The amount of spin generated in Bangladesh this past fortnight, impressive even when compared to the high bar set by neighbourly India, should surely shorten our days.
While that speculation needs confirmation by scientists, it’s no rocket science to state that Bangladesh has lost its regional moral high ground along with its peace of mind; and will have lost a hefty chunk of GDP along with its supply-chain reputation, all thanks to the unconscionably knee-jerk and violent reaction to a students’ protest about quota-led government jobs that flamed on in the beginning of July.
The disturbing second stage of the protest, which from July 19 onward was almost entirely hijacked by extremists, is now being used to whitewash abject failures of commonsensical governance, staggering hubris, several words out of place, gladhanded thuggery against protesting students, and law-and-order personnel running riot attacking students, even killing transparently unarmed student protesters and even a journalist -- all of which led to the students’ protests escalating in the first place.
The second stage -- and shrewdly piggybacking, immaculately prepped and timed -- extremist protest unleashed a firestorm of violence across Dhaka and in several other places in Bangladesh. It destroyed valuable national property and killed ruling party workers, even police.
With a country at stake, it was inevitable that Border Guard Bangladesh, the Ansar paramilitaries largely tasked to protect government property, and the Army would be called upon to quell unrest. Curfew accompanied an internet blackout -- after horrific images and information about brutality against students as much as the brutality of piggybacking extremism, had copiously leaked across Bangladesh, the region, and the world.
Then, amazingly, the government judicially pushed to scale-back and liberalize its quota policy after there was much blood on the streets. And, then, use this commonsense but too-little-too-late decision as a propaganda prop to disingenuously claim it had the moral high ground.
This is now well-documented, even the brutalizing of the initial, genuine students’ protest -- despite all official efforts to the contrary. Indeed, there will be immense pressure for continuing documentation and for justice that is seen to be done. Not first to the third degrees, as is the South Asian default, but a comprehensive and healing 360-degrees.
The ongoing slippage and chaos are really about the myopia and hubris that have derailed Bangladesh’s good news story for the short-to-medium-term -- and, if this Made-in-Bangladesh myopia and hubris continue, then for the long-term too.
Here, the point of expeditious damage control is not so much that the world will not pay attention to the goings-on in Bangladesh. if Israel can get by, for instance, so can Bangladesh, and so on, protected by its staunch allies. Naturally, allies like India and China and others are driven by geo-political and geo-economic expedience; even so, allies are useful. And superpower throws of dice in Bangladesh will surely, and quickly, amount to has-been moments for the greater good of geo-political equations across South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, prerequisites for the already-warm battle against Sino-Russian ingress.
But all this regional and global action won’t do a whit for calming and curing Bangladesh. That task rests with Bangladesh. In Bangladesh.
Hubris is perhaps the most abundant resource in South Asia after people and their potential -- the latter usually expressed in that glib macro-economic jargon, “demographic dividend.”
Nepal violently, raucously disengaged from a hubris-driven monarchy in 2006. King Gyanendra was booted out even as the palace lamented that the palace dogs had been deprived by the “Jan Andolan” -- people’s movement. Imported dog food for the palace dogs lay uncleared in the customs warehouse at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. Along with the loss of creature comforts came the loss of royal impunity. Crown Prince Paras, who had not too long earlier had run over and killed a folk singer -- an incident that was normalized as unfortunate instead of being reprehensible -- ended his run along with his prominence.
Their political inheritors, the democrats, have proved to be a fractious, hubris-laden lot who have routinely placed career over country. Nepal has seen 13 prime ministers since the formal end of the monarchy in 2008. The current and thirteenth, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, was also the seventh and the tenth. The person he replaced, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, PM #12 who freely wears his Maoist rebel-era nom de plume of Prachanda, “fierce,” was also PM #1 and PM #8. Altogether they have presided over a system rotten to its core. A tiny example: A trans-national telecom executive once told me over lunch at the tony Annapurna Café on Kathmandu’s Durbar Marg that he was asked for an amount in kickbacks that exceeded the value of a government project he was tried to land.
A former president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in May 2009 issued an LKR 1000 currency note with his likeness -- the obverse had optics ripped off from US Marines in Iwo Jima during World War II, and showed Sri Lankan Army soldiers planting the national flag, presumably in the country’s bulldozed Tamil areas.
During his term as prime minister between 2019 and 2022, almost coterminous with the presidency of his brother Gotabaya -- the Rajapaksa family firm had a python’s grip on the country’s politics, economy, security, and thuggery for 15 years -- Sri Lanka tanked. The Rajapaksa clan took the country down with them. A desperate resoluteness is now seeing a recovery of Sri Lanka.
Pakistan has of course remained in steady-state hubris since its birth; its hubris also helping to birth Bangladesh alongside unarguably the most embedded military-industrial complex in the region. Indeed, Pakistan has embraced hubris so completely that if it were to inoculate itself with real democracy the country might splinter in toxic shock.
Across that fractious border in India -- a country with which Bangladesh shares a 4,000km-plus long border -- hubris reached its zenith earlier this year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi openly discussed himself as being of divine origin. By eschewing his biological mother, Modi had embarked on an entirely logical bid -- at least in his mind – to set himself up as Millennial India’s three-term premier.
That he achieved in parliamentary elections that ended this past June, but in the process exposed himself, yet again -- and despite the massive, 24/7 misinformation- and disinformation-led projection of him as a saviour of Hindu-stan since his pre-anointment days in 2013 -- as just another smooth-talking, often-mendacious mortal.
Immaculate misconception lost to a resounding electoral verdict and has led to a parliamentary term of a cramping coalition and a resolute opposition. Call it vox pop-star.
Bangladesh is now in that hubris hot zone. Transparently and impeachably.
It’s abundantly clear to any thinking person, and certainly the now-hobbled but unforgiving students, that the flare-up could have been avoided had the government dialled down its hubris hustle and actually recognized that alongside the justifiable albeit overweening pride over showcase infrastructure projects, it also focused on improving SDG indicators, and fixing major disconnects like growing unemployment and unemployability. The head of the growth-and-wealth comet is, today, a lightyear away from the taken-for-granted tail.
It was also a bit rich for students and citizens to be lectured about doing the right thing in an atmosphere of months-long exposes of mind-numbing cronyism and corruption across the board, an abject reality that became the daily staple of media and nationwide conversation.
Trust in governance and government institutions will now have to be re-earned, not forced at the barrel of a gun or finessed with disinformation. Or else there will be an inevitable and irreversible calling to account. And, quite possibly, just transitions.
And names will need to be taken. Even that of she who should be named.
Sudeep Chakravarti is a South Asia risk and policy analyst.
