Ground Realities
A consensus government -- and no opposition?
IN a season brimming over with some novel ideas about governance and statecraft, Professor AQM Badruddoza Chowdhury's suggestion that, once the elections of 2008 are gone through, a government of national consensus might be put in place (for a decade!) only adds to the excitement. You only have to recapitulate everything that has happened in these past few months to get a sense of where the country is going, or trying to go.
When the Iajuddin caretaker administration was peremptorily shown the door, to our intense relief, through an imposition of a state of emergency, it was the natural popular expectation that free, fair and transparent elections would be organised, and the country would soon go back into the hands of decent, caring politicians after the kleptocracy that passed for government between October 2001 and October 2006. Well, that did not happen, as we know only too well by now.
What did happen, though, was a drive against corruption, an undertaking that the nation had little reason to argue with, by and large. And then began to happen all those exciting, disquieting things which have at regular intervals raised some rather hefty questions about the state of national politics in the days to be. Suddenly, everyone began to talk about reforms in the political parties. That was not a bad idea, except for the eerie feeling that somehow it did not emerge from spontaneity.
At this point, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party happens to be waging a huge reform-or-die cum reform-and-die struggle within itself, one that pits the reformists against the conformists in the party. Sad though it may seem for many, the fact remains that the reformist camp led by ousted BNP secretary general Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan appears weaker by the day. Khondokar Delwar Hossain is certainly not the man to lead the party into the future, but he and Hannan Shah have clearly convinced their party activists that loyalty to Begum Khaleda Zia is light unto the future.
Ditch the Begum, so they appear to be saying, and you are as good as dead. But that by no means is a suggestion that the BNP has been getting its act together. Much more water will have to flow under the bridge before any single group gains the upper hand and finally is able to take charge of that shuttered down headquarters of the party in downtown Dhaka.
Now observe the Awami League. The activities, or the lack of them, of the reformists in the party in these past few weeks say a whole lot about conditions within its corridors. Suranjit Sengupta has come back home after quite a few months of sojourn abroad. Amir Hossain Amu keeps moving to and fro, between Dhaka and Singapore. Tofail Ahmed, having initially promoted the reformist cause in the party, has wisely fallen silent. And the inclusion of his name on the newest list of corruption suspects has somehow dampened the reform ardour in him. Overall, therefore, all talk of reforms in the Awami League is something no one in the party wishes to think back on, especially not with Sheikh Hasina spending time in imprisonment.
The contrast between the BNP and the AL could not have been clearer. The former might, in the end, be compelled to ditch Begum Zia, with or without reforms. In the latter, there is hardly any sign that the broad spectrum of the party grassroots is even remotely considering a future without the daughter of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as its leader. The Hasina loyalists in the Awami League have just made it known once more that reforms are not on the agenda, at least not yet. Mukul Bose, acting party general secretary over the past few months, has made way for the eminently decent and widely acceptable Syed Ashraful Islam.
Excitement, if you have cared to notice, does not begin and end with the political parties. You spot it in other realms as well. The Election Commission, reconstituted since the early days of this interim administration, has persistently and exasperatingly offered hope to the country about a final preparation of a voters' list. Months have gone by and yet no enumerators have gone visiting citizens to enlist their names as voters. Chief Election Commissioner ATM Shamsul Huda, having all these months endlessly reassured us about general elections being held by December 2008, now informs us with a bit of alacrity that the voting could happen by October of next year, two months before the original date.
You almost get into a state of frenzied happiness, until you spot that footnote in the CEC's statement: elections in October are possible if a voters' list is ready by July of next year. It all boils down to a question of ifs and buts. So what you for a while thought could be your October surprise may not be there after all. Or you could reflect on things somewhat philosophically. There have been so many surprises in these past many months that you might actually end up being indifferent to any new ones. It is all a matter of choice.
And yet there is that small bit you need to do to put things in perspective. After what was a clear non-starter for Muhammad Yunus in national politics, along came Ferdous Qureshi with his new party that is not yet a new party. Not much has happened to convince the country that Qureshi and his friends can supplant the Awami League or even the BNP in the near future. That is not surprising. Men who try hammering political parties into shape in conditions that leave eyebrows raised everywhere in the end find that they do not get anywhere. That may be a good thing for a nation today worried about some clear moves being made to give politics a bad name owing to the depredations of the government Khaleda Zia led until a year ago.
Which takes us back to Badruddoza Chowdhury's plans for a government of national consensus post-2008. Of course, he has advised critics of his plan to read through his suggestions before pouncing on him. Well, the truth is that those critics have indeed pored over his suggestions and found nothing in them that comes close to offering a mechanism for a strengthening of democratic order in Bangladesh. The constitution has no provision for such an administration. Yes, certainly we can opt for a national government when extraordinary circumstances -- and among these are the country's being in a state of war, or general elections producing a stalemate at the voting -- are upon us.
Barring such exigencies, why must political parties agree that whatever the results of the elections they can come together to form a national government? Britain had such a government in the war years, understandably. In 1946, the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League cobbled such a government into shape, with not very happy results. And remember that in January 1971, more than a month after the Awami League secured a majority of seats in the Pakistan national assembly through general elections, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto tried persuading Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman into forming a grand Awami League-People's Party coalition in Islamabad. Mujib gave, for very cogent reasons, short shrift to Bhutto's sophistry.
Dr Chowdhury's arguments, given the clear democratic goals the country has set for itself, fall flat. He has not explained what his idea of consensus is. And he does not tell us why a party that might gain a majority of seats in the Jatiyo Sangsad should be asking the minority party to join it in government. As former Jatiyo Sangsad speaker Abdul Hamid puts it in so many words, and for all of us: how much of democracy do you get to have when every legislator is a cog in the wheel of government and parliamentary opposition is conspicuous by its absence?
These are opaque times we live through, an uncertain landscape we inhabit. But that is little reason for us to suppose that time-honoured democratic political traditions can be set aside only because some among us may have brought crudity into governance and some others might be dreaming of their own day in the sun under a new order. Bikalpa Dhara may turn into the Liberal Democratic Party and then go back to being Bikalpa Dhara. Politics, on the other hand, is an entirely different proposition.
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