This is not Pakistan, and yet . . .

Bangladesh, he was happy to point out, is a different proposition altogether, for here it is always the people who have exercised the right to elect a government they think will deliver the goods. It is a sentiment we can truly appreciate. After all, the creation of Bangladesh through a determined military struggle against Pakistan in 1971 was based on the very sober principle that the Bengali state was an idea absolutely removed from the politics on which the Pakistani structure was based.

What happened in 1971 was simple enough. We replaced the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with the secular People's Republic of Bangladesh, and for a number of extremely good reasons. While we believed that religion was a part of individual life, we refused to accept the thought that the faith of individuals should become the guiding principles of the state. That was the story.

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Until things began to go awry in the mid 1970s. The reality today, despite Reaz Rahman, is that we in Bangladesh have not only emulated the Pakistani example of government in quite a few instances but may also have gone beyond that. Take the matter of third forces not rearing their heads in this country. Contrary to what the advisor for foreign affairs might suggest, the fact remains that in Bangladesh such third forces have interfered with the business of the state not once but four times in the past thirty-five years.

If you recall correctly, there were as many as three coups d'etat within a span of three months in 1975. The first one, on August 15, was a truly decisive blow to the ethos of the country. It not only left the founding father of the nation and his family dead in a hail of gunfire but also clearly turned the entire secular underpinning of the country on its head.

The shock generated on the day was not merely that a military coup had overthrown a civilian elected government. It was at the same time a throwback to the old Pakistani era of the military undermining the process of civilian control of government and society.

The story of a third force seizing the state in Bangladesh is, therefore, an old one. We cannot look away from such gross realities even if we wish to. After August, the series of coups and counter coups that laid the country low in November are facts of politics that clearly pushed us into directions from which we had veered away during the War of Liberation and in the early years of freedom. Maybe the Khaled Musharraf coup would have helped us get back to secular statehood. That chance was, however, destroyed by the counter-coup of November 7 that placed Ziaur Rahman in power.

And, of course, there is the long, sad tale of all the battering our self-esteem as a people has received through the long years of the Ershad military dictatorship from 1982 until 1990. To be sure, we may not be like the Pakistanis, who have spent much of their life as a nation in the dark shadow of their armed forces. But let us be under no illusion either.

Post-1975, we as a people have progressively passed into a regressive idea of nationhood in this free state of Bangladesh. And regarding that comparison with Pakistan, let no one forget that all the coups that have occurred in that country have been bloodless affairs. In Bangladesh, soldiers and officers, scores of them, have died even as a coup has gone under way. And one ought to remember as well that besides the four coups in question, there have been as many as eighteen abortive coups, all in the Zia period, and all leaving their sad marks on the psyche of the nation. Does the comparison with Pakistan, where weighing the costs involved in mounting coups, still hold good?

While you ponder that question, consider how we in Bangladesh have somewhat assiduously built upon the Pakistani legacy and may indeed have improved upon it. After August 1975, in scenes reminiscent of the Islamabad canvas, we have had military officers grace Bangladesh's sports organizations, assume ambassadorial positions in the foreign service, and even become heads of semi-autonomous organizations. Army officers have regularly been appointed inspectors general of police in the country.

When it is a military officer who is placed at the head of such an organization as the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority, you tend to convince yourself that Bengalis have not really lagged behind Pakistanis in the way they have been trying to manage themselves. From a broad perspective, the nature of the political and social system that has held sway in Bangladesh in the past three decades has encompassed a diversity of sectors.

Observe the bureaucracy. When Bangabandhu inaugurated his Second Revolution in early 1975, one of the more significant aspects of it was a decentralization of authority through segmenting the country into sixty districts, each of which would be headed by a governor. That in turn would mean a slicing away of the authority of tradition-bound bureaucrats, particularly the class of civil servants that had entered the administration through the Central Superior Services of Pakistan.

It would have done Bangladesh a wealth of good if Bangabandhu could follow through on his goals. His murder put paid to the objectives his government had set for the country; and since that time the power of the bureaucracy has steadily been on the rise, to a point where (in a fashion that reminds us of Pakistan) it has regularly undercut politicians as they have striven to put their principles into practice. Indeed, the civilian-military bureaucratic complex that has consistently dominated Pakistan was patently replicated in Bangladesh, especially in the times of General Hussein Muhammad Ershad. A closer, detailed observation of the workings of the bureaucracy in Islamabad and Dhaka should be cause enough for anyone to detect similarities in the administrative systems of the two countries.

No, we are not Pakistan, as the advisor for foreign affairs so forcefully informs us. But we in Bangladesh have not been far behind it. When you watch, in sheer helplessness, the constant, unchecked hounding of the Ahmadiyya community in this country, you cannot but recall the murderous frenzy with which Moulana Abul Ala Moudoodi unleashed his followers on Pakistan's Ahmadiyyas in 1953. Twenty one years later, the same mobs, older and more sinister, compelled Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to declare his country's Ahmadiyyas as non-Muslims. And thus were men like Sir Zafrullah Khan and Professor Abdus Salam rendered non-entities. That was Pakistan.

But what has been happening to the Ahmadiyya community in Bangladesh in the last five years has been nothing short of a systematic persecution of a community that has never sought to disturb its neighbours. The authorities in Dhaka have kept up a constant refrain of Bangladesh's being a land of communal harmony and yet they have consciously, cool-headedly outlawed the printing and publication of any Ahmadiyya literature. Hypocrisy has thus been transported to new heights. The vehemence with which the writer Taslima Nasreen has been treated should serve as a powerful sign of the degree to which intolerance has turned into a way of life in this supposedly liberal society. When you do not have the capacity to share space with dissidence, you cannot truly claim a place for yourself among the world's pluralistic societies.

Of course we are not like Pakistan. Our poetry, our cultural heritage, the story of our struggle for freedom, are all a testimony to our wholesomeness as a nation. That is the idealistic part, the spot where we think we see Golden Bengal, Shonar Bangla, taking root. But it is the ground realities that ought to matter.

Our state is not the same thing as Pakistan. But should we not recall that communal undertones were injected into our constitution by a military regime in the 1970s? Sure, we are different from Pakistan, but when you remember how the Ershad dictatorship imposed a religion on the state of Bangladesh in the 1980s, you know the differences between Dhaka and Islamabad have somehow got blurred.

And then there is the small matter of social iniquities. Whole classes of nouveau riche, or yuppies as some would say, have emerged in both countries -- and they have not been unduly worried about the responsibilities to society that comes with an acquisition of wealth. You cannot explain the wealth of the few and the appalling miseries of the many in Pakistan. It is a truth you stumble into here in Bangladesh, where the number of millionaires has gone up, together with a proliferation of the millions whose future now probably belongs in their past.

In Pakistan, politicians politely stay away from any discussion of allocations for the military in the annual national budget. In Bangladesh, its political classes copy the practice.

No, this is not Pakistan. And yet ...

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.