Drishtipat Blog

Perhaps its time to debate whether we should go about our lives with a joke of a democracy or an efficient military backed interim government. Perhaps, you can start lining up the recent news conference by Dr. Yunus where he called politicians thieves and the recent spate of reporting in DS and Prothom Alo against AL and BNP and add up the numbers. In April last year, I wrote a piece in DS called Sushil Samaj fights back. Did not quite envisage this fight back. Sushil Samaj is really fighting back with high stakes here. Read the article below. Added some choice quotes below:

Five days after Bangladesh’s president, at the insistence of the army, declared a state of emergency, resigned his post as head of the caretaker government and cancelled the elections that were due to be held next Monday, the full implications of the latest twist in Bangladesh’s political drama are only just becoming clear. Few now have any doubt that the country is set for a lengthy period of military-backed technocratic rule.

….

Diplomats say the generals’ unpublished five-point agenda consists of a drive to clean up the country’s biased electoral machinery; a pledge to improve governance in the civil service; an anti-corruption drive that would cleanse the nation’s politics; the depoliticisation of the judiciary; and reform of the crippled power sector.

…

With its credibility now on the line, many believe the military will seek deep-seated reform and that this could take a year or more. At a minimum, this will include updating the voters’ list, providing ID cards to 90m voters, and establishing a fully-autonomous election commission that would do away with the flawed system of charging caretaker governments with overseeing elections.

…
Most political analysts say that any genuine crackdown on corruption would have to start with the clique of business people around Tarique Rahman, son of outgoing prime minister Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist party. Such a move would be likely to provoke such fierce protests from the BNP that it could lead to full martial law.

To be seen to be even-handed in its treatment of Bangladesh’s two feuding parties, the army might consider what is called the ‘Musharraf option’. Just as General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, exiled Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, leaders of Pakistan’s two largest political parties after his 1999 bloodless coup, so might martial law lead to the expulsion of Mrs Zia and Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League.
“I don’t discount the possibility that the generals ask the two ladies to take a holiday,” one Awami League leader said. “Pakistan is certainly a model that could be followed here, even if they have far deeper grass-roots support than Benazir and Nawaz.”

Full Article

We highlighted this scenario in a post only a few weeks ago here

My comment

In the policy exchange conference, I remember Hussain Haqqani looking at Mr. Moudud Ahmed and saying that he might have won then showing technicalities of constitution but he should learn from the example of Pakistan where the fight of Bhutto and Nawaz led to Musharraf. None of the constitutional technicaities that Sharif used held any water later on. Ironically, the fierce enemies at one time have now joined forces against Musharraf. But it is too late for them. The reality in Bangladesh is democracy is something similar. We call it democracy because we have good elections. But what followed the election was shameless plundering of wealth. As if democracy was defined by elections only and gave the leaders free license to steal. As if that was not enough, after looting endlessly and crippling all our service sectors, they wanted to make sure that they are in power for a long time to come. So let’s take down the institutions one by one. Administration, lower judiciary, Caretaker government, election commission — all went one by one. Finally the last bastion of hope — the supreme court was gone too. We only had a free press to show for — but did we really? All the black money holders after bankrupting the country decided to have either a print media or an electronic media to cloud the news for their business interest. We did not know right from wrong because each news had two versions. Not only you had to read the news, you had to interprete who was the owner of the news source. Yes, we had free press on paper but could our reporters from outside Dhaka report everything they saw. Bangladesh became the most dangerous place for journalists in the world. One after another journalists were killed and the killers escaped punishment. Ask any journalist from the outside Dhaka and they will tell you how they would have to tow the line of the powerful. During Awami League it was Tipu Sultan, during BNP it was Mithu. Same shit, different party. As if even those were not enough, the parties started playing with fire by engaging the Islamic extremists as their trump card. The parties did not have any democracy inside. Hence the results are the rise of Tareque Rahman and the MOU deal with Khelafot. The two leaders of the two parties were randomly deciding the future of 140 million people.

Admittedly, I initially rooted for any one but BNP in the coming election simply for accountability’s sake. However, after the MOU deal with the Islamists, it became clear to me the lesson AL took from the last 5 years was not that it will have to clean up the system that was destroyed by BNP. More alarmingly Shaikh Hasina decided that the only way to beat BNP was to be becoming more BNP-like. So predicatabily the next few years would have been followed by the same thing that happened past 5 years only this time by different party making a mockery of us — the voting public. For a while, I believed strongly that you need to slowly reform the parties from inside because there are a lot of genuine dedicate mid level leaders in the parties who worked for the people. But when the rot is in the head, they will never be interested in any reform. In that light, something very drastic was in order. Now, if the Generals move on with their 5 point program with full public backing, only then the parties will realise that the days of choosing between the devils are over. If the AL cries foul today, they won’t find many friends in the secular circle because they decided to ditch them for the Islamists for convenience right before the election. If the BNP cries foul, they won’t find many friends among the common mass because they tried to ram in a farce election to be in power. So what does that leave us with? The choice is clear — go through the motion of AL-BNP and their rotten leaders every five years and see them make a farce of democracy i.e. winner takes all — or try something new for a change and force the political parties to reform themselves. At the end of the day, ask yourself how long do you want to keep our country hostage by Shaikh Hasina, Khaleda Zia and Ershad who took our country for a ride for the last 25 years ? There has to be a price proportional to the crimes they have committed. In my last article in DS in a letter addressed to Mr. Jalil, the AL secretary, I wrote the following which now sounds prophetic:

If you want to have any shred of political credibility for the future, you will want to scrap this deal. Otherwise, you will not find the friends with you when you need them and believe me you will need friends a lot sooner than you think. Deal or no deal, do know this, that from now on we will make it very very expensive for you to take our support for granted.

So there … I just put a price to my support for these “democratic” parties. They have to prove that they are better than what we have now before they get my support again.

Finally, if you have time, the following video clip from Sultana Kamal from two years ago in a DP round table will sum up the situation of the country.