Drishtipat Blog

Last week, a reader asked the question what is the alternative of the current way things are moving. After getting feedback from the blog readers, I wrote the following piece in September for a daily in Bangladesh . Unfortunately, this was considered to be too hot to handle and got the axe. So now that I have complained, here is a solution or alternative that I proposed.

Towards National Reconciliation

I have a cover of a Newsweek I carry with me which shows a confident, young sari-clad woman and a caption that blazes “New India”. My dream is to have a cover flashing “The Resurgent Bangladesh”. In January this year, like most people, I hoped that we could begin that journey towards resurgence. But it didn’t take long for that bubble to burst. While there have been positives in the past months, there have also been negatives — mistakes have been made, credibility has been dismantled and moral authority has been lost.

But it is not too late to start to get that Newsweek cover out in 2009 – after the election. If our current power holders can assess where they are now and be innovative about the next few months towards the election, it is still possible to bring back that positive aspiration that has now all but disappeared.

Lessons for the caretakers:

The four most important lessons that the government should take from the past few months are:

1. The capacity of this government is much more limited compared to the tasks they have started
2. The political forces are a reality in Bangladesh and they will not just disappear without a fight.
3. Any policy that does not take into account its macro impact is bad.
4. With no direct mandate or moral authority, it’s not possible to forcibly make drastic changes in the rules of the game without disastrous side effects.

As the government started implementing a much more expansionist agenda with increasingly less transparency, its acceptability has taken a nose dive and its legitimacy has been questioned. The moral authority with which the government came to power has slowly eroded over the last months making it more vulnerable to various internal pressure groups. That pressure is only going to increase if there is no drastic change in how the caretaker government is approaching reform and the upcoming election. There are fifteen months left to the election. For a government whose legitimacy is now increasingly under question because of the sweeping changes it is trying to make, that is a long time for things to go as per plan. The government should realize that it must restore its moral authority to previous heights if it is to achieve its aims. Ultimately, the questions are: will the status quo work, and what is the best way to move forward keeping the longer term in mind?

Why the status quo will not work?

In order to see whether the existing set up will work, one must look at the issues that are currently facing the government.

Moral Authority

This government was always going to be judged purely by its actions and its acceptability and legitimacy will solely depend on its ability to carry the moral authority it came to power with. Unfortunately, the moral authority has slowly eroded by its various unlawful actions. Unquestionably, the government scored its biggest brownie points by taking on the untouchable almighties. But the lack of due process, added with the arbitrariness, has made people suspicious about the real intentions of these drives. Similarly, widely reported human rights abuses — cases like that of Choles Richil — have still remained unpunished. The result is that there is a growing number of people who feel the justice is not so blind as the power holders claim.

Transparency

while the goal has been to establish a credible and viable system of good governance, some advisers themselves have fallen short of the standards they set.

As politicians are getting jailed for lying in their wealth statements and government officers are being asked to provide wealth statements, the advisers and the our top power brokers strangely seem out of the whole process without having to furnish their own wealth statements. Most importantly, the government seems to be taking fundamental policy decisions, claiming mandate without bothering to justify it.

Precedence

The government is setting some dangerous precedence for the future. The amount of policy decisions the it is taking with impunity flouts the constitution and sets the precedent for the supreme law of the land to be ignored as long as one has the power to vanquish the opposition. .

Acceptability

The government so far in its ill advised policy has tried to artificially engineer the reform process and break up the political parties. With the falling popularity of the government, these reformers are increasingly being seen as the latest in the series of turncoat politicians. In the process, the government has completely disengaged the majority of the parties and their grassroots workers.

Given potential resistance, the government will simply be unable to govern without addressing the issues above. Nothing short of a wholesale change in the government will actually do that.

Lessons from Iraq and Nepal and towards a new politic

The current political mess in Iraq began when the United States banned all members of the Ba’ath Party. Under the Ba’athist rule, one could not reach high positions in the government or in the schools without becoming a party member. So by excluding the Ba’athists, the US designed ways to block many experienced and able people to participate in the new government. By the time they reversed this policy, it was far too late and the political vacuum was filled by far more dangerous extremist elements.

Our current government has turned politics into a dirty word and decided to leave the politicians out of the process of cleaning the “mess”. But the end result of this will not be a new set of clean political leaders, but possibly rather sporadic and violent events and the political land grabbing of opportunists and extremists like Jamaat-e-Islami.

As politics as a whole was demonized in Bangladesh, gone were the chances of connecting with the grassroots. As the government claims that conspiracies by the “evil-doers” from the political parties caused the recent unrest, it is tacitly accepting that the political parties are capable of shutting the country down completely as well. Is nation-building for the supposed new era possible without the millions of people that support the mainstream BNP and Awami League? Without venues for expressing dissent, the response from these groups is bound to become increasingly violent if they are not brought in as stakeholders in the process.

Similarly, political parties must try to engage in meaningful conversation with the powers that be. In this context, a meaningful national dialogue is in the best interest of the country to come up with a roadmap towards a functional democracy with all the key parties having a stake.

In order to make the political parties a stakeholder in the process, we suggest that the caretaker government should be revamped within the framework of the constitution to include politicians. Some of the current advisers should be replaced by members of key political parties. Following this, the main political parties along with all the stakeholders in the current government need to come together and sign a National Accord to agree on keeping some of the existing reform agenda to be pushed after election by whoever is in power. We have an example of such agreement where in 1990 both BNP and AL agreed to revert to parliamentary democracy after the 1991 election.

The National Accord among other things can discuss having an election like the Nepal model to elect an assembly that may be in place for two years with a room to review the constitution and make amendments as necessary based on what worked and did not work in the past 16 years. Nepal is heading to election in November to elect a constituent assembly for two years that will decide the future of monarchy in the country among other things. Not only are they resolving the long standing Maoist insurgency by bringing them into the political process, they are also forming a truth commission for all the minority communities to come together. Similarly, Bangladesh also can elect a constituent assembly which will be responsible for implementing solutions for the long standing issues that have plagued our country. This will implement further reforms agreed to by all the parties and further strengthen institution building for the following two years with a much needed legitimacy in their actions.

A new roadmap

So the new roadmap will look like this:

December 2007: A National Unity Caretaker Government by replacing some advisers with members of political parties and civil society and lifting of state of emergency.

February 2008: National Accord by all the stakeholders towards continuing reforms and the election of a new constituent assembly for 2 years.

June 2008: National Election for a constituent assembly.

June 2010: A new election under the proposed changes in the constitution by the constituent assembly.

Conclusion

Post 1/11, the country looked forward to a new kind of politics. Unfortunately, due to some very poor decision making, the country is headed for the same old confrontational politics and election boycotting. It is time to throw the challenge back to all the groups to show some vision and far sightedness. On one hand we need to admit that the politics and democracy practiced in the last 16 years had flaws, and on the other hand we must acknowledge that politicians are key stakeholders in our future progress and bypassing them forcibly will only bring more chaos and unwanted results.

So let’s have national unity and regeneration as the key goal towards any future settlement in order to see that Resurgent Bangladesh that we all envision.