Won’t get fooled again

A new writer at UV is asked to jot down a a few sentences to introduce themselves.  Instead of boring everyone with where I live or what I do for a living, my self-introduction was about my stance on a number of political issues.  It started with something like: I welcomed the 1/11 coup because it stopped violence, I think the coupmakers are different from others in our history, but in the long run there is no alternative to democracy.

Anyone claiming that ‘there is no alternative to democracy’ has to work hard to explain why they ever said ‘I welcomed the coup’.  This post is an attempt at that.  American liberals who supported regime change in 2002 enabled the neo-con’s Iraq War.  Similarly, I, and others like me, too are culpable for enabling the mess that is today’s Bangladesh.  This post is a mea culpa.  This rambling-masquerading-as-reflections is also my attempt at summarising what I’ve learnt in the past year about our politics. 

If I were to rewrite that introductory sentence with the benefit of hindsight, this is what I’d write: there is no alternative to giving democracy enough time to evolve, and even if we give the benefit of doubt to the coupmakers’ intentions, the coup has derailed that evolution process and cannot be supported. 

Time for fighting in the street 

First things first.  The mainstream media has been full of pieces showing the conditions that prevailed in the country before 1/11 coup.  A contemporary blog post described the dilemma facing the nation as this:

Do we need to do any second guessing on what will be the fate of our democracy if BNP can go by doing all what they are doing now?  Let me be a little bit more explicit….  you don’t need peoples’ support to win election; all you need is tons of black money, cunning meneuvering of administration and caretaker government…..  What options we have left to protest BNP black crafts?….  So are we inviting a vicious cycle of institutional destruction and corruption followed by Hartal-oborodh?….  I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Like everything else, this BNP government has destroyed our dreams too.

That post was titled mon ta bhalo na.  I was on road during the weeks preceeding 1/11.  And reading the daily news and blog analyses, I certainly felt that way.  And I saw many expatriate Bangladeshis – international bureaucrats in Washington DC and poet-intellectuals in London, students and residents in a working men’s hostel in New York, patrons of London’s Gram Bangla and Sobuj Bangla restaurants, the street vendors in Rome and members of London’s Sunamgonj Unnoyon Sangstha - covering the whole range of diaspora Bangladeshi experience in the urban jungles of West in those days.  And mon ta bhalo na was a common refrain.

How did it come to this?  I’ll note my thoughts later in the piece. 

I arrived in Dhaka the day before the coup.  Mon ta bhalo na – that’s how I’d describe the mood of the people I saw.  Then in the late evening of the 11th, Dr Iajuddin Ahmed announced the news of the coup.  How was the coup greeted by Dhakaites? 

I was in Dhaka when the news of the departure of another unpopular government came on TV at a late winter evening.  Here is how that news was greeted.  I was studying for O’ Level then.  I found myself in the streets with friends from the neighbourhood, and then with our parents and older relatives, and then with strangers, celebrating. 

I don’t know whether there was spontaneous celebrations in Paltan or Dhanmondi or Mirpur.  In the Green Zone where my parents live, no one went out in the streets.  May be this was because of the curfew.  But the curfew was lifted in the morning.  Were there celebrations cheering in the new order?

I went out to street corners in Uttara.  I needed a hair cut after backpacking for couple of months, a barber shop was first.  Then a cha-er dokan.  Then I ventured into the city – Farm Gate, Nakhal Para, Bangla Motor, Mogh Bazar, Mohakhali, traffic seemed too uninviting to go further.  I used rickshaw and bus.  I think I got a sense of the city’s pulse on that day.

I didn’t see any celebrations.  I saw a lot of people relieved.  Relief, that would be the first word I’d use to describe what the city was feeling in the morning of 12 Jan 2007.  

I was in Bangladesh for another 10 days.  And within those days, relief started taking a back seat and anxiety started creeping in.

You say you want a revolution?

In Bangladesh and its odd cousin Pakistan, military coups and suspensions of democracy have been called revolutions in the past.  Ayub Khan had a revolution, and it was celebrated with a holiday.  Chaos of 7 November 1975 was also celebrated as a revolution by Zia-ur-Rahman and his heirs.  And Sheikh Mujib described the formation of a one-party state as a revolution.  Fortunately, no one has announced 11 January as a holiday yet.

But in other respects, the coupmakers have behaved pretty much like other revolutionaries in our history – everything is broken, and we are here to fix it.  And, while no one has officially acknowledged that what happened was a coup – an extra-constitutional change in power instigated by the country’s armed forces – at least one narrative of revolution has appeared.  This is a ‘bhodroloke revolution’, according to this narrative.  At least the foreign adviser acknowledged this that day: even if constitutional proprieties are somewhat of a myth, it is vital that they are maintained, and we are absolutely committed to them.  Let’s hope that they have maintained that view.

Let’s go beyond the public relations announcements and ponder the questions raised here.  Let’s ask, what actually prompted the coup?  One popular view is that the army acted when its cushy UN gigs were in trouble.  But this narrative has been questioned here.  Another view, summarised here, hints at a larger conspiracy.  Conspiracy theory abounds.  It is India.  It is America.  It is India and America together.  It is Jamaat.  It is Islamists. 

Meanwhile, the public version of what happened in Bangabhaban on 11 January 2007 is here.  Dear reader, how is this not a military coup?  But wait, there is more.  This contradicts the version of the coup that circulated most widely in the months after the coup.  In that version, Maj Gen Masud Chowdhury, then GOC of the 9th Infantry stationed in Savar, made the first move of the coup.  In that version, Masud was present in Bangabhaban from the beginning, and smashed someone’s face to impress upon Dr Iajuddin the army’s intent. 

If you ever wonder whether you’ll know the truth of what happened in the first week of November 1975, forget it.  It’s hard enough to know what happened on 11 January 2007.

Won’t get fooled again

I said earlier that within days of the coup, anxiety started replacing relief in Dhaka.  People started wondering what would happen next.  Then came the arrests, circuses with anti-corruption, Dr Yunus’s entry and exit from politics.  Meanwhile bread started vanishing, prices rose at an ever faster pace, disasters struck – both man-made and natural.  Discontent simmered, and occassionally burst out.  Many a volume is written on what has happened in the past year, and there is no need to repeat them here.  Instead, here is what I think I’ve learnt.

There were genuine problems with our democracy.  I’ve consistently argued that the fundamental problem was that our political factions had no incentive to share power in the system.  Problems and set backs with evolving democracy are neither new nor unique to us.  And, as is very articulately argued here, the solution to these problems are never suspension of democracy.  Even a bad democracy is better than a well intended dictatorship.  Well intended dictatorships tend to become malevolent sooner or later, while bad democracy can and usually do evolve into better democracy.  Yes, it takes time, but history doesn’t allow short cuts.

Many of our bhodrolokes – elite bureaucrats, newspaper editors, think tank wallahs, writers, critics, opinionmakers, civil society – forgot that history doesn’t allow short cuts.  I say forgot because they knew that past suspensions of democracy didn’t help matters.  Many others remembered, but thought this time it is different because this time they are calling the shots.  Well, pen might be mightier than the gun in the long run, but in the short run, it’s the guy with the gun that calls the shot.  We would be fortunate if this current suspension of democracy doesn’t end in another tin pot general doffing his uniforms. 

And another-general’s-election need not be the only path ahead for us.  Here is one way out.  Possible ways to overcome the winner-takes-all institutional problems include strong local government and stronger parliamentary oversight.  But for any of these to succeed, a credible election at the earliest, with the participation of everyone except any general involved with the 1/11 coup, is an absolute must.  Anything else, and we are slated to another decade of politics of confrontation.

But even if that should happen, let’s not be too distraught.  Despite the past decade of confrontational politics, people became more prosperous, the spectre of hunger diminished, art and culture flourished, a new generation became more socially aware, society itself evolved at an amazing pace.  So will it be if the worst should happen and we find ourselves in a Hatao Moeen bachao Desh andolon.  

And if there is a genuine election and Awami League or BNP or whichever gang of politicians come to power, they won’t deliver a shonar Bangla overnight.  There is no quick fix to our manifest problems.  No government has the magic solution to the environmental disaster that awaits us as a result of climate change.  Globalisation is tearing our social fabric apart, and not everyone is comfortable with that.  Issues like these will vex us for a long time to come.

Dear reader, let me leave you with the words of The Who.

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We won’t get fooled again
Won’t get fooled again.