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GROUND REALITIES

This certainly is no democracy...
**Wherever you cast your gaze, it is a one-woman or one-man show. The whims of the leader of the opposition are the deciding factor in whether or not her party will return to parliament. Every conference and every foundation-stone laying ceremony must have the prime minister in prominent presence.
IT'S a most wonderful thing having influential men and women from powerful nations come visitine us.
When they come, something of a miracle happens to us — to our politicians, indeed to everybody who thinks he or she is a somebody in this country. Even the pompous humbugs we see strutting around all over the place day in and day out suddenly decide to be a little civilised, a trifle polite.
When these bright, enlightening foreigners step into our home, or our homeland, we spot the prime minister and the leader of the opposition setting protocol aside to speak to them in language that is as sweet as you can imagine. It doesn't matter that these officials from the West may be equal in rank to your local joint secretary or additional secretary. It doesn't matter that your prime minister may spend weeks in Washington trying to see the American president and in the end manage to see a mere under-secretary of state. What is important is our sense of hospitality.
Our leaders, for whom we are pushed off the streets and not allowed by the police to cross over to the other side of the road across the foot over-bridges, may not have the time to see us. But they have all the time in the world to let men and women sailing in from overseas know what wonderful work they have been doing in politics and in government.
Wendy Sherman, America's under secretary of state for political affairs, was here last week. Certainly she was not the first official from Washington to be here in these past many months. And she surely will not be the last, between now and the next general election. Like all visiting western individuals holding key positions in government, she proffered some much needed advice to the ruling party and the opposition on ways of carrying the democratic process forward in Bangladesh.
For citizens like you and me, such advice is quite disconcerting, a sign of
the depths to which we have sunk despite our constantly telling the world that ours is a democratic country. Forty years after liberation, twenty years after the fall of the last military regime, the truth is something you cannot conceal any longer: it is that our democracy is gravely flawed, that our politicians inhabit a time warp and that we are in huge need of reformative change.
Do not ask why, for the reasons why we need to chart a new course are all out there. Parliament has been reduced to the state of a verbal pugilistic arena, with the honours going to those who can insult the best. The prime minister walks in and launches a blistering attack on the leader of the opposition. For her part, the leader of the opposition does not have the minimum decency required of a former prime minister. She turns her back on her rival once the latter begins to speak and walks away. Meanwhile, unelected and therefore unrepresentative women lawmakers cheerfully reveal in the house the abusive powers they are capable of calling forth in the defence of their parties. They know not where to draw the line.
The revered Tajuddin Ahmed wondered, only months before the liberation of the country in 1971, whether the free Bangladesh about to rise out
of the ashes of East Pakistan would be a habitable place for his people. His apprehension was not to be proved wrong. His own soldiers killed him and his colleagues in the "secure" confines of prison. Bangabandhu lay dead on the stairs of his home. From 1975 onward, things only got worse. Political loyalties did not matter any more. Where our goal in 1971 was the promotion of a democratic order and a move away from the Pakistani legacy of coups d'etat, it was precisely the opposite we caused to be shaped in our collective life. We have had our own indigenous soldiers commandeer the state between 1975 and 1982. Not a single officer or soldier died in Pakistan's four military coups. Hundreds were murdered in ours.
So there you have all the chances of reflection you need to do. You tell yourself, you try to persuade yourself into believing that since 1991 we have had democracy at work. That's selfconfidence at work. Think again. Our politics remains captive in the hands of two political dynasties. The two major political parties do not move even a centimeter unless they are sure of the mood of their leaders.
On posters put up by party loyalists across town, you are given a choice: go for Bangabandhu, Sheikh Hasina and Joy or for General Zia, Khaleda Zia and Tareq Rahman. You would think there was a severe paucity and poverty of leadership in the country. You would somehow draw the conclusion that Bangladesh is an open, seductive feudalism where a couple of dynasties stay on top and everyone else is but an incidental happening. And then there are the little dynasties in other, diverse sectors of life.
This is no democracy. Wherever you cast your gaze, it is a one-woman or one-man show. The whims of the leader of the opposition are the deciding factor in whether or not her party will return to parliament. Every conference and every foundation-stone laying ceremony must have the prime minister in prominent presence. The result is obvious. Kowtowing or genuflecting before the leader is an unalterable truth. Ruling party men and their friends cough up enough money to set up new banks. A journalist comes forth with as many as seven books glorifying the opposition and its dead and present leaders.
So where's the difference between the pretentious North Korean ruling dynasty and our "democratic" elites? And what separates our political classes from the entrenched political clans of the Middle East?
And where is democracy?
The writer Is Executive Editor, The Dally Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co. uk