IS REGRESSION OF DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN INEVITABLE—INDEPENDENT-20-01-2012Friday, 20 January 2012

Author / Source : Kazi Anwarul Masud  Why is it that intellectuals like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis who believe in  inherent contradiction between Islam and liberal democracy appear on occasions to be right when the essence of Islam and the origin of Islamic Caliphate reflect people’s participation in decision making is it comparable to Periclian democracy in ancient Athens? The current happenings in Pakistan, the second most populous and the only nuclear Muslim country in the world, where tussle is going on between the country’s elected government and the powerful army   has again brought into focus  the fragility of  democracy in a developing Muslim country.  Apart from the fact that Pakistan since its independence in 1947 has been mostly ruled by the armed forces, the factors now responsible for the disaffection of the army is due to US raid inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden without the knowledge of the army intelligence denting the prestige of the army as the most powerful organ in the country. The memogate that refers to an unsigned document allegedly authored by the former Pak ambassador to the US, now being refused to leave the country, that sought the US assistance in containing the army in exchange for greater cooperation in the fight against the Taliban, and also, as reported by the New York Times, the “  government’s poor performance in the aftermath of 2010  floods which left 20 million people homeless and the nation dependent on handouts from skeptical foreign donors, laid bare the deep underlying tensions between military and civilian leaders”. The latest casualty of army-Prime Minister confrontation has been  the sacking of the Defense Secretary ( a retired three star General close to the army).The Defense Secretary is generally appointed with the consent of the army as the person acts as a bridge between the civilian government and the military. Prime Minister’s appointment of a civilian aide as replacement runs the risk of the refusal by the military to cooperate with the newly appointed Defense Secretary signalling the possibility of a serious rupture between the civilian government and the military. Earlier in the month Prime Minister told a Chinese news channel that the army had acted inappropriately in making its submission to the Supreme Court investigating the memogate by not going through proper channel, an accusation refuted by the army, and a report that the government was considering sacking the army chief and the intelligence chief, denied by the Prime Minister,  that  added fuel to the fire. The latest twist in the  drama is a pro-democracy resolution  adopted by the Parliament  in the face of Prime Minister Gilani’s appeal to the Parliament “to decide whether we should have democracy or dictatorship in this country” and his earlier criticism of the military of being a “state within  a state”.   To the demand by the army chief that the Prime Minister retracts his comments on the army Gilani reiterated his stand by saying that the Prime Minister was only answerable to Parliament and not to any individual. He added “What I said was not an accusation, We want there to be respect for the constitution, rule of law, and all institutions to work within their limits” It is difficult to predict if Pakistan is going for a military take over as the free media, politically conscious middle class, and the international community are most likely to oppose such a move by the army. Already Obama administration dissatisfied with the Pak army’s ineffective counterinsurgency actions against the militants has cut down on military aid to Pakistan. If aid  is reduced in projects meant to make up for budget deficit, remove difficulty in  balance of payment, to meet expenditure on social safety measures  etc then Pakistan economy, already in dire strait may collapse making the country ungovernable and expedite its drift toward a failing state with the longstanding risk of nuclear weapons falling into wrong hands. Such a scenario would be disastrous for South Asia.   But then again if the government is overthrown an alternative government with Parliamentary majority cannot be formed pushing the country into chaos. Any change in the status quo would make American pursuit of war in Afghanistan and President Obama’s plan to withdraw bulk of the troops from Afghanistan difficult to carry out. Besides despite Admiral Mike Mullen’s public denouncement of the double game played by Pak intelligence in supporting the Taliban who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul and Hillary Clinton’s warning to Pakistani leaders of serious consequences if they continued to give refuge to extremists, denied by Pak army and considered an insult, Americans have little option but to rely on ISI (Pak intelligence service) to facilitate their talks with the Taliban for peace in Afghanistan. The Americans have temporarily stopped the drone attacks as demanded by Pakistan that has given the militants an opportunity to regroup, mending intra-militant fences, increase attacks on Pak security forces and threaten NATO forces in Afghanistan. The Western demand to have talks with those Taliban who will renounce violence, accept Afghan constitution, and abide by laws of the land appears to be utopian because these Taliban may be waiting for the NATO forces to leave before they resume their fight to capture power and institute an Islamist state with imposition of strict sharia laws. The question that the secular world has to face is whether in Muslim states religion replaces national identity because religion has both emotional and spiritual content. In Islamic countries one is first a Muslim then a citizen of the country while in countries considered to have entered post-secular age religion does not perform functions of the government and sovereignty lies with the people and not with God- a concept contested by Harvard-Berkley sociologist of religion Robert Bellah(Civil Religion in America) as he argues  that implicitly, and often explicitly,  ultimate sovereignty has been attributed to God by successive American administrations . Overall, however,  the Westphalian concept of sovereignty is being eroded by globalization that creates growing economic interdependence among nations; change in the form of conflict  from inter-state to intra-state by sub-state or non-state actors; and violation of state sovereignty by powerful states if they consider their security interests are being threatened. In such cases Michael Walzer’s Just War principles have been swept away by conditions of realpolitik. The debate over the contradiction between Islam and democracy , in the words of Columbia University Professor Robert Bulliet may be summarized as follows:- "Some of the people who say that democracy has no place in Islam, what they really express is a sense that the word 'democracy' as presented in international discourse appears to be wholly owned by the West. The word itself has, for some, a connotation of cultural imperialism but on more idealistic grounds it makes perfectly good sense to a lot of Muslims. The idea of citizenry participating in government, particularly within Sunni Islam, is sort of a bedrock theory.French social scientist Oliver Roy argues (The Failure of Political Islam) that Islamism is a perversion of Muslim faith into a utopian political movement that would eventually wither away and that Iranian theocracy and Hammas has more to do with nationalism than with religion. In the case under discussion  one should not be disheartened but hope for a democratic solution of the Pak problem with the civilian control firmly imposed over the military whose fundamental duty remains to safeguard the nation from external aggression.  

The writer is a former secretary and ambassador.

Is De-Democratization on Ascendancy?

Paper No. 6281                                  Dated 24-Jul-2017

By Kazi Anwarul Masud

The election of Donald Trump, albeit democratically, but his continuing bellicosity with the fourth state and now his disenchantment with some of his cabinet members, daily tweets on foreign and domestic issues  giving fodder for amusement to late night shows and the print and electronic media, US Senate investigation into Trump campaign and Russian connection, “secret” conversation with Vladimir Putin at the G20 dinner without an American interpreter, and scores of other misdemeanor by an American President in just about six months with an approval rating just above thirty percent, Trump’s distancing himself from long time allies and threats to NATO members to fulfill their defense commitment, his praising of North Korean dictator Kin Jung-un have placed the world in a quandary.

US foreign policy had its ups and downs with transition of power from President to President. Way back in 2012 Madeline Albright felt a tectonic shift had taken place with the change of guards from Clinton to Bush administration. Bush administration proved to be sinister, aggressive, and felt it could take unilateral military actions without fear of retaliation from the aggrieved or the international community.

This gung-ho attitude was reflected in the Doctrine of Pre-emption and Bush National Security Strategy of 2002. Popular perception that the NSS of 2006 would undergo a perceptible change towards multilateralism proved to be wrong. Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams (Center for American Progress) argued that the 2006 NSS continued to confuse pre-emption with preventive war, emphasized the unachievable goal of “ending tyranny” throughout the world, and failed to make a realistic assessment of threat to the US and the Western world.

Bill Clinton left a prosperous and safer America. His efforts to sincerely try to solve the Middle East crisis reflected in the historical handshake by Yasser Arafat with Yitzhak Rabin, or Jimmy Carter’s historical get-together between Anwar Sadat and Meacham Begin on US soil will always be remembered.  President Reagan’s request to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall was not heeded but it was not followed by American military prowess. Neither did Eisenhower and Johnson employ military power to prevent Soviet Union’s military interventions in Hungary and Poland in 1956 and then in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

President Bush on the other hand remained totally committed to what he called for eradication of “Islamic fanaticism”. It is not known whether Bush administration had made a cost-benefit analysis of the doctrine of pre-emption before embarking on what is now commonly realized as an adventure  in Iraq that  turned costly both financially and materially. President Bush received encouragement from people like  Melvin Laird, US Defense Secretary at the fag end of the Vietnam war, who urged President Bush that Iraq war must carry the message that the US was fighting in Iraq to bring about freedom and liberty to those “yet unconverted” to western values, little realizing that the Orient was no longer an Antarctica of freedom nor was wedded to the values of communal benefit at the expense of individual liberty or what is touted as Asian values as opposed to Western values. 

By contrast Kim Holmes and James Carafano (defining the Obama Doctrine, Its Pitfalls, and How to Avoid Them September 1, 2010) have noted President Barack Obama’s declaration “ that America would reach out to other countries as “an equal partner” rather than as the “exceptional” nation that many before him had embraced; that “any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail”; and that “[o]ur problems must be dealt with through partnership” and “progress must be shared.”(American primacy in international affairs-INDEPENDENT-03-02-2012Top of Form).

Donald Trump’s America First slogan is contrary to the equal partnership practised by Barack Obama and the ones before him though the world acknowledged American leadership of the free world and adopted varied forms of the Washington Consensus, a set of broadly free market economic ideas supported by the Bretton Woods Institutions, the US and Europe. Trump’s ideas, sometimes conflicting, have the potentiality of pushing the global trade towards protectionism which has been found favor with those trying to protect domestic jobs as free trade and globalization wins over the less efficient industries in many developing countries. Additionally the global meltdown of 2008 brought into sharp focus the opposition to the Washington Consensus and certainly  rejection of Milton Friedman and Chicago School’ s   prescription for amelioration of the global financial difficulties. 

While any reduction of US-Russian tension is good for world peace and their collaboration both in and out of the UN Security council is welcome Donald Trump’s story of Russian meddling in the last US Presidential elections and her alleged attempts to interfere in the European elections are unwelcome developments. Camaraderie between the leaders of the two great powers makes one wonder if one can imagine a brake in Samuel Huntington’s waves of transition to democracy that he described in his book “The Third Wave”. According to Samuelson   there have been three basic periods of democratization that have occurred throughout the world throughout history. 

The First Wave -- during the 19th century, democracy was begun in Western Europe and North America but lost momentum in the interwar period between WWI and WWII when a number of dictators rose to power.

The Second Wave -- began after WWII and faded out around the 60s - 70s.

The Third Wave -- began in the mid-1970s and is still continuing today. Some experts have associated the collapse of several dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa, phenomenon known as Arab Spring, with the events which followed the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The similarity between the two phenomena inspired hope for a fourth wave of democratization. But then democratization process is not an unstoppable process. Slow decrease in poverty level, increase in the gap between the rich and the poor, both in the developing and the developed countries, at geometric progression have produced a rage among the dispossesed and marginalized segment of the economy.

Roger Cohen wrote in New York Times that for at least a decade, accelerating since the crash of 2008, fears and resentments had been building over the impunity of elites, the dizzying disruption of technology, the influx of migrants and the precariousness of modern existence. In Western societies, for too long, there had been no victories, no glory and diminishing certainties. Wars were waged; nobody knew how they could be won. Their wounds festered. The distance between metropolis and periphery grew into a cultural chasm. Many things became unsayable; even gender became debatable. Truth blurred, then was sidelined, in an online tribal cacophony. Jobs went. Inequality thrust itself in your face. What the powerful said and the lives people lived were so unrelated that politics looked increasingly like a big heist.)……. Democracies, it is clear, have not been delivering to the less privileged, who were disenfranchised or discarded in the swirl of technology’s advance. A lot of thought is now needed to find ways to restore faith in liberal, free-market societies; to show that they can be fairer and more equitable and offer more opportunities across the social spectrum ( December 5 The Rage of 2016). 

In the same vein Francis Fukuyama wrote (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA-DEC. 6, 2016 The Dangers of Disruption) of disruption caused by “The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities. And from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat”.

The advent of nationalism over globalization has seen Brexit in Great Britain, assertion by Hungarian Prime Minister that his country sought to be an illiberal state; Turkey’s Erdogan after foiling a coup has assumed immense power and has jailed thousands of people of alleged complicity with the coup. Equally some suspect that India’s Narendra Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinjo Abe, both democratically elected, are quietly supporting actions of intolerance. In the case of India Harish Khare (THE WIRE A Dangerous Arrogance of Power Is Setting InBy Harish Khare on 14/07/2017) apprehends that in the absence of three other institutions of democracy- cabinet, bureaucracy and media- stand emasculated with timidity and opportunism and with the change of guard at Rashtrapati Bhavan Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his advisers could not take Pranab Mukherjee as “rubber stamp”, an option Harish Khare feels is now open to the Prime Minister. It however remains to be seen how far such a fear would come to pass.

India with its long tradition of vibrant opposition and use of democratic rights from grass roots would be a different kettle of fish than many other countries. This divisiveness, a form taking the shape of nationalism, could be traced to religion as many have taken Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization literally. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times (NYT   Huntington’s Clash Revisited David Brooks March 3 2011) the Islamic civilization is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy. Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction… Even if decrepit regimes fell (the Arab governments) there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be. Naturally Huntington’s thesis caused a fierce debate. In a critique late Edward Said (The Clash of Ignorance By Edward W. Said OCTOBER 4, 2001) WROTE “ In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." …The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington’s thesis”.

Princeton Professor Charles Boix disagrees with the religious explanation for the lack of democracy. He points out that the large Muslim population in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and till recently in Turkey who live in partly free (as described by Freedom House) democratic dispensation. Boix instead argues that poverty, corruption, bad governance and terrorism are responsible for the decline of democracy in many countries.  No less important, in the views of Princeton Professor and co-editor of Dissent magazine Michael Walzer, is the absolute or periodic arrest of the rich and the powerful who become more powerful as they become richer under a façade of nominal democracy where money can buy votes. It would therefore be naïve to think that poor countries can suddenly be adorned with democracy just because of the end of colonialism (the colonialists being mostly developed democratic nations) without the requisite countervailing institutions supportive of democracy.

Though India for a variety of reasons have proved to be an exception, the world has to be on guard that the recent and yet to be unfolding events do not foretell a saga of decline of democracy in the future.

(The writer is a former Secretary and Ambassador of Bangladesh.)

American primacy in international affairs-INDEPENDENT-03-02-2012Top of Form

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Friday, 03 February 2012

Author / Source : Kazi Anwarul Masud

Madeline Albright felt a tectonic shift had taken place with the change of guards from Clinton to Bush administration. Bush administration proved to be sinister, aggressive, and felt it could take unilateral military actions without fear of retaliation from the aggrieved or the international community. This gung-ho attitude was reflected in the Doctrine of Pre-emption and Bush National Security Strategy of 2002. Popular perception that the NSS of 2006 would undergo a perceptible change towards multilateralism proved to be wrong. Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams (Center for American Progress) argued that the 2006 NSS continued to confuse pre-emption with preventive war, emphasized the unachievable goal of “ending tyranny” throughout the world, and failed to make a realistic assessment of threat to the US and the Western world.
Bill Clinton left a prosperous and safer America. His efforts to sincerely try to solve the Middle East crisis reflected in the historical handshake by Yasser Arafat with Yitzhak Rabin, or Jimmy Carter’s historical get-together between Anwar Sadat and Menacham Begin on US soil will always be remembered.  President Reagan’s request to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall was not heeded but it was not followed by American military prowess. Neither did Eisenhower and Johnson employ military power to prevent Soviet Union’s military interventions in Hungary and Poland in 1956 and then in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
President Bush on the other hand remained totally committed to what he called for eradication of “Islamic fanaticism”. It is not known whether Bush administration had made a cost-benefit analysis of the doctrine of pre-emption before embarking on what is now commonly realized as an adventure  in Iraq that  turned costly both financially and materially. President Bush received encouragement from people like  Melvin Laird, US Defence Secretary at the fag end of the Vietnam war, who urged President Bush that Iraq war must carry the message that the US was fighting in Iraq to bring about freedom and liberty to those “yet unconverted” to western values, little realizing that the Orient was no longer an Antarctica of freedom nor was wedded to the values of communal benefit at the expense of individual liberty or what is touted as Asian values as opposed to Western values.  By contrast Kim Holmes and James Carafano(defining the Obama Doctrine, Its Pitfalls, and How to Avoid Them September 1, 2010) have noted President Barack Obama’s declaration “ that America would reach out to other countries as “an equal partner” rather than as the “exceptional” nation that many before him had embraced; that “any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail”; and that “[o]ur problems must be dealt with through partnership” and “progress must be shared.”
He has laid out in his public statements the tenets of a doctrine that, if enacted, would enable his administration to remake America as one nation among many, with no singular claim either to responsibility or exceptionalism”. 
But neo-conservatives like Robert Kagan in his recent book The World America Made continues to reassert that it would be folly for the US and the world at large to let the Americans to take time-out from its global responsibilities.
He considers it as “illusion” political scientist John Ikenberry’s argument that even with diminished American power “ the underlying foundation of liberal international order will survive and thrive” for several reasons. Kagan argues that great powers rarely decline suddenly.
Besides measuring a nation’s relative power depends on some basic indicators: the size and influence of its economy relative to those of other competing powers; magnitude of its military power; and the influence it wields in international affairs. In 1969 the US produced a quarter of the global economic output and it remains so even today. China may become the largest economy in the world in a few decades but there is no guarantee that the short term economic decisions now being taken in an authoritarian system will remain constant in the long term when a richer middle class may not wish to barter away its freedom any longer for material gains.
On the question of reducing US troops abroad it has been argued that in 1953 about a million troops were deployed abroad and in 1968, during the Vietnam war, troops abroad was more than one million while in 2011 200000 were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan with another 160000 deployed elsewhere. On the question of defence cut it has been argued that such cuts would have little effect on one trillion dollars annual deficit that the US economy would be saddled with for coming few years.
Kagan argues that American isolationism   would make sea lanes of vital interest to global trade unsafe, raise possibility of  nuclearization of Japan and South Korea to face off Chinese perceived threat, war among global powers may break out without US influence preventing such wars from happening, and result in a   less stable and freer world. But then Samuel Huntington had observed in 1999 that the US had become a lonely super power hated for its “intrusive, interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical” behaviour. Besides the global economic meltdown has brought into sharp focus the acceptability of the “Washington Consensus” and most certainly rejection of Milton Friedman and Chicago School’ s   prescription for amelioration of the global financial difficulties.
Despite MIT Sloan School of Management’s Lester Thurrow’s premature declaration of the death of globalization( Head to Head)  and admitting that   globalization though problematic, as seen in the  financial instability  of 1997-8 and 2008 economic crises and growing inter and intra-state inequality of income,   has registered robust growth  and appears to be irreversible.
In the process China has emerged as the principal actor as the world’s largest exporter, possessing largest trade surplus, and largest reserve of foreign exchange. As global economic development is closely related with the earth’s limited natural resources ( we have already consumed about one and a half “earth equivalent” of resources and are projected to consume two earth equivalent by 2030) the world is likely to witness a race for the acquisition of natural resources  among the rich and the powerful nations.
The least developed and least globalized regions of the world, defined by  US Naval College Professor Thomas Barnett as the “non-integrating  gap”, is likely to be mired in hard power conflicts regressing their economies still further.
Would the world then need hegemonic stability which posits that an assertive hegemony can act as a stabilizing force in the international system? Supporters of the theory cite Edward Gibbons’ admiration of Pax Romana in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire admiring a period of human history when the Romans ruled by the sword, slavery and destruction; modern day proponents of hegemonic stability like Charles Kindelberger and Robert Gilpin have approached the concept from the point of view of the hegemon providing collective goods for economic development and focusing on security implications of hegemonic governance.
The more powerful is the hegemon the less the chances of instability in the international order. The incapacity of the UNSC in getting unanimity for the Anglo-US resolution on the invasion of Iraq and the short duration of the unipolar moment for the US testified to the fragility of the theory of hegemonic stability. The world then and now seeks multilateralism and remains opposed to a single power giving direction to global affairs. The Muslim world, in particular, is hesitant to give the US sole authority due to lack of trust in the US’ impartiality in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Successive American administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, have openly supported Israeli occupation of Arab lands and her brutality of the Palestinians. Western leaders’   assurances that the so-called war on terror is not a war on Islam have failed to reassure the Islamic world of their sincerity and their scepticism is reinforced by the anti-Muslim sentiment pervasive among Westerners.
Europeans more than the Americans are convinced of Islamic-fascism propagated through political and administrative actions forcing the Muslim Diaspora to navigate a second class citizenship in the countries of their birth.  In his latest State of the Union address President Obama spoke in glowing terms of the Arab Spring. At the same time Obama reiterated the old line of “ironclad commitment” to Israeli security. 
As the race for the White House is heating up economic issues and not foreign policy are expected to grab the attention of the candidates and the voters. Until a tolerable solution of the economic problems is found religion will have to take a back seat in American politics and of the world at large.

The writer is a former secretary and ambassador

INDEOENDENT-19-07-2013 Top of Form

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Friday, 19 July 2013

Author / Source: KAZI ANWARUL MASUD

\Dmocracy so sought after when in many underdeveloped countries millions of people live in abject poverty, children are malnourished, and women have virtually no rights at all while the country practices procedural but not substantive democracy (where they can do everything right on paper and get praise from other democracies while being little more than a monarchy in reality). Is the right to vote once every five years to elect some corrupt politicians (if credence is given to the report by Transparency International Bangladesh) more important than having material advancement in an authoritarian system? Is epistemological value in an abstract system that can assure the right to complain but cannot assure right to food and health can have such overriding importance for the people in low income countries? Were the people of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea wrong in acquiescing with authoritarian rule for decades? Are the people of China living in delusion hoping for a democratic set up sometime in the future as China goes forward to claim the title of largest economy of the world? Francis Fukuyama suggests US dollars $10000/- per capita income as the transition point for a stable democracybecause higher income supports a larger middle class, more property ownership, better levels of education and openness to the outside world and  by contrast very poor countries have hard time sustaining democratic institutions. But now regardless of the system of governance the great divergence that Paul Krugman wrote about and lamented for the good old days of great convergence when income disparity between the poor and the rich was tolerable is gone for good. In Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman writes “Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent”. In another article Krugman added John Maynard Keynes” words written in 1936 that “Classical economics, conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain.” And classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems was to let the forces of supply and demand do their job. But classical economics offered neither explanations nor solutions for the Great Depression”. So John Maynard Keynes challenged the market orthodoxy and suggested governmental intervention on occasions to provide people respite from the Hobbesian trait of human nature of plundering capitalism in the sense that human being is by nature selfish and life is “short, nasty and brutish”.
Hobbes believed that the nature of humanity leads people to seek power.  He said that when two or more people want the same thing, they become enemies and attempt to destroy each other.  He called this time when men oppose each other war (Hobbes’ view on human nature and his vision of government. 123 Helpme.com. 14 July 2013).
Keynesian prescription was not to bury capitalism but to rid it of its flaws.  Keynesianism was challenged by Milton Friedman and classical economics got back some of its old glory. According to Paul Krugman if John Keynes was Martin Luther who rebelled against the corrupt papacy then Milton Friedman was Ignatius Loyala, founder of the Jesuits.  In praise of Friedman Krugman wrote “Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later.
Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine”. Friedman dubbed his prescription for cure of the Chilean economy that he suggested  to Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet and the results thereof as Miracle in Chile. Friedman stated that “The real miracle in Chile was not that those economic reforms worked so well, but because that’s what Adam Smith said they would do. Chile is by all odds the best economic success story in Latin America today. The real miracle is that a military junta was willing to let them do it.”
Friedman added that the “Chilean economy did very well, but more important, in the end the central government, the military junta, was replaced by a democratic society. So the really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.”  Many other economists e.g. Amartya Sen have criticized Friedman’s claim of Chilean miracle that in reality demonstrated the failure of Friedman-style economic liberalism claiming that there was little net economic growth from 1975 to 1982. The question that would be relevant for countries like ours is whether free market economy without governmental monitoring would be appropriate. The most recent Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) report has identified political parties and the police to be most corrupt. This is a dangerous situation because the people elect politicians to powerful positions and the police are expected to maintain law and order. In an earlier report TIB found majority among members of parliament as corrupt. In such a situation it may be considered whether the most important debate on how the coming elections would be held would produce any useful result for the people who may be asked to jump from frying pan into the fire. Consumers Association of Bangladesh and many other people have accused the government of inaction against syndicates who on different grounds, most of which appear to be unconvincing, have raised prices of essentials beyond the purchasing capacity of the common man. Many suspect corrupt connections exist between politicians, bureaucrats and business men. According to a study by Mehmet Ugur and Nandini Dasgupta (August 2011) Corruption is defined as abuse of public office for private gains by an agent. The agent is appointed to provide public service to a principal (usually a member of the public), who is unable to hold the agent accountable due to high monitoring costs. The corruption data used in the original studies aim to capture practices that include nepotism, job reservations, 'favor-for-favors’, secret party funding, suspiciously close ties between politics and business, bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, embezzlement of public funds and ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests. This finding indicates that corruption is detrimental for low-income countries where faster growth rates are required for catching up and poverty reduction. However, it also contradicts the common belief that corruption is essentially a problem for LICs, where its incidence is high. On the contrary, it was found that corruption is an international problem and that middle-income and developed countries stand to gain more than LICs from reducing the incidence of corruption further. Corruption has negative and significant effects on growth, both directly and indirectly and in both LICs and non-LICs. Therefore, there is a prima facie case for anti-corruption policy interventions in both low-income and other countries. However, the findings of the study also indicate that the economic gains from targeting corruption in low-income countries are likely to remain small if anti-corruption policies are not combined with a wider set of interventions aimed at improving the quality of governance institutions in general. The relatively lower adverse effect of corruption in LICs is highly likely to be due to the multiplicity of institutional weaknesses other than those captured by measures of perceived corruption. Bangladesh is defined by the World Bank as a low income country and corruption is believed to be rampant.
Institutional intervention through Anti-corruption Commission is present. But it is believed that the powers of the ACC are not sufficient to work independently of the government. It is time that the authorities mend their ways and address the concerns of the people that they had promised in their manifesto before the last elections were held.
The writer is a former Secretary and ambassador

         ANARCHY NOT DEMOCRACY RESULTS FROM INJUSTICE                         

      By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)

            FOR PUBLICATION ON  20TH DECEMBER 2013

Oxford Poverty  and Human Development Initiative , a study on some developing nations of South Asia, has paid glowing tributes to Bangladesh for having done well in reducing  poverty. So have other international institutions. World Bank announced in June 2013 that Bangladesh had reduced the number of people living in poverty from 63 million in 2000 to 47 million in 2010, despite a total population that had grown to approximately 150 million. This means that Bangladesh will reach its first United Nations-established Millennium Development Goal, that of poverty reduction, two years ahead of the 2015 deadline. But all is not well as 49% of the population live below the poverty level. Poverty matters because it affects many factors of growth – education, population growth rates, health of the workforce and public policy. Poverty is most concentrated in the rural areas of Bangladesh, hence creates  disparities between the rural and urban areas. However, urban poverty remains a problem too. In particular, poverty has been linked strongly to education and employment. Research papers published by reputed research institutions  have shown that poverty acts as both a cause and effect of  lack of education, which in turn adversely affects employment opportunities. Having an unskilled workforce also greatly decreases the productivity of the workforce which decreases the appeal of Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) and thus impedes sustainable economic growth. In essence, education is an important contribution to the social and economic development of a country. Secondly, rising landlessness is also a consequence of poverty in Bangladesh. In March 2011 Paul Krugman in an op-ed in The New York Times wrote "It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.” But Krugman argued that the US  needed  to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent —  represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential. "So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen". Equally Jeffrey Sachs advocating for "good society" speaks of sustainable development that aims at three interconnected goals: economic development (including the end of poverty), social inclusion (including the end of gender and ethnic discrimination, and real economic opportunity for all), and environmental sustainability, especially to address dire threats such as human-induced climate change and species extinction. In the establishment of good society and sustainable development the quality of leadership is of crucial importance. Since Periclean democracy is not possible in nation states due to sheer number of people living in a country the leadership that guides the destiny  of the people including that of the minority in a transparent manner has to be of a standard that can be  counted upon as honest and has wide outlook. It is always pertinent to remember James Madison's words written in The Federalist Papers: "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part... In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger". Such words are of timeless importance and should be a warning to rulers who want to do otherwise. Albeit during the Cold War period then super powers supported military and civilian dictators to contain  the influence of the contender from increasing its sphere of influence.  Unfortunately the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union did give a chance to the US to play a role of a benevolent global hegemon.  Zbigniew Brzezinski gives  in his book Second Chance the first President Bush high marks for handling “the collapse of the Soviet Union with aplomb” and mounting an international response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait “with impressive diplomatic skill and military resolve,” but says he failed to “translate either triumph into an enduring historic success.” The senior  Bush,  Brzezinski says, neither used “America’s unique political influence and moral legitimacy” to help transform Russia into a genuine democracy, nor used the victory in the first gulf war strategically to press for an Israeli-Palestinian accord and help transform the Middle East. Furthermore Brzezinski warned President George W Bush while he was preparing to invade Iraq that  war “is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences — especially in a highly flammable region — to be undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions” ( Michiko Kakutani-NYT-March 6 2007- The Book of the Times). On Ronald  Reagan Jeffrey Sachs observes : Reagan’s statement in 1981 was extraordinary. It signaled that America’s new president was less interested in using government to solve society’s problems than he was in cutting taxes, mainly for the benefit of the wealthy. More important, his presidency began a “revolution” from the political right – against the poor, the environment, and science and technology – that lasted for three decades, its tenets upheld, more or less, by all who followed him: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, in some respects, by Obama in his first term( America's new progressive era-07-02-2013).These illustrations  highlight the hubris, leaders big and small, may suffer when they fail to see the after effects of their  actions that transforms a democracy into a "dictatorship". The New York Times' series on the Great Divide between the rich and the poor illustrates socio-economic stratification of the global society regardless of the developed and developing economies. Even in the most advanced economy in the world, the US, many economists believe that the great divide has come to stay because the leg up received by the children of the rich in education and skills from their parents give them a decided edge over the children of the poor.  Decades back Harold Laski had observed that the “mass of men” having captured political power providing enough solid benefit to these people has become of urgent necessity for the preservation of democratic system. But then some have wondered ( Francis Fukuyama for example) if there is proper sequencing of transition to democracy. Samuel Huntington had argued that transition to democracy should follow industrialization creating middle class and other institutions necessary to support democracy. Prominent economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Arthur Lewis, Milton Friedman, to name a few, hold the opinion that a certain degree of economic development is necessary before democratic system can be sustained. In other words procedural democracy or multiparty elections before ensuring substantive democracy or economic distribution may not be the surest way to retain democratic way of governance. One wonders, therefore, if the current situation prevailing in Bangladesh can be called procedural democracy where the peoples' verdict have already been secured  before the elections have taken place as large number of parliament members have been elected unopposed and their elections are legitimate as providing a way to substantive democracy.

  

Kazi Anwarul Masud [kamasud@dhaka.net]

Sent:                                           Wednesday, February 12, 2014 9:29 AM

To:                                               'editor@bol-online.com'

Cc:                                               'enayetrasul7114@gmail.com'

Subject:                                     ATTENTION: MR. SHAHNOOR WAHID REPEAT MR. ENAYET RASUL

                               NEED TO SOLIDIFY DEMOCRACY

        By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)

         FOR PUBLICATION ON FRIDAY THE 14TH FEBRUARY 2014

Alyssa Ayres of the Council of Foreign Relations described   the  attempts to frustrate the 5th January elections as  " an opposition party which not only boycotts an election but seeks to prevent citizens from voting isn't furthering a democratic process at all". Like many other observers she found Bangladesh as  "a country that has achieved around 6 percent economic growth for much of the last decade, has the eighth largest population in the world, has delivered maternal and child health improvements on a scale comparable to the great Meiji restoration of 19th century Japan, is the world’s second largest exporter of ready-made garments after only China, and has achieved a 94 percent infant immunization rate". Recently Bangladesh government expressed hope to graduate to the threshold of  a middle income country by 2015 ( the next triennial review period of LDCs). The up-to-date criteria for a LDC are the ‘per capita income’ criterion, based on the gross national income (GNI) per capita (a three-year average),with a threshold of USD 992; the ‘human assets’ criterion based on a composite index (the Human Assets Index), which consists of indicators on nutrition, health, school enrolment and literacy; and the ‘economic vulnerability’ criterion based on a composite index (the Economic Vulnerability Index), which includes indicators on natural shocks, trade shocks, exposure to shocks, economic smallness, and economic remoteness. On all three fronts the government is hopeful to meet the needed criteria for graduation to the threshold of a middle income country.  UNDP report of 2013, World Bank reports and some others positively assessed the recent economic performances of Bangladesh with a question mark on the political instability that may very well undo the successes achieved and stall the progress of the country to solidify its democratic structure.  Ayreen Khan  (a researcher at the Peace and Security and Democracy and Governance fields at the Institut fur Entwicklung und Frieden (INEF), Duisburg, Germany) has assessed that the current political impasse hampers the economy of the country. Each day of strike or blockade mount huge loss to the economy of the country, estimated an amount of USD 193million per day. Every sector of the economy gets affected for political clash, e.g., garment industries count loss of USD 25.8 million per day, transport sector USD 32.2 million and small retailers face an amount USD 77.4 million loss per day. The current deadlock has affected every economic-monetary sector possible, e.g., hotel, restaurant, tourism, housing, raw materials (low growth in cement production: 3.6%, iron and steel production: -8.72%), remittances (-8%). Transport owners counted loss of USD 540.8 million while 4000 (3000 vandalised, 1000 burnt) vehicles were damaged in one and a half years. Agricultural growth weakened from 3.1% in 2012 to 2.2% in 2013. Service growth declined from 6.3% in 2012 to 6.06% in 2013 (“Bangladesh Development Update: Resilient Economy Facing Internal Risk”, World Bank, accessed on 29 December 2013). Investor’s confidence declined 1.2% in the real private investment rate. Due to the inevitable political clash during the election time, economic growth declines in every election year. The GDP growth rate declined during the election years in 1996, 2001, 2008 and in 2013 from 4.93% to 4.62%, 5.94% to 5.27%, 6.43% to 6.63% and 6.32% to 6.01%. The recent escalation of the nationwide blockade and existing thrust hampered the average rate of 6.2% GDP growth of the last four years( Where is the limit to political violence--3rd January 2014) . The loss to the economy listed above bring in the debate on inequality raging in both the developed and developing world. The most advanced industrialized economy in the world--the USA--is also believed to have most unequal distribution of national wealth. In Bangladesh and in other comparable societies the poor are hurt more than the rich because the poor have less shock absorption capacity than the rich. Gini coefficient, that measures the extent of distribution of income among individuals and households,  last reported by the World Bank for Bangladesh was 3.12 in 2010 where 0 represents perfect equality and 10 perfect  inequality. As the rich( noveau or otherwise) in most societies, particularly in ours, are believed to have cards stacked in their favour they even on occasions of hartals/strike take advantage of supply disruptions forcing farmers to sell their produce below production cost and in turn sell the same products to the city dwellers at exorbitant prices by forming syndicates. Then one has to take into account structural inequality and its adverse effects on the poor. Even in the US, writes Rutgers Law School  Professor David Dante Troutt, " We experience structural inequality — see it in the quality of local schools and their test scores, smell it in the access to healthy food or not, feel it in a sense of safety or danger as we walk the streets.
The American dream is more than a job or an income. ... People’s fortunes strongly correlate to their parents’ status. The Harvard researchers also found that the ingredients of mobility require certain structural components — including low residential segregation, low income inequality, better primary schools, greater social capital and more family stability.
In my own recent analysis of U.S. inequality, I found that income profiles closely follow residential profiles. Far more than pluck and merit are needed to get into the middle class". The same is true for Bangladesh. The children of the rich and the powerful go abroad for studies or to English medium schools in the country with more skilled teachers and lower student-teacher ratio. By the time they are in their teens these children are ready to compete internationally. In today's technology driven economies better schooling gives them a decided advantage to go up the socio-economic ladder compared to the children who are trained by less skilled teachers and less equipped schools. In essence, argues Salvatore Babones of the University of Sydney, by definition, rising inequality is a shift in economic rewards from poor to rich, and almost by definition it represents a shift in economic power from poor to rich.  Obviously, rich and powerful people in every country have enormous incentives to promote policies that result in rising inequality. It is not credible to suggest  that rising inequality is entirely due to larger economic forces without so much as a hand in the right direction from those who stand to benefit most from the trend.  Rich and powerful people would be extraordinarily irrational indeed if they did not promote rising inequality.  Our political leaders would be well advised to seek the path of communication  forsaking violence because in the ultimate analysis people seek peace and fast lose interest in an electoral process where their will is not fully expressed. Uncontrolled violence also opens up the possibility of strengthening radical Islamists movement introducing an international dimension to our political crisis. The present government has to its credit suppressing  radical Islamists by taking strong actions against them. The continuing  trial and conviction of those accused of crimes against humanity has done the nation proud. But the conflict between the ruling parties and the opposition parties combine, unless settled soonest possible, may encourage external forces to fish in troubled water. One would like to hope that meaningful communication between the feuding parties  would be restored and  possibilities of  interference would be denied to external forces.

  

editorial@theindependentbd.com

Cc:                                               'enayetrasul7114@gmail.com'

Subject:                                     ATTENTION: MR. ENAYET RASUL ASSOCIATE EDITOR

        IS  DEMOCRACY AN ABSTRACTION IN BANGLADESH

    By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)                     FOR PUBLICATION ON FRIDAY THE 18TH APRIL 2014

Robert Alan Dahl, the Sterling Professor emeritus of political science at Yale University,   past president of the American Political Science Association and  sometimes described as "the dean of American political scientists" identified among the thicket and impenetrable ideas surrounding democracy five factors he found essential for its survival and flourishment. According to Dahl these are Effective participation, Voting equality, Enlightened Understanding, Control of the Agenda and Inclusion of Adults. Tracing the roots of democracy Dahl writes about the Athenians who founded in the 6th century A.D. a system akin to democracy till they were defeated by the Macedonians and later by Rome. Dahl surmised that it was the Greeks-probably the Athenians-who coined the term democracy, or demokratia, from the Greek words demos, the people, and kratos, to rule. It is interesting, by the way, that while in Athens the word demos usually referred to the entire Athenian people, sometimes it meant only the common people or even just the poor. The word democracy, it appears, was sometimes used by its aristocratic critics as a kind of epithet, to show their disdain for the common people who had wrested away the aristocrats' previous control over the government. Democracy these days apart from Abraham Lincoln's government of the people, by the people and for the people has lost its relevance to a great extent and can be more aptly defined in  Winston Churchill's oft-quoted statement that "many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". But then the incorrigible imperialist that Churchill was treading upon the grave of Karl Marx Churchill observed that the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.  It is unfashionable these days to dig up the grave of socialism despite The Great Divide debate  in The New York Times being participated by the famous intellectuals of the day. People who criticize developing countries like Bangladesh for lagging in the establishment of Western style democracy where votes are counted (barring 2000 Presidential election of George W Bush and Al Gore that was decided by the Supreme Court) should look over their shoulders to read pages of history. In Robert Dahl's words, "There were ups and downs, resistance movements, rebellions, civil wars, revolutions. For several centuries the rise of centralized monarchies reversed some of the earlier advances-even though, ironically, these few, monarchies may have helped to create some conditions that were favorable to democratization in the longer run. Looking back on the rise and decline of democracy, it is clear that we cannot count on historical forces to insure that democracy will always advance-or even survive, as the long intervals in which popular governments vanished from the earth remind us .Democracy, it appears, is a bit chancy . "  Charles Boix,  of Princeton University, added to this strain of thought when he wrote " It was apparent to most classical political thinkers that democracy could not survive without some equality among its citizens. But a quick look at the history of the past two centuries shows that equality loomed large in the choice of political institutions. Big landowners have always opposed democracy, whether in Prussia, Russia, the American South of the nineteenth century, or Central America in the twentieth. By contrast, for democratic institutions to prevail, at least before industrialization, there had to be a radical equality of conditions". Boix and others brought in the necessity of per capita income for the sustenance of democracy. They argued that   since 1950, 80 percent of all non-oil-exporting countries with a per capita income over $8,000 have been democracies. The proportion is roughly reversed among high per capita income countries whose export revenues from oil amounted to 25 per cent or more of total trade revenues. In those economies where industrialization did not take off and natural resources remained or became the sole or main source of wealth, authoritarianism was likely to prevail".  National wealth and economic growth was correlated with sustainable democracy  in less advanced countries. No democracy has collapsed in any country with a per capita income over $7,000. Yet even these seemingly robust results are, upon further reflection, weak and unconvincing. First, the threshold of development at which democracy becomes likely has varied over time. Before 1945, 90 percent of all countries with a per capita income of $4,000 were democracies (versus 40 percent afterwards). Second, there are glaring exceptions to the relationship between development and democratic regimes. Germany and England had similar incomes but experienced very different political fortunes in the 1930s. India is a democracy in spite of its relative weaker economic performance vis-a-vis the developed economies. Most oil countries are rich but impervious to liberal institutions. It is, rather, excessive economic inequality, particularly in agrarian countries and in nations rich in oil and other minerals, that exacerbates the extent of social and political conflict to the point of making democracy impossible. In an unequal society, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the wealthy minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage. Eminent political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes  that basically four conditions have to exist to facilitate democratic transition:- (a) the level of development, (b) culture, (c) neighborhood effect, and (d) ideas. Virtually all industrialized economies are functioning democracies while relatively very few poor countries are democracies. There are of course exceptions such as India and Costa Rica which despite their relative underdevelopment have been thriving democracies while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait having high per capita income are struggling with the idea of opening up their governmental machinery to their own citizens despite American pressure on them to do so. While analyzing the stages of development necessary for acquisition of democracy it was found that barring exceptions virtually all industrialized countries are functioning democracies. Indeed once a country attains per capita GDP of US dollars six thousand it transforms itself from an agricultural society to an industrialized one and that country also attains sustainable democracy. Empirically it has been found that not a single country which became democracy ever reverted back to authoritarianism. Fukuyama thinks that it is because of the growth of the middle class owning private property and getting education. Evidently people living in poverty are too busy making both ends meet than to worry about elections and votes. Besides political scientists worry that even if countries have elections and make democratic transition, democracy’s sustainability becomes a challenge “in a society that is close to subsistence, that does not have any kind of resources, have very low level of education, very severe ethnic and other kinds of cleavages”. Professor Adrian Leftwich (On the Primacy of Politics in Development) quotes G.Kitching’s observation that “materially poor societies cannot produce the democratic life which is an essential prerequisite for the creation of socialist democracies”. Only economic growth, insists Leftwich, through industrialization can provide the platform on which democratic values, institutions, and process can be sustained. This argument is supported by Seymour Martin Lipset (Political Man) that democratic political development with a combination of economic, social and cultural factors are unlikely to exist in underdeveloped economies. Would then one to conclude that the developing nations should wait for the introduction of democracy till they achieve per capita GDP growth rate to reach the figure of US $ 6000? This appears to be a ridiculous position to take. As it is in many developing nations plutocracy are ruling in the name of the people the great majority being marginalized and voiceless. But then Bernard Shaw once remarked that democracy is a device that ensures that people  should  be governed no better than what they deserve . Shaw also dubbed democracy as a process in which election by the incompetent many is substituted for appointment of the corrupt few. The famous wit of English literature Oscar Wilde characteristically observed that democracy  means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. True these may be for Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Robert Taylor's Liberia or the feuding Democratic Republic of Congo. But   historically, democracies have replaced authoritarian regimes through two paths. On the one hand, democratic institutions have emerged after a long process of economic development spreads material wealth across society, equalizes economic conditions, and erodes the strength of the old authoritarian elites. On the other hand, absent economic modernization, social and political change has happened only after enormous violence — generally through military intervention of a foreign power. The acute observation of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, in  1754  is citable.  "The rich man . . . conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him, to make allies of his adversaries, to inspire them with different maxims, and to give them other institutions as favorable to himself as the law of nature was unfavorable." Both are true in the case of Bangladesh. The War of Liberation was fought not only for freedom from oppression but also to achieve a fair Bangladesh where people regardless of religion, creed, or any other factor associated with identity politics would get a just share of the prosperity of the nation. The feuding politicians regarded by the international financial institutions and donor countries are believed to be impediment on the way to economic development. Bangladesh's economy suffered a loss of Tk 49,000 crore or 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) due to political turmoil according to estimates by Centre for Policy Dialogue(published end January 2014). The way out, therefore,    is  not  the abandonment of democratic process but in  strengthening  institutions that would further democracy.   

 

                    DEMOCRACY DEFICIT AND DEVELOPMENT

        By Kazi Anwarul Masud(  former Secretary and ambassador)

              FOR PUBLICATION ON  FRIDAY THE 9^TH DECEMBER 2011

Harvard scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way( Election without democracy-The rise of competitive authoritarianism-Journal of Democracy-Vol 13-Number 2-April 2002) have argued that authoritarian governments may coexist indefinitely with meaningful democratic institutions as long as they avoid well publicized rights abuse and do not steal elections. Besides using bribery, co-optation, and other forms of “legal’ persecutions governments may limit opposition challenges without provoking mass upsurge. Competitive authoritarianism may result from the decay of full blown authoritarianism as seen from public upsurge against the regime of General Hussain Mohammad Ershad that was followed by election resulting in the installation of a seemingly representative government. Problem arose when this representative government which commanded absolute majority in Parliament started indulging in widespread alleged corruption and abuse of the rights of the people, in particular of the minority community who, though briefly in post- liberation  Bangladesh in 1971 till the assassination of the Father of the Nation and consequent change over were left largely untouched,    has been subjected to discrimination in many areas of their livelihood that would have been their right as citizens of the country. One of the reasons behind such persecution of the minority community was the doubt held by a  section  of Bangladeshis of their  loyalty  to the country . This conviction of disloyalty was sown  in the minds of the people of former East Pakistan since the partition of India in 1947 based on religion and as an attempt to concretize and legitimize the existence of Pakistan and to firm up the belief that Hindus and Muslims cannot coexist peacefully as a nation. Historians have cited many examples of peaceful coexistence of the two communities till the advent of the British rule in India who to perpetuate their rule  adopted and encouraged such constructed  division between the two religions that unfortunately has become embedded in post-partition India into Pakistan, India, and now to an extent in Bangladesh. Professor Sushil Chaudhury ( of Calcutta University-Identity and Composite Culture: The Bengal Case-presented at the Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh) tried to explain how the question of identity and religion are intertwined with the evolution of cultural syncretism and that from sixteenth to eighteenth centuries a composite culture evolved in Bengal. As opposed to that Professor Afia Dil ( of Alliant International University-San Diego-California) in her paper Arabic Impact on Bengali Language and Culture has demonstrated the impact of Arabic script and its influence on Bengali life and culture in general. This debate on our identity and culture becomes relevant if one considers the  debate on multiculturalism raging in the West. Language though an important element in defining identity is not the only factor in its evolution because the influence of  religion, believed to be  bred in the bone becomes no less an important factor in the evolution of identity. If Jurgen Habermass’s post-secular society in which “a worldwide resurgence of religion, the missionary expansion, a fundamentalist radicalization, and political  instrumentalization  of the potential for violence innate in some religions” are noted and have  come to stay then the common thread of linguistic similarity would not be enough  for the governance of countries like Bangladesh where 12% of the population consist of  Hindus, Christians and Buddhists. In such cases both transactional and transformational leadership is needed to enthuse the people to strive for furtherance of economic development regardless of religion, gender, ethnicity or cultural differences. One has to be careful that in quest of a national identity one does not fall into the trap of hybrid or illiberal democracy because it is easier to impose on than to  enthuse people to voluntarily adopt a common identity. But enforced laws or regulations are always transitory in nature and do not grow roots. As Levitsky and Way have pointed out there are mainly four areas of democratic contestation—the electoral arena, the legislative arena, the judicial arena, and the media. In Bangladesh the ruling party has three fourth majority in Parliament that may seemingly indicate stability but effectively means instability as the oppositional views are more likely to be voiced through street demonstrations and inevitable governmental repression in the name of maintaining law and order. The very fact that the legislation on the bifurcation of  Dhaka city into two took less than ten minutes to be passed into law in Jatyo Sangsad without debate or deliberation is indicative of a possible dysfunctional Parliament. If on examination it is later found that the bifurcation was a mistake then all the money and manpower spent on implementation  of the decision would have been in vain. In this context James Madison’s words are worth heeding to: In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. Democratic contestation in the electoral arena would not apply as elections so far held after the fall of authoritarianism have been free and fair despite opposition parties’ complaint of machinations by internal and external forces. Unfortunately in Bangladesh the democratic culture of gracefully conceding defeat is yet to take root. Likewise opposition party’s complaint of politicization of judiciary in the forms of appointment of judges and verdicts given on important legal issues do not hold water as such complaints are not backed by popular acceptance. Democratic contestation in the field of media  prevails in Bangladesh. The situation, however, has improved with the passage of time. In 2006 Freedom House rated Bangladesh with 66 points which put the country in the Not Free press group. Each country is rated in  three categories, viz legal environment 0-30, political influence 0-40, and economic pressure 0-30.with the higher numbers indicating less freedom.  A country's total score is based on the total of the three categories: a score of 0-30 places the country in the Free press group; 31-60 in the Partly Free; and 61-100 in the Not Free press group. Apart from the crisis of democracy facing Bangladesh due to inflexible attitudes of both the opposition parties and the ruling combine mainly on political issues the financial crisis facing the world  put the free-market or neoliberal model of development on trial. The Chinese model and that of some  emerging economies of reducing their exposure to foreign financial markets by accumulating large foreign currency reserves( China reportedly has $three trillion as reserve) and maintaining strong regulatory control over the banking system have posted impressive economic growth and at the same time supporting social policy have earned praise of the developing world. Hesitation to fully embrace the Chinese model by the developing countries en masse  stems from authoritative political system China has and also increasing inequality between the rural and urban sectors and profit of growth going to minority of the people that can lead to social unrest. For countries like Bangladesh devastating effects of climate change in a few decades, lack of adequate food to increasing number of people due to increasing food price and decreasing income, greater   focus on stemming population growth to a manageable level, de-industrialization  and lack of FDI  due to  inadequate infra-structure and energy, uncertain  future for manpower sector due to global meltdown and unsettled political situation in the Middle East and increasing  diplomatic initiative towards labor markets in Malaysia and South Korea, reduced exports of RMG and other products to the US and Europe due to falling  of demand will remain critical challenges for the governments in power. Better work ethics, job oriented quality education, reducing  “wastage” of public money, focused development strategy will be necessary to lead Bangladesh to a comfortable  state in years to come.