নতুন বোতল, পুরান মদ
নতুন মিডিয়া, পুরান মেসেজ
নতুন চেহারা, মাগার পুরান গলাবাজি

Sajeeb Wazed Joy and his handlers appear to be escalating their campaign to gain some fake legitimacy for their boy who, having spent so many years in the loving bosom of the West, suddenly seems to have decided that desher jonogon now need his wise counsel and leadership.

The story so far:
- There was that stage-managed homecoming tour of Bangladesh that he did a while ago.

- There is the widely spread meme which his party has been floating that Joy has been “selected” as one of 250 young global leaders by the World Economic Forum. I will be looking at this a bit more closely in a moment.

- Finally, there is this online blog that he has started and which has already created considerable buzz in the Bangladeshi blogosphere. The blog is only too obviously another step in his campaign to ramp up his currently non-existent credibility. So what has he been doing with this blog? He’s been dissembling from the very beginning, praising Awami League for imaginary good practices and vainly defending it against charges of pandering to the mullahs. His second post made the risible claim that Awami League is a party that practises democracy within its ranks, his third post made the equally far-fetched claim that his party did not really sell its soul to the fatwa-mongers back in December. I guess we, the mukkho-shukkho jonogon, just dreamed it all up.

Joy, please quit with the contorted explanations. It is so early in the day, and already you are embarrassing yourself in your blog. Let me state this categorically:

The day that you and Tarek Zia permanently quit the Bangladeshi political scene cannot come soon enough.

It is high time that the Sheikh family and the Zia family stopped treating 150 million people like a bunch of infants, in the deluded and self-serving belief that the country cannot be governed by anyone else, that Bangladesh should only ever be governed by some thoroughly underachieving scion of these corrupt and discredited families. *passage deleted*

What’s with this WEF thing?
Coming back briefly to the WEF meme, this link (warning - pdf file) mentions that Joy was a nominee for the Young Global Leaders thing. It doesn’t say anywhere who nominated him or whether he actually won anything in the end.

My guess is that Awami League put him forward as a nominee to WEF in the hope that desher lok would not question this any further, so that they could sell this inconclusive, dubious honour to us fools and idiots, thereby building up some fake cred, some fictitious aura of achievement when in reality there is no achievement to speak of. (It reminds me of Rajiv and Rahul Gandhi’s successful attempts to hoodwink the Indian population, fake degrees from Cambridge and all the rest of that sordid story.)

Indeed, when you check Joy’s entry, you don’t see anything against his name that would mark him out as a Global Leader of anything. All it says is that he is a “stakeholder” in the “political” arena. I leave it to the readers of this blog to figure out what he has done in the political arena to be called a “stakeholder”. Just above his name, there is Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia. Just below him there is George Weah, legendary footballer with AC Milan and Liberia, and further down a Chinese professor of the natural sciences at Harvard. And then we have Joy whose “achievement” is that he is a “Member of Awami League”.

Smells like a damned setup to me.

I have nothing personal against Joy. I’m sure he’s a perfectly pleasant chap in real life. I just don’t want to see Bangladesh being reduced to a hereditary dynasty again. Even India has successfully shaken off that dirty label thanks to the generous decision of Sonia Gandhi to step aside. So today you have a situation where India is run by top technocrats, people whose competence and patriotism are beyond doubt. Under the able leadership of Manmohan and Chidambaram, the country is justifiedly on its way to national glory. Whereas we are stuck with Tarek and Joy, the latter a person who hasn’t even lived in Bangladesh during the entirety of his adult life, and who thinks he can now just parachute himself in as the Saviour, the Messiah of the nation. Who will tell him that just because his grandpa was called Sheikh, he has no such right???

No more Juboraj culture

In the end, we only have our immature political culture to blame. You see BNP posters with three pictures in the top corner – Zia, Khaleda and Tarek, a new Holy Trinity - “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Madam.”

And what do we see on AL posters? Juxtaposed pictures of Mujib and his daughter, and no doubt very soon they too will be joined by Joy, this absurd parachute artist, to form an alternate Holy Trinity. শালার দুর্ভাগা জাতি! That’s what I mean by immature political culture – the people swayed not by reason or arguments or cogent policy platforms, but instead shamelessly manipulated by the parties through use of these emotive connections, these naked tropes – Sheikh, Nouka, Zia, Dhaner Sheesh.

Joy, there’s a name for people such as yourself in your adopted homeland of the USA. That name is carpetbagger: “The term is used to describe outsiders attempting to gain political office or economic advantage, especially in areas (thematically or geographically) to which they previously had no connection. You have had minimal or no connection to the Bangladeshi nation from the time you left up until now - now when the question of dynastic succession comes up for the Awami League, and suddenly on cue, you oblige us and turn up to save the day.

Please stay where you are. The country has no need for wannabe উড়ে এসে জুড়ে বসা netas like you.

The opinions expressed here are the writer’s alone. They have no relation to DP’s position.