It was a deft touch in his address to the nation Wednesday night when the chief adviser wryly noted that he wouldn’t ask his fellow countrymen and women to be patient when it comes to the reforms he and his government are undertaking.
Bangladeshis are not a patient people and already scarcely a month into the tenure of the interim government we hear grumbles of discontent as to how slowly things are moving and how is it that Bangladesh has not yet sloughed off fifteen years of misrule and emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of August 5.
Of course, the interim government has made its fair share of missteps, and if we are being blunt not all of them have to do with the exigency of time or the mess that they inherited. As is the case for all governments, some of their mistakes have been entirely of their own making.
But, that said, any fair reckoning of the one month since the interim government was sworn in and able to get down to business would have to concede that it has accomplished more in one month than any previous government in Bangladesh's history and that too from a starting point that was anything but propitious.
In this context I feel that it is important not to lose sight of where we were as a nation a scant forty days ago. Similarly, I feel that it is incumbent on us to fully recognize what the nation had become under the last fifteen years of AL rule and to articulate how and why, as slow and tortuous as the road back may be, that we are in an exponentially better place as a people than we were prior to the revolution.
I think that for people outside of the country it is hard to fully grasp the extent of the violence done to the Bangladeshi people by the outgoing Hasina regime.
It is easy enough to understand and condemn its worst excess: the disappearances, secret prisons, crossfire killings, custodial abuse and torture that made Bangladesh a black hole for human rights.
Similarly, it is easy enough to comprehend the monumental scale of looting and corruption that saw billions plundered from the public exchequer while the common man and woman struggled to make ends meet.
Nor is it hard to discern the problem with the theft of three national elections in a row that kept the regime in power regardless of its record or how the voting public felt about it.
But, astounding as this may sound, given the gravity of what I have detailed, all of the above only scratches the surface of the real spiritual violence done to the Bangladeshi people by the Hasina regime.
We need to understand just how broken this country had become
It is hard to put into words just how corrosive and corrupting to the soul it was to have to live in such a country for the past decade.
There is a reason why even educated Bangladeshis routinely risked life and limb to work as busboys, kitchen assistants, taxi drivers, day labourers, construction workers, domestic help, anything anywhere just to get out of this country.
It wasn’t just the money.
This was a country where you couldn’t tell the truth. Where we all had to participate in a never-ending parade of falsehood and untruth from the moment we woke up to the moment we fell asleep at night, worn out by the strain of living a life of deceit. We were told what to think, what to believe, what to say. We choked on the official truth that was crammed down our throats and we were unable to utter the simple refrain that it was not so.
This was a country where a people famous for their loquaciousness suddenly became circumspect and hesitant in their speech. People looked over their shoulder and dropped their voice before saying anything that might even pass for disloyalty. The walls had ears and no one could be trusted. You never knew when something you said might be passed on to the security agencies. This was a country where people switched off their phones when gathered together, ever fearful that Big Brother was listening.
The malady infected every organ of the body politic and got worse the higher up you went. The more you were willing to say things you knew were not true, the more you were willing to sacrifice your dignity and self-respect, the more shameless and obsequious you were willing to be in service of the official party line, the higher you rose.
This, above all, was what Hasina had done to Bangladesh. She had turned it into a kakistocracy -- the rule of the worst.
Imagine being a young person growing up in this country and the damage that would be done to you as a result. In conversation with the student leaders and foot soldiers of the revolution, the one point so many of them come back to was that as a generation they are suffering trauma that manifests itself in all kinds of maladies, physical, emotional, spiritual. How could it be otherwise when the only life you have known is life in this looking glass world where everything is wrong. Their whole life was a lie. It was the only life you could lead in Bangladesh until forty days ago.
We need to understand just how broken this country had become. We need to understand that everything was wrong. And I’m not talking about the fact that for fifteen years Hasina had packed the police, the courts, the administration, every institution you can name with her loyalists and turned out all the good, conscientious, committed people who refused to knuckle under to her despotism.
It was worse than that. This was a country that was spiritually broken almost beyond repair. This was a country that had been corrupted from top to bottom. That is what Dr Yunus and his team are dealing with and putting right, slowly but surely.
It’s not something you can fix overnight.
Zafar Sobhan is Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
