Travelling an uneven road to democracy
Shahid Alam probes the chaotic history of Bangladesh's politics
As things stand, Bangladesh is scheduled to go through an electoral process to vote in its ninth Parliament, and, keeping with the norms of parliamentary democracy, the next democratically-elected government to run the affairs of the country. After an unbroken run of three parliamentary democratic governments, which were marked as much by some major dysfunctions in governance and the political process as by significant achievements in several key social and economic indicators, the country has been in the undesirable grip of an emergency for close to two years. This state of languishing in the doldrums of political torpor certainly does not help in the march towards the establishment of liberal pluralist democracy in the country. There can be little equivocation that a combination of progressively virulent political partisanship, dubious and/or inept political leadership, and lack of democratic culture within the major political parties has contributed to a dysfunctional political process and system. Equally, there can be little doubt that other sinister elements, comprising internal and external actors and forces, failed and/or obscure politicians, retired bureaucrats, think tank gurus, NGO stalwarts, civil society-wallahs, social engineers, crass opportunists, agent provocateurs, and foreign elements of various descriptions, to name a few, by taking advantage of the prevailing state of affairs, in several instances actually instigating and exacerbating it, have been at least as much, if not more, guilty of expending their effort towards creating the situation that eventually culminated in the phenomenon called 1/11. One can only fervently hope that the road towards liberal pluralist democracy, whose most vital ingredient is creating a mindset for it among the general citizenry, is eventually cleared of its roadblocks. Besides the psychological factor of ingrained mindset, several fundamental institutional imperatives will have to be met for making the polity operational as well as meaningful. One of them is the holding of periodic elections. The book under review has taken a fairly long, if not quite hard, look at elections and the electoral process in Bangladesh from the 1970 parliamentary election to that of 2001. After briefly introducing the reader to a theoretical overview of the concepts of election and democracy, and a slightly fuller treatment of the failed attempts at establishing democracy in Pakistan leading up to, and including, the critical (in several ways)1970 election, Mannan deals at much greater length on events in Bangladesh. Much of the second half of the book, which discusses all the parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2001, including the controversial February 1996 polls, follows a generally routine pattern, providing a backdrop to the election, pre-poll arrangements, election manifestoes of the major parties, the election campaigns, the polls, outcome, and reaction to the results from the losers, winners, and international and local observers. Much of the discussion is matter-of-fact, at times skirting around hotly contentious issues, rarely going deep into the likely reasons indicating why the country has been plagued by an unwholesome political culture, or its offshoot, the state of liberal pluralist democracy that has fallen significantly short of, let alone that of the United States, Great Britain and other advanced democracies, but of the very fundamentals of the polity, including elections that leave a significant portion of the population dissatisfied with the results, and the losing political parties carping ad infinitum, eventually, almost inevitably, inducing them at some point to boycott parliamentary sessions for protracted periods. Mannan mentions the matter of rejection of results by the losing major party (Awami League or BNP, as the case might be), starting from the 1991 election, when the demon of discord manifested itself with Sheikh Hasina, after having expressed her "deep satisfaction" over the voting process, complained, on losing, that the election had been rigged, after all. A mirror image reaction was given, after the 1996 election results were announced, with BNP asserting rigging. The ante was upped in the 2001 election when the Awami League charged across-the-board rigging "under the blueprint jointly prepared by the BNP-led alliance, caretaker government and the Election Commission." No matter that foreign and local election observers had characterised each poll as having been generally free, fair, and impartial. As an interesting sidelight, the case of the sore loser taking refuge behind allegations of vote rigging has been observed in several of the relatively newer democracies over the last few years. Maybe this is a phenomenon that confirms Samuel P Huntington's proposition in 1968 that the developing countries are not always likely to create liberal-democratic institutions, or that it is a passing phenomenon that will fade as democracies mature, but it is one that has to be satisfactorily brought to a conclusion if a mindset for democracy has to become a part of a person's persona. If political intolerance, mutual exclusivity and distrust have paved the way for the decidedly non-democratic pernicious concoction called the caretaker government system, then inevitably it has become the easy scapegoat of political parties, especially after election results are announced. It is a system that needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history by the next Parliament. The author indicates at the inherent anomaly of the caretaker system: "...the issue of a caretaker government soon divided the political forces into two contending groups: BNP government vs. major opposition parties headed by AL." Mannan dwells at some length on the shame associated with the farcical interlude famously known as the February 1996 election for the fifth Parliament. He uses it as an example to support his thoughtful hypothesis, originally postulated by Robert Dahl, that "...a regime's rule or some of its other activities can be legalized constitutionally, but political crisis remains unresolved and it obstructs the development of a stable democratic order. So, constitutional rule alone without other prerequisites for democracy seems trivial for democratic development." The same chapter lays bare an unpleasant truism that does not speak well of this country's government and politics, as indeed of a gamut of people and organisations outside the purview of the government structure: "In a poor country like Bangladesh, usually donor countries exert a significant influence upon decision-making (sic) process at national level." Turning to electoral politics during the Ziaur Rahman regime, Mannan terms the state system that he initiated since November 7, 1975 as an "administrative state", and the structure that came into being after the 1979 parliamentary election as appearing as being "democratic, but...was in fact dominated by the civil-military bureaucratic elites under a centralized system of authority." And, preceding and foreshadowing HM Ershad's longer term in power, Zia actively sought, through a combination of referendum, presidential and parliamentary election, to legitimize his and his party's rule. The author's comment with regard to Ershad is appropriate in terms of military rule: "Since Ershad came in power (sic) overthrowing an elected civilian government, he urgently needed the consent of the people in order to make his rule legitimate and more endurable. For this purpose, he stepped forward for legitimization of his rule through elections." Elections and Democracy in Bangladesh is mercifully free of an unseemly number of editorial errors/oversights. Of the very few that have crept in, one is particularly glaring in terms of an erroneous presentation: "...most of the Muslims (in Bangladesh) belong to the Shiite set of Islam that brought religious harmony in this country." While the book fails to explore the probable deep-rooted causes that have placed liberal pluralist democracy and one of its fundamental ingredients, periodic elections, under a cloud since the country's inception, it is an honest attempt at chronicling the electoral experience in Bangladesh. It would serve as an adequate textbook in the field of government and politics in Bangladesh.
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