In the first 20 years of her existence, neatly coinciding with the last 20 years of the Cold War, Bangladesh was decidedly a backwater in the global scheme of things; as such the “Bangladesh beat”–at foreign offices, major Western media, university research centers–was the place where ambitious late 20 somethings went to dabble in things “South Asia” while waiting for their big “promotion” to the affairs of newsworthy Pakistan, exciting India, exotic Sri Lanka, and cutesy Nepal. I knew several such worthies during graduate school via my years of participation in Model UN conferences where wannabe globetrotter college students and their graduate school counterparts would get together to, in their own minds, try out for the world stage. Not much has changed even as Bangladesh has become more of a presence in South Asia. Unfortunately, that lack of quality in the “Bangladesh expertise” in foreign offices, major Western media, university research centers seeps into the intellectual laziness that produces “scholarship” and “journalism” across much of Western Europe and North America which relies on tropes like “imperfect democracy” and “Battle of the Begums” and “questionable elections” and similar euphemisms that simply ignore the fundamental fact of governance in Bangladesh: it is a brutal, one family, one party dictatorship that is a cross between Kim’s North Korea and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe…except that North Korea and Zimbabwe actually get/did get critical coverage in US, UK, and Canadian newspapers, magazines, and web outlets whereas it’s almost impossible to find any decent scholar or journalist on either side of the Atlantic asking tough questions about, say, the thuggery of the Bangladeshi regime’s para-statal militia BCL or the presence of almost every cabinet member’s family permanently in Toronto in palatial homes paid for by the Bangladeshi taxpayer, or the shadowy activities, income streams , and family of the Virginia-based son of the Bangladeshi dictator. On the contrary more than a few such “experts” in newsrooms and foreign offices and research foundations are often wined and dined by the heir apparent Sajeeb Wazed in Fairfax and Alexandria to make sure that the “correct” narrative is continuously peddled, albeit with the usual mealy mouthed caveats to appear serious. The network of the ruling family’s elite retainers in Bangladesh and abroad do a very good job keeping the “Bangladesh” desk experts mollified; and anymore, it’s only those retainers (and their children) who are able to learn English and train abroad to become more cosmopolitan.
Thus goes the tragedy of Bangladesh which, in the words of the current crop of Bangladesh “experts” in London and New York and Washington and Toronto, is merely a case of “imperfect democracy”. Talk about calling domestic violence merely a “family dispute”.