It was the politics of confrontation and exclusion practised by the two major parties, the AL and the BNP, which was identified as the most deadly legacy of our electoral democracy.
The confrontational politics not only deadlocked resolution of all contested issues as the two parties refused to engage in any political dialogue, it also led to repeated violent clashes between the supporters of the two major parties, often resulting in murders and grievous injuries. Vendetta and violence marked inter-party as well as intra-party contestations. In the initial years of elected governments, the incidence of political violence was confined to the less well known party workers but as the confrontation between the two major political forces intensified, top level leaders were targeted for assassination.
For example, on August 21, 2004, a grenade attack at an AL rally in the capital city, Dhaka, killed 23 people including senior AL leader Ivy Rahman. Though the AL chief Sheikh Hasina was targeted, she narrowly escaped death but with some injuries. On January 27, 2005, another AL leader, SAMS Kibria, a former finance minister was assassinated while addressing a public meeting in his constituency in Sylhet.
During the last five years of the AL-led grand alliance government (2009-2013), the style of political confrontation has become less lethal as there was no incidence of killing of top leaders. However, other means were used to silence the opposition. Top leaders of the opposition were repeatedly taken into prison, and the BNP chief, Khaleda Zia, was prevented from going out of her house for several days during the tenth parliamentary elections.
Let us now turn to the question that is agitating all of us. What is the way out?
Again, there is no simple answer, and there is no magic bullet. Following the 10th parliamentary elections, the most discussed issue is the organisation of a credible parliamentary election participated by both major parties. While organisation of such an election is necessary to establish the representative credentials of the government, it is not so that the organisation of a free and participatory election would solve our deep-seated problems that have repeatedly derailed our democratic journey.
Before coming to an agreement about the next parliamentary elections, the two sides first need to, at a minimum, agree to give up the practice of “winner-takes all” political culture, and commit themselves to discard the politics of vendetta and violence.
It is preferable to take a long term view about curing our political malaise, and if there has to be a one-sentence answer, it is: The main challenge now, and it has been there for quite sometime, is to implement measures to “democratise” our electoral democracy.
The Challenge of ‘democratising’ electoral democracy
“Democratising” electoral democracy has been identified as a major challenge not only for Bangladesh but also for all countries in South Asia. Indeed, various studies assessing the quality of democracy in different regions of the world have noted the poor quality of many electoral democracies. Some of these democracies have developed features of what Fareed Zakaria has called “illiberal democracy.” In some others, such as in Latin America, progress has been made in routinising democratic elections and reducing the power of the military, but checks on the power of the executive have been limited.
Studies on South Asia have highlighted the influence of criminal elements, mastaans (hooligans) and people with black money, in electoral and party politics. Governance style of all South Asian states, whether unitary or federal have tended to be highly centralised and accountability on the whole has been weak.
In Bangladesh, academics and civil and political party activists have been advocating for a long time specific proposals of reforms to improve the quality of our electoral democracy. The most widely discussed reform ideas encompass democratising party and electoral politics. This should be our priority.
Democratising party and electoral politics
Lack of internal democracy within the political parties has long been identified as a major constraint inhibiting consolidation of democracy in Bangladesh. Dynastic inheritance has emerged as the dominant route to party leadership positions.
Two dynastic inheritors, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have headed the two main parties, the Awami League and the BNP, for more than 30 years, Sheikh Hasina as the daughter of the AL leader and the founding father of the nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Khaleda Zia as the widow of Ziaur Rahman, founder of the BNP. These two women have been the uncontested leaders of their respective parties since the early 1980s taking all key decisions.
The third major party, Jatiya Party has also been headed by its founder, Lt General HM Ershad since 1986, and at present the leadership of the parliamentary party has been transferred to his wife Roushan Ershad. The Islamist party Jamat-e-Islami has also been led essentially by two leaders – Ghulam Azam (1992-2000) and Matiur Rahman Nizami (2000-2010).
Though the rules of organisation of all these parties provide for various processes of grassroots consultations, in practice decision-making is controlled by the top party leadership. The office bearers of various tiers of party organisation and the candidates seeking party nominations for election, depend on the support of the top party leadership.
The party agenda and election manifesto tend to be designed by a few professionals in consultation with a few leaders and are rarely exposed to debate within the party or with the public. There is very little debate and discussion within party forums about various policy issues. Political parties recruit a large number of party workers but they are mostly used as mobilisers during election campaigns or for public agitation campaigns.
The deficiencies of political parties have generated many reform proposals over the last 10 years regarding party financing, recruitment, leadership, decision-making process, representation of groups, and interests and so on. However, the major parties have not taken any concrete action.
Apart from the Awami League, the other two parties, the BNP and the JP do not bother to organise party council meetings. Since its inception, the BNP has organised only five party council meetings (one in every six years) though the party constitution stipulates council meetings once in every three years. There was a gap of 16 years between the BNP’s last two council meetings held in 1993 and 2009.
The AL has been more regular in organising its triennial council meetings, but these meetings are generally big public shows where the party president (and in the last two meetings the general secretary) is unanimously elected through voice vote. The council then authorises the party president to select all other office holders.
The top party leadership, in the three major parties, AL, BNP and the JP, has the final say in selecting candidates for elections, and can ignore the recommendations of the grassroots committees. Though policies and strategies are discussed in central party decision making bodies, the final decisions are, again often left to the party chief. At local levels, party activists mainly spend time planning celebration of special days, or organising rallies.
Inter-party and intra-party violence is endemic amongst all parties. Various human rights organisations have regularly reported on high level of violence such as killings and injuries as a result of clashes between party activists. Generally, students and youth organisations associated with political parties engage in violent clashes.
Some of this violence occurs between parties and some are happening within parties. In many cases, the conflicts are not due to ideological differences, but due to struggles over distribution of patronage. Recent data collected for my study on political parties, show that incidence of intra-party violence is generally higher than inter-party violence. Additionally, incidence of intra-party violence is higher within ruling parties compared to opposition parties. This implies that most of the intra-party violence is caused by factional feuds over grabbing of business contracts or other patronage deals.
Over the years, electoral politics has increasingly become dependent on patronage politics where money and mastaans have played a dominant role. Elections have become a costly process. While in the earlier years businessmen used to donate funds to election campaigns, they have increasingly become directly involved in electoral politics as candidates. For example, the percentage of businessmen as members of parliament has steadily increased from 24% in 1973 to 48% in 1996 to 57% in 2001 and 56% in 2008.
Mastaans have also emerged as a political resource and are used widely by all parties to ensure retention of authority in various constituencies as well as state patronage to access public resources. The student and youth fronts of the parties are dominated by mastaans who have frequently turned campuses of educational institutions into battlefields.
Many of these mastaans later become party bosses. In various constituencies successive elected governments have used law agencies to protect their own mastaans, and drive away the mastaans of the opposition. The mastaans have used their immunity from law enforcement to extract toll from various business and construction contracts. The dominance of money and mastaans have excluded the participation of two important groups, women and the income-poor, from electoral politics since neither group commands these two resources; yet it is the women and the income-poor who constitute the majority of the voting population.
The nexus between politicians, businessmen, mastaans and the law enforcement agencies has, thus, become embedded in our political system during the period of electoral democracy.
Some of the reform proposals geared towards minimising the influence of money and criminal elements in political parties and electoral politics were adopted by the election commission in its guidelines for the 2008 parliamentary elections. These measures helped in the nomination and election of a number of women and also a number of relatively clean candidates.
However, there are still many more specific actions regarding party financing and control of political violence which have been proposed by civil society and political activists. These need to be further refined and pushed as priority agenda for adoption by the political parties and the government.
The last word
It is not easy to predict the future of democracy in Bangladesh. There is no doubt that we have overwhelming popular support for a democratic system of governance. This support has been strengthened during the two years of rule by the military-backed “caretaker” government when all major players came to the realisation that there was no other alternative but to return to electoral democracy.
We had hoped that with our renewed democratic journey in 2009, we would be able to break away from many of our past undemocratic practices and take bold steps to democratise our electoral democracy. At a minimum, we had hoped that the two main political parties and their two supreme leaders have learnt some lessons and would be able to come to some agreement about the basic rules of the game of electoral democracy.
Unfortunately, it appears that the two main parties and their leadership are still on a confrontational path, and they cannot even agree on the ground rules for parliamentary elections.
Fortunately, for us there is a growing awareness amongst the citizens that we have to do away with the past patterns of bad politics that have stood in the way of good governance. People are increasingly showing their disapproval of old style confrontational politics. It is this shift in popular will, an overwhelming desire to see our past undemocratic patterns broken, and the beginning of a new era of accountable and responsive governance that makes me hopeful about the prospects of our democratic renewal.
Who should take the leadership of this project of democratising the political parties and electoral politics?
Obviously, the primary responsibility falls on the shoulders of the party leaders and activists. They cannot continue the rhetoric of being the sole champions of democracy unless they practise what they preach. They need to first put their own houses in order. They need to introduce democracy within their respective parties and in electoral politics.
The media, civil society and the academics also have a very important role to play. They need to be independent in collecting information and take up positions based on facts. They need to tell the truth to power.
