Almost every week another building goes up in flames and dozens die in Dhaka. For those wondering why nothing is done to fix the zoning, structural, and fire code violations, ask yourself this: what is the incentive for an unelected government to do that ESPECIALLY when the violators—almost always big businesses with ownership interest held …
Category Archives: The Party and the State
The Cadre’s Training School ULAB
Every dictatorship needs its own institution of higher learning to train cadres outside of the military academies. China has its Central Party School; the USSR had its The Higher Party School or VPSch. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had its Saddam University (now called Nahrein University). The purpose for all these was to train smooth faced interlocutors …
Dictator vs. Prime Minister
One of the great myths–regularly perpetuated by most Western media and think-tank types who see peripheral South Asian countries through the organic lens of the British parliamentary system or its robust Indian counterpart–is that Bangladesh has independent institutions that are merely flawed. Junior reporters or freshman analysts or interns who are often starved of research …
Pearls before swines
There is a saying in many South Asian languages that the wicked rarely listen to reason, let alone morality…kind of like the pearls before swines adage. Bangladesh’s one-party, one-family regime is no different. Messages, diplomatic notes, exhortations, and cautionary advice to these people is unlikely to do much. Short of Magnitsky type sanctions on key …
Only in Bong-land!
Awami League apologists like Gowher Rizvi and his ilk regularly regale us about how Bangladesh is the epitome of Westminster parliamentary democracy…..but shy away from the obvious truth that only in Bangladesh among such ‘democracies’ is the ruling party and the ‘official’ Opposition (Jatiya Party) elected as electoral coalition partners. It is the statecraft equivalent …
The torture prince of Virginia
One of the greater ironies of the Bangladeshi junta is that the ‘crown prince’ Sajib Wazed ‘Joy’ who is the son of the Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hasina and a cabinet level adviser on information technology to his mommy, lives in Virginia under the freedoms afforded by America’s Constitution while directing the surveillance, capture, and torture …
Second line enforcers of the Bangladeshi regime
The Bangladeshi regime’s grassroots terror squad “BCL” gets far less attention than its counterparts like the “Basij” in Iran, the “War Veterans” in Zimbabwe, or the “ANCYL” of South Africa do, for reasons ranging from its 1950s beginning as a student organization to the fact that most foreign journalists covering Bangladesh are too lazy to …
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Selling the dream of a Stalinist state
Despite the oft-repeated ludicrous claims of its mandarins that the ruling Awami League party is the most liberal political outfit https://bdnews24.com/politics/2018/12/24/awami-league-briefs-diplomats-on-election-issues, the truth is uglier and compelling. In its first run at the helm of Bangladesh in the 1972-1973 period, the party abolished a Westminster multi-party democracy and installed a Stalinist one-party state under an …