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End the grand 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.

Shahfr Zaidi
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 1 was not the only one. H. Khondker calls it Spaces of Despair" in Ilie Daily Star. although his recommendations (headlights on rickshaws, teach rickshaw pullers the rules, etc) smell like the same philosophy (blame the subaltern) that landed us in this national mess.
Putting hard facts to the exploding traffic crisis, Kailash Sarkar of Die 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But here is the key statistic that will make the metaphor even more solid: 1 lakh vehicles out of 6 lakh were withdrawn by CTG after 1/11, but all those vehicles have now returned. 175 community’ policemen were deployed by CTG.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 I lakh expected before Eid.
As I ditched my transport and walked (something 1 do every morning now to get to work on time) 1 kept thinking of traffic. 1 thought of those vehicles that the CTG boldly banished, which are all now back. Actually, everything is back. Every one is out. Everyone is well (or sick)? Everyone regrets! Everyone has leamt a lesson!
And while a natok plays out on the national stage, I look at grid-lackecLDhaka city; and come to this “realisation: 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 work erswill rise in the ranks. But now?
All the things that we saw over the last twenty months are all starting to be reversed 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 a "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 who does admit having initially high hopes for the 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 ... . . ,
1 usually curse our dysfunctional democracy non-stop. 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.
The writer is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star.