The Bangladeshi neo-cons

There remains some confusion about what the label actually denotes and who precisely comes under its rubric.

The term has been used, not quite accurately, as short-hand for those in the Bush administration with links to the expansionist Project for the New American Century, a Washington DC-based think tank that champions a hawkish and unilateral vision of US global leadership, that had long pushed for the ouster of Saddam Hussein as the first step in remaking the Middle East according to US strategic imperatives.

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The confusion stems from the fact that there is considerable overlap between neo-con thinkers and members of PNAC. But the term "neo-con" was originally coined to describe (as the prefix "neo" would seem to indicate) conservatives who started out on the left of the political spectrum and for one reason or another ended up on the right.

The political transformation of most of the original neo-cons in the 1950s and 60s can be attributed largely to what they saw as insufficiently hawkish foreign policy on the part of the American left, and the original neo-cons included people such as Irving Kristol, now a senior fellow at the AEI, who famously described a neo-con as "a liberal mugged by reality."

But it is interesting to note that the US is not the only country with its neo-conservative coterie that has succeeded in insinuating itself into the corridors of power and advancing its foreign policy agenda.

Remarkably enough, perhaps, Bangladeshi politics also has its fair share of politicians and intellectuals who started out on the left of the political spectrum, but are today to be found on the extreme right, and have, in the course of their own peregrinations, succeeded in moving the country's foreign policy to the right as well.

If you asked them about their political and philosophical inclinations and affiliations, they would probably still profess to be leftists at heart. Despite their fancy official vehicles, and their multi-million dollar Gulshan residences, and their sons and daughters studying or living in the US, they might still have pictures of Che Guevara on their walls,

and their libraries almost definitely still contain a well-thumbed copy of Mao's little red book.

But in terms of the domestic and the foreign policy that they champion, and the political alliances they have formed over the years, there is nothing remotely leftist about them any more.

The Bangladeshi neo-cons, like their American counterparts, started their political careers on the left in the 1950s and 60s. When the left split in the mid-1960s, most of today's neo-cons, though not all, ended up in the pro-Peking faction.

Many of the pro-Peking leftists were skeptical of the liberation struggle due to the fact that their affiliation was to the Chinese, who were allies of the Pakistan government, and believed that the liberation struggle would ultimately serve only to advance Indian regional interests and to create an Indian client state.

In any event, they had always despised the Awami League, who were spear-heading the liberation struggle, and whom they thought of as bourgeois and in the thrall of the Indians and the Russians.

Some of the this section of the Bangladeshi neo-cons sat out the liberation war, some opposed it, and others supported it but distanced themselves from the AL. As a result, they found themselves marginalized and side-lined upon independence. For them, it has been a long hard road back from the political wilderness.

They were soon to be joined by another stream of leftists who had been very active in the liberation war, but were more radical than the senior AL leadership, and immediately upon independence started a movement to establish a revolutionary leftist government.

The response of the AL government to these threats to its authority from the left was not its finest. Extreme measures were taken, and for many of those who were at the forefront of the left in the post-independence days, though significantly, not all, antipathy to the AL due to the excesses of those days became the touchstone of their political existence.

It was this antipathy to the AL that permitted Zia-ur-Rahman to co-opt some of the leftist elements into his fledgling political party after he came to power in 1975. Paradoxically, the remnants of the left became an integral part of the new right-of-centre coalition that Zia cobbled together, that eventually became the BNP, the majority party in the country today.

If it seems odd that erstwhile leftists would make common cause with the rest of the political flotsam and jetsam, most of whom inhabited the right of the political spectrum, that Zia populated his party with, it should be remembered that, just as what motivated the American neo-cons was their antipathy to the Democratic party, the principle motivation for the Bangladeshi neo-cons was their antipathy to the AL.

The BNP is where most of the Bangladeshi neo-cons reside to this day, though some joined the JP in the 1980s and are still active in its leadership.

Thus, now in Bangladesh we have the rather interesting situation that these erstwhile leftists are sitting in the same government as religious fundamentalists, whom one would have thought would have been their ideological opposites. It is a fascinating turn of events, but as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.

The Bangladeshi neo-cons are not quite the cancer on the Bangladeshi body politic that the neo-cons are in the US. They have not, for instance, embroiled us in an unwinnable war in the Middle East. But there are distinct similarities between the two constituencies which bear some close examination.

First of all, on the lunatic fringe you have the proponents of Brihot Bangladesh, who in their hawkish delusions are not a million miles away from their American counterparts. But it must be said that one will not find any sensible or influential Bangladeshi neo-con advancing such an agenda. At least not publicly, anyway.

But where the Bangladeshi neo-cons have had the most pernicious impact is in terms of relations with India, and of course, in addition to their antipathy to the AL, this is the one principle that they have in common with their fundamentalist allies as well as the more right-wing elements who originally made up the BNP.

The one principle they have retained from their days on the left is their pathological opposition to India and belief that there can be no rapprochement between Bangladesh and India.

It is the Bangladeshi neo-cons who have been the instrumental intellectual force behind the continuing friction between the two countries, and it is they who are the most vocal in their opposition to better relations between Bangladesh and India.

In this century, much of Bangladesh's future development and advancement depends on our ability to connect up to the outside world. This in turn is dependent on our ability to forge productive relations with the entire region, especially India, which surrounds us on three sides, and is the gateway to south-east Asia, China, and beyond, and this is where the negative thinking of the Bangladeshi neo-cons is holding us back.

So there you have it. America is not the only country in the world with its neo-conservative elements, and, as in the US, the ascendance of the Bangladeshi neo-cons has not come without its costs to the common good. The parallels between the two movements are striking and not at all comforting.

The time has come to recognize that the Bangladeshi neo-cons and the increasingly negative regional foreign policy that they are championing is only serving to isolate us and is thus detrimental to our national interest. It is not the Iraq war, but in the long run, in terms of our relations with the outside world, this school of thought can have just as pernicious an impact on our polity as the neo-cons have had in the US.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.