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 ideology called “BKSAL” with all civil servants, judges, and military officers required to take oath to the President for Life…which just happened to be the father of the current “prime minister” Sheikh Hasina. Some of the Awami League leaders who were part of the one-party putsch—like Hasina’s key adviser H T Imam—continue to serve at the highest levels of government in this Awami League regime. Aware that the world doesn’t quite like, in the aftermath of the Cold War, outright one party states of the Soviet variety, the current regime has adopted a de facto rather than de jure approach to its well-known desire for a one-party system. The approach involves harsh suppression of any real dissent at home, stage managed ‘elections’ like the one of December 30, 2018, draconian censorship policies, and grassroots level non-government vigilante forces like the BCL terror group to ensure localized compliance. A big part of selling this as a Third World utopia falls to smooth talking spokesmen duos who can charm low level functionaries in the foreign ministries of Western capitals and junior editors on Fleet Street with the panache these functionaries and scribes are not used to enjoying. Among these apologists are couples like Gowher Rizvi, once a professor of politics in Virginia and his Italian wife Agnese Barolo; K Anis Ahmed,  the owner of the regime’s flagship private university “ULAB” and his American wife and former Newsweek columnist Juditha Ohlmacher, and, of course, Hasina’s son Sajib Wazed Joy and his lawyer wife Christine Overmire, both living in the Washington DC area off the ‘consulting fees’ from the taxpayers of Bangladesh. Credit where it is due: The Dhaka regime has perfected the art of finding the right people to do its advocacy while the utterly sidelined and slightly awkward foreign ministers (they have two of them) are rarely at the front and center of such frays of schmoozing bedazzled, mid-level, foreign dignitaries.