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Freedom, eternal vigilance, and negligence

Imtiaz Hussain
ETERNAL vigilance may be the price of freedom, but how does it resonate across Bangladesh after forty-three birthdays?
Historically, it has been used to defend the status quo, rationalise expansion, and facilitate state integration. Sir Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, used it despairingly when the French Revolution threatened the monarchy, as too John Philpot Gurran in the United States against British threats after independence was won. Famous for dragging Florida's and Georgia's Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Indians, through the "Trails of Tears" to Oklahoma, LIS President Andrew Jackson exposed the aggressive usage in his 1837 Farewell Address, which set the stage for James Polk's 1848 war against Mexico under a Manifest Destiny ideology. Shortly after, as the LIS headed towards a race-based civil war, abolitionist Wendell Phillips offered a third variation of the phrase through his desperate urgings for reconciliation and integration between citizens and slaves.
Only the first and third types could be relevant to Bangladesh, though our four-decade history is thin on exemplars. If "eternal vigilance" was our vital post-1971 interest, we would have acted immediately to try war collaborators, instead of being persuaded, largely by outsiders, to delay any trials. Procrastination, in turn, promoted secondary issues. One eventually became who to institutionalise as the country's spiritual "founding" father. Until 1975, this was a unanimous choice: Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. By the 1990s, it became a contentious issue precisely because we shifted our attention from vigilance to political infighting and from democratic pretenses to authoritarian diktats, with our two dominant political parties rallying behind two different founding fathers: Sheikh Mujib for the Awami League (AL) and General Ziaur Rahman for the Bangladesh National Party (BNP). Political bitterness, alternating administrations, and contrasting foreign-policy proclivities (either pro-India or pro-Pakistan), rather than any "eternal vigilance" to preserve the fruits of independence took their toll on conflict-weary citizens. What could not be done publicly and officially became a private option, rather than a universal assumption, and unofficial, as it escaped any national discourse.
Though Bangladesh was never threatened militarily, in the very "take-off" stage of its nation-building, when institutions, symbols and senses, as well as loyalties, should have been cultivated, we turned instead to institutionalise internal division and foreign homage. Even lessons were not being learned, as we kept replicating the same mistakes: turning to a caretaker government to manage any administrative transition because the country was politi-
cally so polarised, we ended up institutionalising the caretaker government instead of any representative political party, not to mention an executive or legislature.
Foreign examples reveal our missed integrative opportunity. Alexander Hamilton's protectionist policyapproach after US independence, for instance, or Jawaharlal Nehru's nationalistic orientation in India, shifted attention to the home-front to construct institutions first and foremost. Both became the bedrock of cultivating democracy immediately after independence, which may be one reason why they are the largest two and most secure democracies today within their own contexts - one representing developed countries, the other less developed counterparts. Both also de-emphasised the foreign context in the initial decades - the US under a foreign policy of isolation, India under non-alignment. The results: thrivingexecutive, legislature, and political institutions, respect for the idea of an opposition (adversarial politics), and the veto power of rules and law.
That sounds like our wish-list. Indeed, our gaps might matter. In an age of ferocious globalisation, countries not only have to adjust domestic growth to unpredictable external circumstances, but those which do often get to come away with fewer bruises than those which do not. In our case, globally recognised success in the social arena, such as poverty-reduction, and advances in the business sector through the textiles revolution, has so frequently been trampled by political conflict that, ultimately, we pay twice over: first, through the absence of stable institutions to intervene and absorb the shocks; then by thwarting emergent socio-economic infrastructures even as they carry promises. A future determined by political vendettas, rather than micro-finance, for example, or even trickle-down growth, could have been nipped had we nurtured the strong secular institutions we inherited from our Independence War right after it ended.
Our wounds need not become fatal. That requires we cultivate the defensive version of eternal vigilance first, and for long enough to make it a tradition; and simultaneously encourage the healing process so that integrative instincts can be built. The belief in our independence is still strong, and especially when we still have a handful of freedom fighters left. That is the critical starter we missed in the 1970s. Once restored, the state would return to being the unquestionable subject of our loyalties rather than an instrument of our self-seeking interests. It would boast broader legitimacy than in the past, and be more widely recognised than it has ever been. Failing to do so before our last freedom fighters leave us would put us on the slippery slope to "eternal anarchy" - a war for all against all. That would insult anyone who utters the country's once-hallowed name.
The writer is Professor Emeritus, International Relations, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.