Given how ‘elections’ happen in Bangladesh, the mayoral one in the northern half of the capital Dhaka is no surprise with the usual make-believe candidates running against the anointed ruling junta selectee and the press showing all the silly coverage of phony canvassing and long queues at polling booths. It is doubly phony since the mayors of any city in Bangladesh have little more than ceremonial duties: they have no control over the roads, healthcare, utilities, police or education in their communities and can be dismissed by the “Prime Minister” at will. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/election/2019/02/28/dncc-by-polls-atiqul-leads-in-162-centres So why do they make such a big deal out of it? Mostly for public consumption, as is wont in dictatorships; it gives an aura of public participation, fools the lazy stringers writing for Western newspapers who don’t want to delve deeper than the headlines, gets ceremonial props for upcoming midlevel leaders of the ruling party, strokes the ego of many a protocol-hungry Bangladeshi politico who has no consequence otherwise, and allows the largely compliant press to fill column inches…as the utterly fawning first sentence of the story reads without an iota of irony.
Thugs with diplomatic immunity..what could go wrong!
After the chilling end of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in his country’s consulate in Istanbul, one would think that other dictatorships would pause. But leave it to the Bangladeshi regime to make sure that diplomatic immunity can be used to harass and intimidate the large diaspora, especially in West, which keeps dissenting from the official line. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/government-affairs/2019/02/06/police-to-be-appointed-to-bangladesh-s-embassies It is a tried and tested method of intimidation by dictatorships–going back to the earliest era of the Soviet Union–who often use the freedom of movement accorded to ‘diplomats’ by liberal democracies to track down and do surveillance on their own citizens abroad and, use that information to extract concessions from family members at home or blackmail during needed consular services. Sometimes the blackmail goes awry like with the late Saudi journalist. Iranian and Libyan security services were notorious in the 1980s for doing the same; in fact to this day former Libyan foreign minister Mansour Khikia has never been found. Any pro-democracy expatriate Bangladeshi with a social media presence should soon think twice before entering a Bangladeshi diplomatic mission. The thugs are on their way.
“Transparently fraudulent”
“To give due credit for originality, a slow cooking approach to transforming a budding democracy into an authoritarian regime without officially becoming a dictatorship is perhaps an invention of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The robust two-party parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary that Zimbabwe started with in 1979 was slowly, steadily, and methodically transformed into a one-party, one-man banana republic under the careful tutelage of Mugabe who purged the courts, locked up opponents, took over civil society organizations, and used vigilante groups like the “War Veterans” to terrorize dissenters, extra-judicially. Even when he agreed to hold ‘free elections’, the supporters and potential voters of the pro-democracy Opposition movement MDC were hounded, intimidated, raped, and killed by the thousands in a reign of terror that shook even Mugabe’s patrons in the South African government. The Awami League in Bangladesh, simply adapted and perfected this political terror into an art form. Thus ended what the Economist–the white-shoe London magazine hardly given to hyperbole–-called the 2018 electoral exercise in Bangladesh, a ‘transparently fraudulent’ election. While the Western democracies were figuring out how to find nuanced responses to the increasing authoritarianism in Bangladesh, the country had transitioned from authoritarian to dictatorial in the space of weeks. A conceptual model of election manipulation had been tested, perfected, and found ready to be deployed en masse wherever dictators would need the veneer of ballot box legitimacy in the 21st century.” (From the article “Bangladesh’s robbed elections..” Winter 2018-19 Issue of the South Asia Journal.)
Even the sycophants admit rigging
The scale and scope of the night-before stuffing of ballot boxes was so stunning even by the ruling junta’s normal benchmarks, that it’s own ‘front’ ally (all these totalitarian parties of the Eastern European style..be they post WWII Poland or North Korea or Syria have ‘fronts’ which bring the main political machine of the junta with a few non-entities in a make believe combine to provide a mirage of internal pluralism), the JSD party finally admitted it. In a report of the JSD exec’s post election meeting reported in the February 4 2019 issue of the daily Prothom Alo, the JSD supremos–after the usual sycophantic ‘we would have won anyway’–admitted the obvious: ‘some over eager government employees stuffed many ballot boxes overnight’. But true to the amorality which is incumbent in any dictatorship’s sinews and its corrosive influence on anyone associated with it, the JSD leaders had no desire to have free elections. A victory is a victory…isn’t it?
Finally, the Economist says it too
It is said ‘better late than never’. What many of us had known from the time of the January 2014 ‘elections’, when the majority of the parliament was elected without a single ballot being cast, the mandarins of the global elite at London’s Economist have finally concluded as well: Bangladesh has ceased to be even the rudimentary democracy that it was. It did not happen overnight and the consolidation of the dictatorship will also happen in stages like a ‘drip, drip, drip’ process while the the Economist’s counterparts in the United States (WaPo, NYT, WSJ) and Canada (Globe and Mail, National Post) continue to provide space for the Bangladeshi regime’s apologists–official and unofficial–to regale the North American think tank types about how their dictatorship is really just a ‘different’ kind of democracy. In the run up to the farce of the December 2018 ‘elections’, twice did the NYT provide a space for the column of the brother of one of the unelected MPs, so that the said sibling (who owns the regime’s flagship ULAB college) could defend the dictatorship’s tactics. In the post Cold War world, democracies rarely die with a bang; rather they are squelched one breath at a time while the friends of democracy in London, New York, Ottawa, and Brussels are too busy being even handed between the respective narratives of the advocates of dictatorship versus that of the victims of the dictatorship. http://espresso.economist.com/0390aff9c68eeb7b64fbebe21c878de3
Hounding the wounded
In a January 29, 2019 piece in the Daily Manabzamin—which was retweeted by democracy activist and noted physician Dr Pinaki Bhattachariya—a tale of sadism emerged that rivals in specificity, if not in scope, the depredations of the Iranian junta. Mary, a young woman activist in the pro-democracy Opposition movement, was blinded when the junta’s police opened fire on a demonstration seeking a halt in the overnight ballot stuffing the ruling party cadres were engaged in as a prelude to the December 30 joke of elections. What happened next was straight up Orwellian: the junta’s police and prosecutors charged the maimed woman in a case of ‘anti-state’ activity and have now issued a warrant for her arrest.
This is the stuff of diabolical legends, except it is true. To make it worse, no major media outlet dare report it for fear of further enraging a one-party dictatorship already hell bent on seeking vengeance. This is the regime, by the way, for which the Trump administration is asking almost $ 200 million in US taxpayer funded aid, the Canadians about $ 120 million, the Europeans almost $ 600 million. Is this the regime Americans, Canadians, the French, the Germans, and the Scandinavians want to support with their citizens’ money?
An election model to die for
In election observer parlance in Bangladesh–where telling blunt truths about government shenanigans can result in long residence behind bars as the internationally renowned photojournalist Shahidul Alam found out–it is known as the “Khulna model” of elections. Realizing that the brute manipulation of election results through blatant rigging alone is not considered polite these days, the Bangladeshi regime perfected more of a ‘portfolio management’ approach to elections during the municipal elections in the summer of 2018, with its apogee in the southwestern city of Khulna whence the moniker of the model was born.
The Khulna model reduced reliance on the crude stuffing of ballot boxes with bogus votes and, instead, enlarged the scope of manipulation to a larger sphere so that such 11th hour nastiness was not as necessary. There were five key elements in the model: cut off the head (arrest local Opposition leaders), disrupt communications (isolate Opposition candidates from their voters), frighten any voters not reliably in the Government camp, get the civil service to drag its feet on any instructions from the ostensibly neutral Election Commission, and, if all else fails, stuff ballot boxes the night before. By all accounts the model succeeded spectacularly as government candidates swept almost all city corporation polls in 2018 without the government having to resort to too many overtly strong arm tactics like the stuffing of ballots. One exception was the city of Sylhet where, thanks to strong diaspora connections the foreign media was watching closely and, despite valiant efforts of the police and administration, the Opposition candidate squeaked out a victory of a third of a percent.
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 resources generally assume what is written in the law, or subcontract the research to their more senior peers who are, more often than not, on the New Delhi beat. The result is an understanding of the Bangladesh institutional context that is quite devoid of the reality on the ground.
The stark truth is that in Bangladesh every rein of power, be it administrative, executive, judicial, or legislative, sits in one office and, thus, in one person. The Prime Minister decides which civil servant serves where; while her powers to fire bureaucrats is still somewhat limited, she can make any undesirable one an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) which in South Asian bureauspeak means you draw a salary but are no longer functioning in any professional capacity. All the judges at every level are appointed by the President, but, here is the caveat, the President is constitutionally bound to follow the ‘advice’ of the Prime Minister; and today every last one of almost 50 or so judges of the High Court have been personally appointed by the Prime Minister Shiekh Hasina. As head of the ruling party, the Prime Minister also selects (there are no ‘primaries’ like the US or constituency selection committees like the UK) all the 300 candidates for her ruling front’s parliamentary slate while Article 70 of the Constitution (which the Prime Minister’s father inserted in the 1970s) automatically voids the parliamentary membership of any MP who votes against the party leader. In her capacity as the “Leader of the House”, the Prime Minister appoints the Speaker and chairmen of all standing committees of parliament as well. Bottomline, there is no separation of powers of three branches of government in Bangladesh; everything is an extension of the office of the Prime Minister.
Lest you think the alphabet soup of ‘independent agencies’ is any different, think again. Beautifully named organizations like the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), and the Bangladesh Election Commission (BEC) are no different than parliament or the courts: all the members are appointed directly by the Prime Minister or by the President under the mandatory provision of accepting the ‘advice’ of the Prime Minister. The results are quite predictable in that the ACC is exclusively focused on finding corruption in Opposition politicians or businessmen who have pro-democracy sympathies, the NHRC has little time for investigating police abuses but an enormous appetite for ‘cultural human rights’ and ‘food rights’ seminars, and the BEC…well you all know how the December 30 elections went about happening.
When the Prime Minister of Bangladesh is referred to as dictator, it’s not an exaggeration; if anything it is an understatement: not even the General Secretary of Soviet Communist Party had the enormous, unchecked powers that the chief executive of the Bangladeshi junta has.
The Bangladeshi media is unlikely to bring this up for reasons ranging from sheer terror visited upon families of recalcitrant journalists to the control of newsprint paper and advertising by the junta to the fact the broadcast- and print licenses are no longer given to those who do nor display sufficient zeal for ‘chetona’ (a Bangladeshi version of the cult of ‘juche’ of North Korea or ‘jamahairya’ of Libya’s Gaddafi).
When a 30 year old woman frightens a dictatorship
Five days ago, a young woman by the name of Dewan Mahmuda Akhtar Lita was picked up by the Bangladeshi junta’s police in the port city of Chittagong and jailed. No arrest warrant, no trial, no defense lawyer; no verdict; just picked up in a truck (where the brave 30 year old showed a clenched fist as captured by a brave photographer) and put in jail. She didn’t murder anyone and robbed not a dime. Her crime? She criticized on Facebook the wholesale farce of the December 30 elections in Bangladesh and hence, according to the junta, ‘hurt the feelings of the masses.’ I wish this was a sarcastic joke; unfortunately it is true to the last word. When you hear the dictator’s cronies in the Western media talk about merely an ‘imperfect democracy’….remember that they probably thought Saddam was merely an ‘imperfect President’ too. Not surprisingly, most of Bangladesh’s kept media merely mentioned an ‘arrest’, and little more than that. This, then, is the ‘rule of law’ that the Bangladesh regime’s apologists talk about.
Better late than never, New York Times
Better late than never, though I am not sure Sheikh Hasina Wazed would have won a free vote either (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/editorials/bangladesh-election-sheikh-hasina.html?fbclid=IwAR0WHcijPV-mdyyWil5ai0iY9MkvBgjqWQWm6llz408Ttjxk-9u5OmzXY_U) . But the NYT and it’s ilk share the blame too: time and again and again they have given space to the junta’s craven apologists (like K Anis Ahmed, a pro-regime publisher who, along with his American wife, owns the junta’s flagship college with the ironic name of University of Liberal Arts, who wrote a big pro-dictatorship piece just a week before the elections) to advocate for the dictatorship. Before that, it was the the kids of two major newspaper editors (kids who live in the freedom that America provides) who waxed eloquent about the ‘glory of the Awami League’ on those pages. The liberal-progressive crowd in the salons of New York, DC, and London has to share the responsibility for normalizing these tyrants…as do many of the civil society types in Bangladesh. That cup of tea at Gonobhobon (the official residence of the dictator) or getting that minister at your daughter’s wedding or son’s new company inauguration is worth the last sliver of conscience for these Bangladeshi pseudo-savants.
Even as it condemns the farcical vote, however, the New York Times, whitewashes the legacy of the Awami League when it merely says Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s father ‘was killed’ in 1975. The truth is that the father usurped the Westminister constitution of 1973, instituted a one-party Stalinist state in 1975 via the infamous “Fourth Amendment” that abolished all parties (except his own), shut down all newspapers (except the four owned by his family members), and mandated that the judiciary, civil servants, and military officers take oaths of personal loyalty to him. To make sure his diktats were followed, he created the “Rakhi Bahini” paramilitary force that was, by law, put outside the ambit of judicial review for its activities. His own sons (Sheikh Hasina’s brothers) were well known for using the Rakhi Bahini to abduct women and loot businesses. Against this backdrop of utter tyranny, was the daddy’s rule ended amidst a coup which paved the way for the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1977.