In the good old days of the Soviet empire, client states like Poland and East Germany had their own public relations version of representative democracy, where elections were regularly held and pliant rumps of non-Communist parties were not only allowed to participate but often forced to do so for the sake of appearances.
In fact, there was an unwritten understanding that such “opposition” parties were to be given a percentage of seats in the largely impotent parliaments; this unwritten understanding was executed flawlessly through the Communist regimes’ total monopoly over the process of nomination, vote counting, and certification of the results by virtue of their exclusive control of the electoral commissions and civil administrations. To easily-duped journalists and starry-eyed idealists of the Stalinist model, this kind of “democracy” provided some justification that the ruling Communists were, in reality, democrats of the first rate.
Sounds familiar? Sadly, as Eastern Europe has moved from stage-managed farces of elections, Bangladesh seems to be moving precisely in the opposite direction. The prime minister’s ruse of using her Oxford-educated, Harvard professor-turned-adviser to lend a sheen of respectability to this farcical exercise is unlikely to fool anyone in either Boston or Barisal.
Even her most ardent ideological apologist in the country’s largest non-vernacular daily has bluntly said that an election where more than half the candidates get elected unopposed is not really an election. The question is not if we will be shaken back into a reality that a power-drunk government refuses to see, but only how, when, and at what astronomical, social, and economic cost. The political cost, of course, keeps mounting every day.
Methodically, this government has destroyed the independence of the nation’s precious few respectable independent institutions that were painstakingly built up over the last twenty years in the public and private sectors: the Anti-Corruption Commission, the Election Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, Grameen Bank, Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission, and, last but not least, the national parliament itself.
Every public agency, commission, and constitutional body is no more than a mere appendage of the prime minister’s office now, notwithstanding the vocal denials of the cerebral information minister of the comically named “all-party government.” The tragedy is that this state of affairs was unlikely to be much different if the prime minister’s main adversary was in power instead.
Thus, when we are shaken back to reality, the temptation of finding a quick solution to regime overreach and fair elections should be checked in favour of longer lasting structural reforms that ensure an avoidance of election year mayhem routinely every five years. The cause of this mayhem is simple: the leading lights of Bangladeshi politics truly believe that the government of the day owns the country and the prime minister of the day owns the government, and therefore, any challenge towards the ambition of life-long rule is treason.
The solution, which has been fought tooth and nail by politicians of every stripe whenever it was tried in the past, is to put in structural roadblocks in the organic law of the land so that the integrity of democratic governance is not left to the mercy of men and women who have shown marked inability to resist the temptation of arrogating to themselves absolutism over their fellow citizens. That is exactly the approach that neighbouring countries like India and Pakistan have both adopted.
The key to a permanent solution is one that has already been tried successfully in both India and Pakistan: a truly independent and muscular election commission whose composition and plenary powers are spelled out in the Constitution, making it difficult for the government of the day to tamper with the commission’s neutrality.
Rather than make it simply another pathetic appendage of the state bureaucracy as it is today, constitutional amendments should ensure that the commission has its membership chosen by the president only on the unanimous advice of an all-party parliamentary committee empanelled specifically for that purpose.
Such constitutional reforms also need to establish that the commission’s power during the period between the end of one parliament and the inauguration of the next is paramount in matters of deploying the civil bureaucracy, police forces, and election machinery, subject only to judicial review at the Supreme Court.
The original Constitution left out these details, perhaps under the illusion that Bangladeshi politicians had the democratic maturity and innate decency that their British counterparts did. After all, the model for its author, Dr Kamal Hossain, was the Westminster system.
Four decades later, we should be thoroughly cured of the nonsensical notion that our professional politicians are selfless, tolerant, decent democrats when in the saddle of power.
As any neutral observer looking at Bangladesh can see today, it far less resembles any normal democracy, and far more an autocracy that was once elected, and is gutting every institution and process that will cause it to submit to any real election ever again.
If the prime minister’s adviser doesn’t know the difference between those two resemblances, one has to shed tears at the precipitous decline of the quality of scholarship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
