As the CTG govt suffers in identity crisis, in stead of getting caught up in the label, if we look at the component in the government, something interesting will appear. A few months ago, we discussed this in the blog which resulted in an op-ed in Daily Star. One of the telling lines of the article was this:

Elitist politics of the top-down variety not only leads to bad governments, but more importantly, it could lead to populist backlashes that produce equally bad — if not worse — governments, 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 governments we had for the last 16 years.

At the thread, Mahmud Farooque exploring the elite of the elites who are calling the shots had this to say:

…my frustration with the elite of the elites is that I have found them to be mostly followers and not leaders. Their education and training allows them to manage well only under steady state conditions. They generally come up with brilliant analysis only after the fact when anomalies, good and bad, occur. They are generally risk averse but power hungry. A Korean analyst once told me that had their leaders listened to the WB-types, they would still be counting on planting rice to grow out of poverty. In our case, contrast the performance of our garments sector, where WB had limited role, with the jute, energy or the IT sector, where it had been a major driver.
… taking my past frustrations into account, I try but cannot gather sufficient confidence in the abilities of the current group of “managers” to separate them from my generalized observations and believe that they will be able to master the creativity, imagination, and entrepreneurship necessary to dig us out of the hole we find ourselves in at the moment. In addition to the political crisis, we have a looming power and inflation crisis at hand that continues to inflict heavy toll on the most economically and socially vulnerable, about which the CTG still hasn’t been able to come up with an effective response.


picture of some of our super elites courtesy of Daily Star

The above was written 3 months ago. Now we are seeing the consequence of some of the policy debacle. Forget the social and political implications of their policy changes which are not quantifiable, purely on the economic point of view the future looks grim. As bdnews24 points out today economic growth appears to have slowed down, and excluding the hope of a crop bonanza after the floods, major indicators point to tension rather than relief in the near future.

What’s worse is that on top of these bad policy makings by the ellites, spectre of a military rule is in full display. Typical to military fashion in stead of addressing the root cause, dissentions are met with iron hand. Perhaps those in the power chain who decided to show their iron fist, could also listen to the BBC Sanglap which addresses the unrest. This is what was needed — a sanglap, a national dialogue between all parties. Could we not even count on these super elites to show this much creativity?

Military is doing what it does best — it is showing command politics. They are beating the apology out of protestors, journalists and teachers for last week’s trauma. But what are our elite of the elites and civilians inside the government doing? Sucking thumbs or feeling good about themselves thinking they know best and we should have absolute trust in their ability to take us to that magic land. Well, if Dr. Yunus, the now discredited and humiliated NGO messiah turned politician-wannna-be, had any say, that’s exactly what he wants us to do. Could they not take an initiative to turn things around towards reconciliation and do a self introspection? A friend put it quite harshly the other day, “If military comes and beats the hell out of me today, I am not going to have a single thing to say to them, but I will get a gun and shoot these civil society bastards”.

You can read about the Sanglap here and also suggest listening to the whole thing in the BBC site.

Update An update on the apology by teachers from Sanjeeb Hossain is here