As a jaded millennial, doomscrolling through social media right before bedtime is an essential part of how I transition to the next day, the rationale being “if I end my day absorbing all the way the human race is charting its own path to self annihilation, surely tomorrow can't be that bad?”
Surprisingly, it does work … sometimes.
Anyway, it was during one such late night doomscrolling session that I stumbled upon a fairly lengthy video (by Instagram standards anyway) by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez providing a rather succinct, yet incredibly detailed, explainer on how members of congress in the US get assigned to their respective legislative committees, while also wedging in the incredibly arcane process of how a bill becomes a law.
Now, full disclosure, I am something of a fanboy when it comes to Ms Cortez, or AOC as she is known more popularly, not necessarily because of her brand of politics (although there is some of that) but because of her knack for clearing up a lot of the fog surrounding US politics, especially to the disenfranchised.
I suppose the act of educating people about politics can be considered just another way to build your political base, if we're feeling particularly cynical, but it's the fact that she's not white, is a woman, and is not immediately tied to wealth (she is ranked by OpenSecrets as one of the least wealthy members of the 116th Congress, with a maximum net worth of around $30,000) that makes her way more of an outsider to her country's political landscape.
While her attempts at providing political education does make her more of an activist than a politician (which she is, as a member of the US House of Representatives), it is the fact that she actively educates people on how her nation's political machinery works that makes her so fascinating to me on a personal level -- someone who works in the news industry but has next to no idea about how the political machinery in his own nation works, or rather doesn't.
So, where's our AOC? Where is our outsider artist to the performative art that is the Bangladeshi political process?
Now, I don't want to insinuate anything here but, if we stripped away the political activism, the eloquence, the really nice facial bone structure, and squinted really really really hard, we can kind of start to make out some similarities within Hero Alom.
Please, just humour me for a second.
Hero Alom is an “internet celebrity” who famously got into hot water last year for doing a bad cover of a Rabindranath Tagore song, and by “hot water” I mean he was arrested. Now, if that's not a scathing indictment of just how much of a joke our law enforcement has become, I don't know what is, but when you consider that the man literally tried and failed to run for the Bangladeshi general election back in 2018 on the Jatiya Party ticket, without any political precedence, such attempts to delegitimize him start to make sense.
Of course, that was hardly enough to deter him from further heroics, as earlier this month, he contested the Bogura 4 and Bogura 6 by-polls as an independent and … lost. By around 800 something votes, so there's that at least.
However, the point being, there were people who voted for him. The reasons could be anything, from jokesters who wish to see how far they can go with this obviously opaque system to perhaps even genuine belief that Hero Alom represents the people of his constituency.
This is where parallels between AOC and Hero Alom start to make some amount of sense: They are both outsiders respective of their nations' political machinery, but have very different things to say about the state of political inclusivity within them -- that and their relative youth (they're four years apart in age).
Needless to say, Bangladesh's political culture is not very conducive to change. Sure, we get a rolling list of candidates for members of parliament seemingly every other decade, but the seats are almost entirely filled by varying shades of grey. While I am hardly one to discriminate against anyone based on their age, surely a nation as “young” and “vibrant” as Bangladesh needs representatives who do those adjectives some justice?
We need people in our Parliament and in every rank of our political hierarchy who can take some time to just go live on whatever social media platform is trending for the time and explain how one can register to becoming an MP, or how our laws get passed, or any number of the bureaucratic procedures that make up the pea soup morass that is our political landscape.
Is Hero Alom the one to take up that responsibility? I have my doubts. But watching him act the fool on TikTok has proven far more entertaining than watching wizened senior citizens battle sleep on national television.
Rubaiyat Kabir is Joint Editor, Editorial and Op-Ed, Dhaka Tribune.