[Reader-list] BANGLADESH: It's Time You Were Gone

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

As Bangladesh's 2 year limbo army-led "caretaker government" comes
near an end, and we head into an uncertain future of promised "return
to democracy" in December 2008, everyone is describing the last two
years as a massive disaster. One anthropologist has said simply "they
have not improved a thing, but the army has made everything much
worse". The original title for the op-ed below was "It's Time You Were
Gone", but was changed prior to publication.

Blog discussion at:
http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2008/09/15/time-you-were-gone/

DAILY STAR, September 15, 2008
End The Grand Experiment
By Saher Zaidi

"It's time — it's time you were gone"
- Anton Chekhov [Agafya]

Sitting in traffic and calculating how long it would take my 10 minute
ride to mutate into 2 hours, I thought about traffic as a metaphor for
the country. Then I cracked open the newspaper and found I was not the
only one. H Khondker calls it "Spaces of Despair" in The Daily Star,
although his recommendations (headlights on rickshaws, teach rickshaw
pullers the rules) smell like the same shushil samaj philosophy (danda
mere thanda, and always blame the subaltern) that landed us in this
national mess.

Putting hard facts to the exploding traffic crisis, Kailash Sarkar of
Daily Star informs us that a 10 km ride (Bangla Motor-Bangla College)
is now a 3.5 hour 'odyssey'. People are using apocalyptic language:
"Commuters say the entire city traffic system has collapsed". But here
is the key statistic that will make the metaphor even more solid: 1
lakh vehicles out of 6 lakh were withdrawn by CTG after 1/11, but all
those vehicles have now returned. 175 community policemen were
deployed by CTG, but they have no reporting to police and are now seen
as totally ineffective. DCC has licensed 87,000 rickshaw, but there
are 5 lakh rickshaws now in Dhaka with another 1 lakh expected before
Eid.

As I ditched my transport and walked (something I do every morning now
to get to work on time) I kept thinking of traffic. I thought of those
vehicles that the CTG boldly banished, which are all now back.
Actually, everything is back. Everyone is out. Everyone is well (or
sick)? Everyone regrets! Everyone has learnt a lesson!

And while a natok plays out on the national stage, I look at
gridlocked Dhaka city, and come to this realization: No one is running
the country.

Weekly Shaptahik wrote after the latest round of bails to politicians:
"Special Special Bail and 2 Years of System Loss". System Loss. It
sounds like a cruel joke. The CTG is in its last days and all that
remains is a human-spirit/life-electricity siphoning system loss?

Some hoped against experience that something good would come of all
this. Actually many did (more than will admit now). Even AL/BNP
grassroots workers were heard saying, the rot at the top will be
removed, and we the honest workers will rise in the ranks. But now?

All the things that we saw over the last twenty months are all
starting revert. Jailing the bigwigs, reforming the parties, creating
a Third Force, trying War Criminals, War on Corruption, ending black
money, demolishing illegal Rangs Building, separation of judiciary,
independence of TV and Radio. Promises made, process started, and back
to square one.

Another Daily Star columnist called it "round trip ticket from status
quo to status quo". An architect friend said to me, "It's as if we
took off from an international airport, and now as we are coming back
to land, the runway is overgrown with grass and some of the control
tower lights have been stolen." Faruk Wasif, one of the dynamic
writers on the left, in discussing the community that initially had
high hopes for CTG, writes a bitter coda in Prothom Alo: "I bathed in
ambrosia/but it turned to poison"

An optimist said to me "Listen no one likes spending a year eating
jail rice. I think all these people will think twice in the future."
Maybe, maybe. Several politicians have already said the last year in
jail was a "fire test" and a "learning experience". But what if some
take the opposite lesson: that we are the only game in town. Some have
achieved a glow after their time in jail, a heroic tint to their face.

A civil servant pointed out another dangerous side effect. He feels
that in the future no government officer will take the risk of
championing any project. If someone is efficient and pushes through a
large infrastructure project involving a lot of procurement, they will
fear that one day this will be dragged up in a national witch-hunt.
But, says honest civil servant, I was an honest officer! The problem
is the CTG years have given the distinct feeling that corruption cases
can also be arbitrary and politically motivated. Even anti-corruption
has become a dirty word.

I usually curse our dysfunctional democracy nonstop. But all trump
cards have been played and failed. The country is a patient, sliced
open on the operating table. But the medicine is killing him. And the
longer it stays open, the more infections spread. The gangrene has
reached all the way to the head.

And let's not even indulge any more force-fit solutions like National
Security Council. NSC would be another disastrous experiment. No more
of this laboratory testing please. Let's end this experiment and get
back to the messy business of political governments. It seems this
dysfunctional democracy is all we have, and we have to fix it through
democracy. There are no short cuts left.