transnationalism to protect itself.”
[3] Mukti Bahini, literally meaning Freedom Army, is how the Bangladeshi guerrilla fighters were referred to in the Liberation War of 1971. Gen Osmani, the chief, led a diverse group of defecting soldiers from the East Pakistan Rifles, police, paramilitary forces, and thousands of civilians in this name. The Mukti Bahini received shelter, training, arms, and other kinds of support from the Indian government. See Tripathi (2016) for an account.
[4] The stakes and forms of these ongoing tensions were debated at a landmark conference: https://mcusercontent.com/f21bad6708d7560d53ea321fa/files/56b007b8-fa58-fccb-b022-d44ab903fa96/Copy_of_War_Violence_and_Memory_2_.pdf
[5] The particular style of black coat worn here by Modi is iconic and known as the “Mujib coat,” reproduced in imagery of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as well as widely worn by male Bangladeshi politicians. See Chowdhury (2021) for a fulsome discussion of political mimesis and iconicity in Bangladesh.
[6] This is not factually incorrect. As Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, announced in a radio address on December 3, “Pakistan has launched a full-scale war on us. . . . Today a war in Bangladesh has become a war on India,” and, indeed, Indian soldiers and officers died in that war. What is noteworthy in the timing and performance of Modi’s speech here is the production and reminder of these sacrifices as coeval at the commemoration of Bangladesh’s foundational event.
Cite As
Ghosh, Sahana. 2022. “Parade-Charade.” American Anthropologist website, August 4.