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Review by Tariq Mahmud 30 November 2023
Dr M Adil Khan, a Bangladesh-born Australian and former senior policy manager at the United Nations and currently an Adjunct Professor at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Australia, has written an insightful and comprehensive 50-year history of development and governance in Bangladesh.
In his seminal work, Dr Adil takes the reader through seven eventful governance periods in the country’s history in chronological order with narratives that are quite informative and succinctly.
Khan has delineated as to how during the past fifty years, the South Asian nation has made laudable progress in many fields, especially on the economic front, while at the same time, experienced significant and repeated governance missteps in the form of what he has termed the “Constants of Bad Governance (CoBGs).”
Dr Adil has argued that these CoBGs have marred Bangladesh’s enviable economic progress and more worryingly, are threatening to undo the gains the country has made during the last five decades.
Initially, Bangladesh opted for parliamentary democracy as its governing arrangement and a socialistic system to develop the economy. In foreign relations, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s bold decision to attend the historic inaugural summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Lahore in 1974 forged abiding links with the rest of the world, especially the Muslim Ummah.
However, by early 1975, Bangladesh had taken a U-turn and transited from parliamentary democracy to a one-party presidential authoritarian rule – a move that was antithetical to the aspirations of the people of the new-born nation.
Concurrently, the raising of the ‘Bahinis’ – government militias – the vigilantes composed of the ruling party loyalists was not viewed favourably by Bangladesh’s young army officers, who had also grown restive at the scale and range of corruption in the government that pervaded the society at the time.
The army, the young Turks rebelled and on August 15, 1975, and staged a bloody coup in which Sheikh Mujib, and his family members who were present with him at the time at the house, were assassinated.
In the aftermath of the coup and during a brief interlude following Sheikh Mujib’s assassination, socialism was abandoned in favour of market economy and shifts were also made from secularism towards the country’s Islamic identity.
In January 1976, after a series of coups and countercoups, General Ziaur Rehman, the army chief, took over the country’s reigns as president. He dismantled the one-party system, introduced a multiparty presidential system, and established his own political party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, BNP.
To empower villages and to incorporate rural Bangladesh into his mission of rebuilding the tormented nation, General Zia promoted the idea of Gram Sarkar, or village government, where villages were given modest funds to pursue development through elected councils. His main thrust was on the primacy of the market economy as an engine of growth and in foreign relations, he focused on deepening ties with Middle Eastern countries, something which Sheikh Mujib had pioneered through his participation at the OIC in Lahore a few years earlier.
Dr Adil notes that in terms of national identity, General Zia honed Bengali nationalism into Bangladeshi nationalism, an identity which was based on Bangladesh’s territorial, cultural and religious heritage, something which he saw as unique and different from that of the Bengalis living in the Indian West Bengal. General Zia remained president for five years until he was killed in a gruesome coup in May 1981, ending his transformative rule.
The next phase in Bangladesh’s governance involved a military takeover by General Ershad who ruled the country until 1990. During his 1982-90 tenure, he prioritised decentralised governance and encouraged privatisation. His rule saw the economy flourishing, but there was also widespread favouritism, nepotism, and corruption, which dulled much of his accomplishments.
Begum Khaleda Zia, wife of the slain General Zia, who had taken up BNP’s leadership after her husband’s death, launched a fierce campaign against the military rule of General Ershad, eventually partnering with other opposition forces, including the Awami League, and successfully toppled the military ruler, Ershad in 1990. The country returned to parliamentary democracy, with Khaleda Zia at the helm as the prime minister.
From 1991 till 2006, apart from a military-backed interlude of two years, during 2007-08, in the form of a caretaker government, power has alternated between Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, the leaders of Bangladesh’s two main parties namely, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, respectively.
During the Khaleda/Hasina alternating governing periods, significant progress has been made in economic development, health and education, especially in educating the girl child.
Since 2009, Sheikh Hasina has been in power and is now all set to contest the 2024 general elections for another four-year term. Dr Adil has noted that during Sheikh Hasina’s current tenure, Bangladesh has experienced accelerated economic growth, reduced poverty, and increased foreign exchange earnings through growing remittances from Bangladeshi expatriate workers and from the export of readymade garments. There has been remarkable progress in women empowerment with the number of women employed in both the formal and informal sectors, swelling. Of late, mega projects, such as the construction of the Padma bridge, and the fast-moving metro rail in Dhaka, have become Sheikh Hasina’s and her party, the Awami League’s proud signposts of ‘development.’
Dr Adil, however, notes that notwithstanding these admirable accomplishments, Sheikh Hasina’s tenure has also been mired by allegations of rampant corruption, crony capitalism and democracy deficits where dissent is rising but brutally suppressed, and forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, detentions, custodial torture, and disruption of opposition rallies are common occurrences as are the pre-engineered electoral results, which seem to have become more the norm than the exception. These all are the hallmarks of an illiberal democracy, a system that has all the trappings of a democracy but not the substance.
Currently, with the aging and ailing opposition leader, Khaleda Zia under house arrest and the opposition in disarray and with the general elections due in early 2024, and with there being no evidence of a level playing field, many are despairing. Dr Adil thus believes that chances of free and fair elections taking place in 2024 under the supervision of Sheikh Hasina are remote.
Dr. Adil may be right. Available evidence suggest that Sheikh Hasina has complete control over the levers of power and at the same time, she appears to sustain herself through some not-so-invisible external support. In this regard, the notable Indian journalist, Shekhar Gupta has argued that as India is no more the favourites of neighbours such as Maldives, Sri Lanka and Nepal nor with China and Pakistan, it would be keen to bet on Sheikh Hasina, a mutually convenient ally, who has already extended, ex-gratia, to India transit and port facilities and is likely to give more in exchange of the guarantee of her remaining in power.
Summing up Bangladesh’s 50-year accomplishments which are no doubt astounding, and the cumulative challenges, the CoBGs, that are also no less daunting, Dr Adil has argued that presently Bangladesh is in a situation where lack of balance between sustained economic growth and good governance and rather abundance of the latter is endangering the former. To create this balance, which is key to ensuring sustainable development, Dr. Adil has recommended a set of urgent “resets” that include but not limited to restoration of democracy and good governance norms such as the rule of law, transparency, and accountability in the government.
Dr Adil has further pointed out that despite introducing innovations such as non-party neutral caretaker governments during elections, which did ensure free and fair elections in the past, an arrangement from which the Awami League itself benefitted once and secured an overwhelming majority in the 2009 elections, it, once in power used its parliamentary dominance and scrapped the very system it had once introduced and benefited from. The result of this misstep is that the party has since never ‘lost’ an election, a testimony to the limitations of democracy as is currently practiced, more particularly in Bangladesh.
Citing these examples Dr Adil has suggested that democratic reforms in Bangladesh, where democracy has been used to “kill democracy,” must introduce measures that help prevent abuse and help “democratising democracy.”
The author has also emphasised that strengthening moral values and bolstering as well as the qualities of empathy and promotion of sense of morality among citizens are as important if not key to enhancing accountability and transparency in governance and more importantly, in controlling corruption and abuse, which are currently rampant in the country.
Dr Adil has also suggested that promotion of citizenship values, which irrespective of their political choices, empower citizens to make governments accountable, something which is currently missing, must also be taken up as an important aspect of democratic reform.
Thus, time is ripe not just for Bangladesh but for the sub-continent itself that seems to suffer from the phenomenon of ‘one-step forward’ and ‘two-step back’ to take a deep breath and reflect inwardly and mend the ‘Constants of Bad Governance’ that keep on pushing them backwards.
Indeed, Dr. Adil’s book on Bangladesh could very well be a reminder to the Sub-continent to appreciate its unattained potential and grow as a democratic, peaceful, and economically mightiest region of the world, together.
This may sound like a tall order but by no means an undoable one. As CoBGs –governance missteps – continue to plague our nations and have trapped us in a vicious cycle of ‘one step forward,’ ‘two steps back,’ the time is ripe to remind ourselves as Dr Adil has aptly done in his book by quoting the great Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz that:
“This was not the dawn we longed for,
Move on, as we still have a long way to go”!
We must commend Dr Adil Khan for his bold and timely discourse on development and governance in Bangladesh that has raised awareness about governance missteps that have plagued Bangladesh’s and in one form or the other, Sub-Continent’s progress. His comprehensive reset agenda is a helpful roadmap to rectify the ‘Constants of Bad Governance,’ restore democracy, morality and in some instances, ‘democratise democracy’ in a bid to move forward, together.
The reviewer is a writer, a public policy analyst and Adjunct Faculty at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences. Until recently, Tariq Mahmud has been a member of the civil service in Pakistan and a retired Secretary of the government.
Note: The review is an amended version of the original, published in Minute Mirror, Lahore, Pakistan