A tale of two administrations

I have to confess that this thought occurred to me too when I arrived in the country in mid-2003 after spending most of the past fifteen years in the US, and that the more familiar I become with the polity here in Bangladesh, the more strikingly apt seems the comparison.

Perhaps (to stand Tolstoy on his head) all unhappy governments are alike.

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Perhaps there is something about the arrogance of power combined with the sycophancy of those close to the seat of power that results in all beleaguered administrations seeming to be so clueless and out of touch with the concerns of the public.

Perhaps all government mismanagement and incompetence can be reduced to the administration placing personal or party interest above the national interest.

Or perhaps we are reversing cause and effect, and it is their similarities which have led to the two governments' under-performance and unpopularity. But, whatever it is, the two administrations have very similar instincts and very similar problems.

The first point of similarity is between what some in the US media have dubbed the "imperial presidency" of George Bush and what I would call the "imperial prime ministership" of Khaleda Zia.

In the US, this amounts to unprecedented and virtually unlimited exercise of executive authority and privilege, and the idea that the Bush administration is unaccountable, either to the other branches of government or to the public. Sound familiar?

The consequences are virtually identical in each country. The same out-of-touch leadership with dictatorial and anti-democratic inclinations. The same contempt for the media. The same obsession with image and "spin" and elevation of appearance over reality. The same insistence that things are going well when it is obvious to the voters that the opposite is true. The same inability to admit mistakes let alone to correct them. The same smearing of political opponents as unpatriotic and treacherous and giving aid and comfort to the nation's enemies.

In fact, when it comes to politics, the similarities do not end with the likeness that the BNP bears to the Republicans. It is perhaps unsurprising that there also seem to be parallels between the clueless Democrats in the US and the hapless AL here in Bangladesh.

The first similarity is in their media and public relations. Just as the Republicans run rings around the Democrats when it comes to propagandizing and framing the various political debates to their advantage, so too does the BNP public relations savvy and political acumen dwarf that of the opposition.

Like the Democrats, the AL always seems to get itself boxed into a corner. It is forever failing to take advantage of the political opportunities that the government provides, and it always seems to be on the back foot when it comes to public relations and communication.

There are similarities in terms of ideology and outlook as well. Both the AL and the Democrats are slightly left-of-centre while the BNP and the Republicans are right-of-centre. Both the AL and the Democrats are more pro-minority and pro-women and pro-poor in their policies and beliefs.

Both the BNP and the Republicans believe in a more bellicose foreign policy and are popularly thought to be the party of business, though, as in the US, where the economy fares better under Democratic administrations, so too in Bangladesh, there is no actual evidence for the proposition that the BNP is better for business than its rival.

One significant similarity is the role the religious right has played in both the Republican party and the four-party alliance. In the US, many believe that the Republican party has been more or less taken over by the religious right and that much policy is controlled by the interests of this large but influential minority.

The situation is almost identical here in Bangladesh, where the fundamentalist religious parties have pushed the alliance government far to the right, and retain an influence and authority that is far out of proportion to their actual numerical strength, with the result that the entire society has been moving steadily rightward, too.

The most striking similarity is in the balance of political power. Both the BNP and the Republicans have the edge when it comes to frequency of office and the AL and the Democrats seem to perennially be the party of opposition.

It is an interesting co-incidence that the AL came to power in 1996, the same year that Bill Clinton was re-elected president (the first Democrat since FDR in 1944), and that the BNP returned to power in 2001, barely nine months into George Bush's first term.

There does seem to be a natural affinity in terms of ideology and outlook between the BNP and Republicans on one side and the AL and Democrats on the other, and this might help explain the continuing indulgence the Bush administration appears to retain towards the four-party alliance and the otherwise inexplicable soft spot that so many US government officials seem to have for our current regime.

As it happens, 2006 is shaping up to be an interesting year in both US and Bangladeshi politics. The Republicans are already concerned about the Congressional elections due in November that they fear could return both houses of Congress to the Democrats and further isolate the president. Meanwhile, here in Bangladesh, we have elections scheduled for the end of the year, and the voters are looking restless.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.