A “bhodroloke” revolution is said to have taken place in Bangladesh. At least that is how it was being advertised to foreign audiences, as Jyoti reports, by the Foreign Affairs advisor speaking at Australian National University last week.

While what happened on 1/11 is a lot more complicated than the simplified picture put forward by the Foreign Advisor, that simple picture by itself is highly important. In politics, as in marketing, “packaging” and “image” matter. What is so worrying about the “bhodroloke” ideological package?

Dr. Chowdhury’s highlighted how the “bhodrolokes” were seen as a high-achieving, benign elite who brought welcome innovations and reforms to Bengal. However, it is also true that they were simultaneously perceived as beneficiaries of colonialism, a much despised enterprise precisely because of its exclusion, racism and dehumanization of the majority. Indeed these evils of colonialism are highlighted in the schools of Bangladesh, thus raising serious questions about the effectiveness of the Advisor’s choice of “packaging”.

Such ideological packaging inevitably leads to resistance from those who take it seriously (a handful definitely will). Charges of neo-colonialism, of elitism and cultural inauthenticity will no doubt be leveled. What’s worse, opposing forces will not need to prove to the populace the worth of their policies. Rather they will simply have to prove that they themselves are not an “elite” or that they are “culturally authentic”.

What form might this resistance take? “Nationalists” questioning the CTG’s loyalties to the nation, populists will questioning its “popular mandate”, Marxists questioning their linkage to the “international capitalist system” and religion-based politicians questioning their “cultural authenticity”. In other words, the packaging has made the CTG an easy target for all, with justifications easily found in the historical memory of the Bangladeshi nation. It is thus highly ironic that the Advisor delved back into our history for an analogy.

One hopes that Advisors and others within the CTG do not take this seriously, that is only ideological wrapping or rhetoric. If they do, they should seriously have a re-think. Elitist politics of the top-down variety does not simply lead to bad policies. More importantly, it could lead to populist backlashes that produce equally bad - if not worse - policies since succeeding regimes have popular mandates but few institutions where the information flows from the bottom to the top. That is, we feel, a good description of the kind of regimes we had for the last 15 years.

Our advice would be to go to the people. Not appealing to the people is the mistake made by numerous other bhodrolokes, some with very good intentions such as Drs. Kamal Hossain and Muhammad Yunus. Yes someone always has to lead. But people must be led as people, not herded like sheep.