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Imported institutional reforms

For example, our parliamentary system worked in a very presidential manner. Our leaders tended to evoke the imperial (and imperious) style of rule (as distinguished from governance) of our pre-colonial history; our keepers of law and order tended to (and still do) arouse a mixture of apprehension and fear within the hearts of those they are supposed to protect, rather than the secure comfort that the average British citizen derives from the sight of the friendly neighbourhood Bobby walking the walk and talking the talk in his local precinct; and so on and so forth.

Tariq Karim
I have followed, with some interest, reports on a recent roundtable held in Dhaka about police reforms. The Daily Star also wrote a lead editorial on the subject on April 30. I fully concur that the reforms of a core institution in the state can best be addressed by a government in interregnum like the present one, non-partisan or removed from affiliation with any political party.
As the roundtable and the editorial correctly pointed out, reforms were not carried out by any past government, whether in the erstwhile Pakistan period or in Bangladesh since liberation, or any political party or dispensation in power simply because they could use the institutions as
tools for their own narrow and, more often than not. nefarious partisan purposes.
As I had written over a year ago, our present institutions arc essentially derived from the institutional concepts that were imported and transplanted (not without some "genetic" engineering) by the British.
However, the actual manner in which the colonial masters operationalised these imported institutions was actually quite different from the original British prototype for two reasons.
One, the purpose of the institu-tions transplanted overseas, while replicating the original institution at home, was fundamentally different. The institutions in Britain were designed to govern and deliver services for the welfare of the Crown's sub-
jects, while their replicas on colonised soil were designed to rule over conquered people. They were designed to extract everything from colonised subjects in order to fill the coffers at home, and project their imperial power overseas.
Secondly, the local soil conditions, in their inherent composition and "pH" factors, were quite different from the "home" soil from which these institutions were transplanted. For example, our parliamentary system worked in a very presidential manner. Our leaders tended to evoke the imperial (and imperious) style of rule (as distinguished from governance) of our pre-colonial history; our keepers of law and order tended to (and still do) arouse a mixture of apprehension and fear within the hearts of those they are supposed to protect, rather than the secure comfort that the average British citizen derives from the sight of the friendly neighbourhood Bobby walking the walk and talking the talk in his local precinct; and so on and so forth.
Tragically, when the gora sahibs packed up to return to their native homeland, the thrones they vacated were taken over by the brown sahibs whom the British had educated and groomed, very much in the mould of interlocutors as had been envisaged by Macaulay, to act as "intermediaries" between the British rulers and their Indian subjects.
The erstwhile colonies may have wrested their freedom from British shackles, but their new rulers and administrators had not been able to shake off and change for the better the mindset of ruling by coercion and extraction that they had inherited from their erstwhile white masters.
True independence from continuing tyranny and from oppressive extraction by the successor ruling elite and the bureaucracy and police they controlled eluded the hapless people.
At a seminar that discussed human rights and rule of law in Bangladesh, convened by a Washington think-tank in 2005, in which I was one of the invited panelists, the suggestion for police reforms was also raised.
One discussant, representing an international NGO asked me if I would recommend that substantial sums of money be made available to the then government of Bangladesh for modernisation of equipment and for training. My immediate response to that was a horrified "NO."
I asked in return: Why was it that the police worked very well indeed during the short threemonth period when a caretaker government was in power, in 1991, 1996 and even in 2001? By all accounts, people had a sense of security, traffic flowed relatively smoothly and there were no remarkable accounts of egregious abuse of power.
The laws as they existed, though quite antiquated and in dire need of being updated and upgraded, still worked. I pointed out that the police were an instrument of the state, a tool in the hands of the rulers. It could well be likened to a kitchen knife,
which by Itself was quite harmless, albeit an extremely sharp-edged and potentially dangerous, tool.
It depended entirely on the intention of the person wielding it as to what use he was going to make of it -- to slice an onion or chop some vegetables and meat for cooking a gourmet meal -- or to cut a disliked person.
The vast majority of the population perceived the police as an instrument of oppression and terror. Refurbishing them with more efficient weapons and tools of policing, and training them to use these tools with greater efficiency, might very well result in the ordinary people being "more efficiently oppressed and terrorised," not necessarily more efficiently and better policed and safeguarded.
So, in my view, the reforms had to start with untangling and setting the crossed wires straight in the head of the person wielding the knife, so to speak. I daresay, the point I made was very well taken.
The present government has, indeed, taken a number of admirable steps to reform the core institutions, and safeguard them
from future tampering by partisan politics. By all accounts, the people who have taken over these reformed bodies are all persons with impeccable and unimpeachable integrity.
One hopes that the next elected parliament.will not result in a return of partisan politics with a vengeance once again. To safeguard these reforms I have earlier, on more than one occasion, suggested the formation of a council of ombudsmen with independent and enforceable authority to keep a sharp-eyed vigil on the performance of all the state institutions, particularly the bureaucracy and the police.
Simply putting laws in place, or upgrading them, is not enough. One needs to not only ensure that the laws are applied and enforced in letter and in spirit, but also that there is a body to monitor those charged with the enforcement of the laws, to ensure that they do so in fair and just manner.
Having witnessed the many broken promises of past elected governments, regardless of what party or creed they ascribed to, one is still quite cynical whether a political party elected to power will not, once again, succumb to the
temptation of reneging on its promises, and, therefore, tends to quite empathise with the call for the present government to take the initiative on this matter as well.
Having said that, one is also conscious that a broad consensus in society is also essential to ensure that whatever reforms are being put in place will not be rolled back or negated by subsequent elected governments or partisan squabbling.
In many countries, the people put up matters of great importance as questions for a general referendum at the same time as elections are held. The same electorate that will turn out to elect their leaders to the new parliament could also voice their opinions on specific reform matters.
Most people are likely to welcome these reforms, and, therefore, may be counted upon to give their Imprimatur to them. No elected leader is going to disregard the will of the people so expressed.
Tanq Karim, a retired career diplomat and former ambassador of Bangladesh to the Unled States, is nm teaching as adjunct faculty at George Washington Unrversrty, the University of Maryland and the Virginia International University