Subversion Of Democracy
In BangladeshBy Taj Hashmi
20 September, 2006
Countercurrents.orgWinston Churchill, known for his arrogance and colonial hangover, once observed that there could be no democracy in the East of Suez. However, there is nothing axiomatic about Churchill’s aphorism that no democracy could flourish in the orient. He did not blame geography but held the “enduring” political culture of the orient responsible for the promotion of “Oriental Despotism”, in the Hegelian-Marxian sense of the expression. However, there is nothing permanent about any culture. As democracy does not sustain itself only in the occident, so is there nothing so typical about “Oriental Despotism” either.
The raison d’etre for Bangladesh lay in the Bengali assertion for their democratic rights in erstwhile united Pakistan. One wonders as to why the country has turned into a dysfunctional democracy. It is also the most corrupt country, consecutively for the last five years. It has virtually become an arena of political rivalry between the successors of two dead patriarchs, Mujib and Zia. They are competing against each other to run their own version of “democracy” or dynastic oligarchy. Meanwhile, analysts differ if the country has already turned into a “failed state”, or on the verge of becoming one.
General strikes, road blocking, setting fire to public transport, rioting and police brutality are common. Boycott of the Parliament by opposition members and their demanding the resignation of the elected government are frequent. Declaring people, including the Prime Minister, persona non grata or “undesirable” by local political stalwarts in their localities is not uncommon. The lack of respect for democracy is so pervasive that even elected vice chancellors or deans of public universities frequently face demands for their removal, sometimes within days after the elections.
Democracy is a modern concept, developed in the West following the Renaissance, Geographical Discoveries, Reformation, Industrial Revolution and political revolutions in Europe and America. It is a post-feudal capitalist institution. Pre-modern Bangladesh with strong feudal / colonial hangover cannot fully adapt itself to any of the above ideologies. “Then what about India, Sri Lanka or the Philippines?” one may interject. The answer is simple: ongoing socio-economic and political process under the right leadership may perform miracles. One should not forget about the positive impact of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, which delivered modernism, and eventually democracy, to the people. Unfortunately, Bangladesh did not get visionary leaders having respect for democracy, totally disengaging themselves from the civil or military vested interest groups. A functional democracy also requires a strong middle class, urbanization and mass literacy.Ever since the restoration of democracy in 1991 in the wake of the overthrow of Ershad, who ran one of the most corrupt military regimes a la Marcos style, four rounds of parliamentary elections failed to legitimize the elected governments in the eyes of the Opposition. The irony is that for the sake of fairness, “caretaker governments” conducted these polls. The main opposition parties since 1991 are not only rejecting the polls as “rigged”, hence unacceptable, but they are also portraying people associated with the caretaker government, the majority party and its leaders as conspirators, liars, murderers and foreign agents.
Of late, the BNP-led Coalition and the Opposition are at loggerheads over the modus operandi for “fair and neutral” elections due in January 2007. The Opposition demands a totally modified “caretaker” system, removal of the “pro-Coalition” Chief Election Commissioner and a fresh voter-list, for alleged anomalies in the present one. The Coalition is not agreeable to these demands. The upshot is total uncertainty about the elections.
Why is democracy faltering in the country, which is no stranger to the institution? One may cite the absence of good leadership and degenerating political culture of the people responsible for the problem. It is indeed quite puzzling that Bengalis held smooth elections in the past without having any “caretaker” government. The elections of 1937, 1946, 1954 and 1970 played historic roles in the formation of Bangladesh. Since the overthrow of Ershad in 1990, it seems nothing can guarantee polls acceptable to all and a government legitimate to everyone.
The institution of democracy in Bangladesh, paradoxically, is a creation of British colonial rule. The British wanted the transformation of the restive and violent “pre-political” masses into civil, orderly and “political” through democracy. And the first step in this regard was holding elections at the local levels. The colonial government wanted the masses to consider the elected legislators, not government officials, as their representatives. This is reflected in a government Report (1918): “Eventually it will dawn upon him [Indian] … that because he has a vote he has the means of protecting himself …. He has at his command better weapon than the lathi or the hatchet with which to redress his wrongs [Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, pp.120-21].”
Subsequently people in colonial and post-colonial Bengal gradually turned into “political” by shunning “pre-political”, violent methods of redressing their grievances against their local exploiters. Their adopting programme-oriented methods for changing the exploitative system signalled the beginning of democracy. So, democracy is not only all about holding free and fair elections but it is also a process of empowerment for the grassroots. However, as civil and military autocracy shattered people’s faith in “political” methods and democracy, one may find the British colonial rule (during the 1930s and 1940s) more benign and democratic than what prevails in Bangladesh today.
The way Bangladesh came into being has something to do with its problematic leadership quality and the evaporation of democratic values and culture. The country came into being:
almost without any plan or preparations on part of the would-be founding fathers;
as a by-product of Pakistani intransigence and brutality rather than an historical inevitability;
through armed struggle mainly by members of the lower middle classes, soldiers, peasants, working classes and students; by supplanting traditional upper and middle classes with petit bourgeois, peasant and lumpen proletariat classes.Consequently the post-Liberation Bangladesh witnessed the unceremonious demise of the not-so-well-entrenched middle classes and their values. After the first generation of petit bourgeois and lumpen elements, who had already amassed huge wealth and property, political clout and power soon after the Liberation, the second generation of their likes is around vying for similar opportunities, which are few and far between; only attainable by the right political connections, not through democracy.
The hyperbolic assertions at the dawn of independence went quite well with the people at the beginning. They believed that Bangladesh was going to be another Switzerland, a land of peace and prosperity. They welcomed the four-pronged state-ideology – Nationalism, Democracy, Socialism and Secularism – sold as “Mujibism”. As bad luck would have it, the people did not enjoy the fruits of “Mujibism”. Gross mismanagement, corruption and nepotism soon demoralized the majority. While hyper inflation and black marketing of essentials wrecked the economy, well-connected vigilante groups and individuals plundered and occupied factories, shops and houses, declared “abandoned” by the state machinery. The government also nationalized the “abandoned” and locally-owned banks, industries and financial companies in the name of socialism. Corruption and lack of managerial skill soon turned these organizations “sick” and total liabilities to the state.
Soon the ruling party polarized the people between pro- and anti-Liberation. The Awami League disinherited its opponents from political favour and state patronage under the very nose of the weak visionary, the founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Not only had those Islamists who collaborated with the Pakistani occupation army felt discriminated against, but pro-Liberation left-oriented people also felt the same. The upshot was the Left-Islamist understanding. Both were opposed to “Mujibism”, although for different reasons. Unlike the pro-Moscow Left, the pro-Chinese Left did not believe in a united front with the nationalist Awami League. It also had strong reservations about glorifying state-acquisition of industries and financial institutions as socialism.
After the military takeover of 1975, pro-Chinese Leftists and Islamists lent support to the civil-military oligarchy under General Zia. And none of them had any commitment to democracy. Although patriotic and visionary, having no political experience and constituency, Zia surrounded himself with people with dubious track record; people having strong revulsion to democracy, secularism and socialism. And having lost faith in all these lofty principles, people started relying on Zia to get the promised self-sufficient, or “Swanirbhar Bangladesh”. People’s survival instinct and disillusion with democracy or any ideology other than religion played important roles in this regard.
With the abrupt killing of Zia in a military putsch and the subsequent military takeover by General Ershad in March 1982, whatever semblance of democracy had existed under Zia disappeared. From the failures of Mujib and Zia, Ershad learnt quite well how to maintain the precarious balance between the military and civil, Islamist and secular oligarchs. He has been the most skilled political acrobat and magician that Bangladesh has ever witnessed. Having no qualms about ethics and morality, his promotion of hedonism and rampant corruption infested the whole polity. He inducted “ultra-left” Kazi Zafar to “ultra-right” Maulana Mannan, and among others, Ataur Rahman Khan, the president of the “Democracy Revival Committee” as his cabinet members. These leaders legitimized dictatorship at the cost of democracy.
The widening gap between the rich and the poor, due to the institutionalized corruption through state enterprises, banks, NGO-business, garment factories, bribery, tax evasion and extortion has adversely affected the polity. On the one hand people have become apathetic to politics and on the other have accepted corruption as a way of life. The bare survival of the fixed income groups, with no illegal means to make a living, has become the main priority for the masses.
Since both the nouveau riche and the lower classes have petit bourgeois and / or rural / peasant background they are nurturing rural and peasant culture. The unprecedented rural-to-urban migration in the recent years has implanted the rural patron-client relationship in the urban areas in the domains of politics, trade, industry, education, sports, culture and even the underworld of criminals. Thus Dhaka has become the largest “Rural City” in the world.
Thus Bangladesh society, having more in common with Ferdinand Tonnies’s gemeinschaft [rural community] rather than with the gesellschaft [urban society], is promoting the politics of faction-ridden, quasi-tribal, village or pre-modern peasant community. Here nothing is free from the gemeinschaft culture, which is “pre-political", violent and fatalist at the same time. Villagers hardly expect much from their superordinates, let alone trust or respect them. Lack of trust and mutual respect for each other are normative in the village community. Peasants in general fight each other, especially their neighbours, over disputed properties, more so in deltaic Bangladesh.
Mostly criminal elements, people with no known source of income, are the new patrons in the arena of politics. And since winning elections at any level – local municipalities or the Parliament – have rich dividends; elections have replaced the share market for investment. The apathetic and marginalized middle classes hardly take part in elections, neither as voters nor as candidates. Thus half-educated people with dubious character get elected through manipulation and literally buying votes of urban squatters, lumpen elements and rural hoi polloi. Mass fear of local “election-mongers”, who in the event of losing an election can resort to violence, has turned democracy farcical.
In retrospect, we find the following factors responsible for the retrogression of governance, civility and well-being of the people in Bangladesh:
· hyper inflation ;
· endemic corruption ;
· systematic degeneration of the education system and
· opportunism of the elite – failure of the welfare state.
A comparative appraisal of the price (of consumer goods) and income (of salaried or wage-earning people) indices of Bangladesh in 2006 with those of 1971 reveals that what one could buy in 1971 with one taka is roughly seventy to one hundred times more expensive in 2006 (the inflation rate being 7,000 to 10,000 per cent). The corresponding incomes of the salaried and wage-earning groups have gone up by ten to fifteen times only, or a rise of 100 to 150 per cent only. The prices of residential blocks of property in prime urban areas since 1971 have gone up by 1,000 to 2,000 times or by an abysmal 100,000 to 200,000 per cent. This means government and private sector employees have to resort to pilfering for bare survival and “robbery” for comfortable living.
According to Samuel Johnson, “patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel”. Bangladesh is infested with such scoundrels. These “patriots” for promoting their vested class interests and cheap popularity among the masses resort to ultra-nationalism or Islamic fanaticism. In the name of promoting Bengali or Bangladeshi nationalism, the Government since 1972 not only abruptly introduced Bengali as the official language but without considering its pros and cons, it overnight allowed Bengali as a medium of instruction at every level. Consequently half-baked university graduates having incomplete access to modern knowledge in any discipline, not available through Bengali, swarmed the job market. They either end up getting low-paid jobs at home, and the “fortunate ones” work as menials, mainly in the Middle East.
Paradoxically, the Government has allowed the mushroom growth of private English-medium schools and universities. Mostly rich children have access to these exorbitantly expensive institutions of learning. And they are cut out to be executives in the small private sector, mainly in financial institutions, NGOs and multi-national companies. What is not so surprising is that elites – political, professional and business – mostly send their children to English-medium schools at home or abroad.
Besides the English- and Bengali-medium schools and colleges, thanks to the philanthropy of local and foreign donors, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, there has been a phenomenal growth in the number of private madrassas or Islamic seminaries – thousands of them by now. These seminaries, following thousand- year-old curricula, produce unemployable / under-employable, alienated and angry graduates; often readily available for terrorist activities in the name of Islam. These angry men, who hate modernism and secularism, are big threats to liberal democracy. The unsettling education system is producing employable, under-employable and unemployable graduates, which does not bode well for democracy. Democracy is a strange bed fellow with poor, backward people.
In short, elite opportunism, dishonesty and inefficiency are at the roots of all evils in the country. Peasantization of the polity, evident from the predominance of patron-client relationship and the associated violence, is the main hindrance to the growth of democracy in Bangladesh. The failure of democracy is a by-product of the failure of the welfare state, the promised Sonar Bangla, or Golden Bengal. Leaders are collectively responsible for its fading away from people’s consciousness.
In sum, it is easier to locate factors retarding the growth of democracy in the country than finding the solutions. Nevertheless, tracking the main causes of the retardation process is a positive step towards solving the problem. Since the problem did not crop up in a year or two, there is no quick solution to the problem. Bangladesh will have to go through this trial-and-error transition before the people will get rid of dynastic or guided democracy. Democracy is not an end but a means towards progress and development. The intelligentsia must realize that the country will not become democratic only through ensuring free and fair elections. An independent judiciary, modern uniform secular education and above all, people’s willingness to challenge corrupt leaders at every level can guarantee democracy. Only the young and educated can ensure all these pre-conditions, while Bangladesh goes through the transition and hopes for the best.
