Maneeza Hossain recently came out with a Hudson Institute White Paper on the current interim administration’s impact on democracy in Bangladesh and the radical Islamist agenda in Bangladesh. While it seems to be geared towards a Capitol Hill audience, you can download a copy of the paper here and evaluate the paper for yourself. However, if you’re interested in spoilers and some quick comments, read on.

Ms. Hossain motivates her piece by putting the current situation in Bangladesh in context, relating the importance of a moderate Muslim majority country as a democratic model in the global war on terror, and warning the reader about how the current BD administration’s extra-constitutional and undemocratic actions are strengthening the hands of militant fundamentalists – intentionally or otherwise.

She refers to the current interim administration – a little melodramatically – as the New Order. The reasoning behind this new label for the government goes something like this: the current administration is unlike any that has existed in the Bangladeshi political sphere – neither fully civil and constitutional nor completely martial and extrajudicial. As she puts it quite neatly “The New Order can argue that it is not in breach of the Constitution. It can equally be argued that it is extra-constitutional because it is in territory uncovered by the Constitution.”

Ms. Hossain warns that by suspending the democratic process and legitimizing extra-constitutional governance, this New Order of technocrats and the military is legitimizing an anti-democratic “Islamist agenda”. While I may be dropping a lot of loaded terms in this summary (Islamist agenda, New Order, etc), the author does a bang up job of walking us through what she means by them, for the most part.

Despite it being very well written, there are a couple aspects of the paper that I find a little ambiguous and at times disturbing – such as the tacit approval of the military’s role in Turkish democracy or implying that the World Bank should be pushing for political reform.

For starters, while Ms. Hossain’s piece is about the New Order and its unintentional benefits to the Islamist movement, it fails to capture the complexity of the situation on the ground. While she’s quite clear about what she means by the Islamist movement (radical politicized Islam with mostly anti-democratic intentions), she is not so clear about who is actually in the Islamist movement in Bangladesh, or how they are a threat to democracy, in concrete terms. By referring to “the Islamists”, the paper gives the impression that the Bangladeshi radical political Islam is monolithic. It is my understanding that political Islam in Bangladesh comes in many shapes and forms spanning a spectrum of outfits – from the radicalized militant to the enlightened pragmatic – with a wide range of backgrounds, leaderships, and agendas. The broad treatment that Ms. Hossain gives the topic, especially when the paper is geared towards an audience with policy-making power, can be potentially dangerous for Bangladesh.

For example, when I think of the type of Islamist threat the paper discusses, I immediately think of Harkatul Jihad, Juma’atul Muhahedin, or the JMJB. Leaving out these groups, Ms. Hossain’s idea of the Islamist threat to democracy seems to revolve around the Jamaat-e-Islami, and how its hand has gotten stronger because of the caretaker government. I am no fan of the JI, but I believe that in its current incarnation, the JI is pragmatic enough to engage in BD realpolitik and democracy as much as any other party that’s on the field right now. Given limited resources and political/diplomatic capital, should the USA and other international actors be more concerned with groups like the JI – a party that is a willing participant of the democratic process – or with groups like the JMB that are clear and present threats to regional stability?

There are a few other concerns that I have with this paper, and I can’t shake the feeling that it is too simple a treatment of a much more complex issue. However, Ms. Hossain does drive home the point that the longer the caretaker government acts outside the democratic process as an extra-constitutional entity, its’ reforms will lack the punch they need, and will only serve to further subvert BD democracy. I’ll give her props for highlighting this point and I’ll let you be the final judge of the paper for yourselves.

Photo by Kazi Huq: Spring 2004. Rickshaw art highlighting Osama.