“I ain’t indigenous” – reflection of a Bengali

July 28, 2011

Once upon a time, the British called us ‘blacks’, and then later the Pakistani Army called us ‘inferior race.’ Time passes, it is 2011. As International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples approaches again this year, Bangladesh is stuck in a quicksand ditch trying to figure out ‘who’ the Adibashis or indigenous of our land really are in the first place! This goes back to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party era, when ministers were first heard saying “Bangladesh has no indigenous people”, but somehow that ideology has leaked into a few heads in the Awami League as well (we hope they are the minority within the party).

Wasfia NazreenJuly 5, 2011bangladeshComment

Of hippos and endangered indigenous denizens

June 21, 2011

On 19 June 2011 a national English daily reported that our honourable State Minister for Environment and Forests, Dr Hasan Mahmud, is planning to introduce hippopotami, imported from Africa, into the Kaptai Lake area of Rangamati, in the semi-autonomous region of Chittagong Hill Tracts.

The Minister, who got the idea during a recent visit to Kenya, was reported as saying, “if we can have hippos in the Kaptai Lake, it will draw many tourists and add a new species to our biodiversity.”

Wasfia NazreenJune 21, 2011Comment

No god, no refuge, no New Year for the indigenous of Bangladesh

April 26, 2011

Water drenched, tropical sweat-soaked while celebrating Songkrant festival just north of Chiang Mai, Thailand, my phone started getting clogged with alarming news coming from the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Another arson attack, another settler versus indigenous clash and henceforth more deaths, another authority-backed violent incident in our country, another media outcry that doesn’t tell all the stories.

Wasfia NazreenApril 26, 2011Comment

Including the Excluded

Nov, 2010

RAJA DEVASISH ROY & WASFIA NAZREEN

There are several reasons why so many of our citizens have been deprived of their basic human rights, which are called fundamental rights in our constitution. For those who happened to come from the “wrong” class, gender, ethnicity or religious group, those rights remained in name only. Worse still, if they happened to be members of religious and ethnic minority groups that do not have Bengali as their mother tongue (read Adibashis), they were even lower down in the rungs of the rights-access ladder.

Wasfia NazreenNovember 6, 2010Comment