“Potemkin village” is actually a term that originated in politics, and thus, for this article, a very appropriate term to describe one interesting recent, possibly rhetorical, sidestep in the authoritarian march of Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League government she runs. According to Wikipedia, a Potemkin Village is “any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better.”
It is an appropriate term to describe the possible sidestep because it comes from another authoritarian country in another authoritarian time, and symbolizes authoritarian politics’ extreme avoidance of the truth. The term originated from tales of, and probably events in, 18th Century Russia during the reign of Catherine II. At one point during her reign when Catherine toured Crimea, the local gentry erected fake portable villages—facades of various buildings and establishments really—to impress her as to the attractions of their province; after Catherine had passed though the fake village and moved on, the facades were taken down, moved ahead and erected again further on down the line so Catherine would pass through the fake village again and the place would look more built-up than it was, and she would leave with the impression that the provinces weren’t so bad after all. It is also an appropriate term in a modern context, as the same kind of facades were heavily used in the golden days of Hollywood, especially in Western movies, to represent the small neat little towns of the fabled American West, a nod to making something look better than it really was.
I mentioned in a previous piece (the one that was stolen for use in a censorship scam), that Sheikh Hasina was quoted recently as publicly lamenting the absence of a serious opposition in Bangladesh. Given her seemingly lifelong effort and success at quashing any opposition, it is hard to take this lamentation at face value. I will describe in what follows her record vis-à-vis an opposition.
First, however, a comment on the authoritarian path she is clinging to and the background which pointed the AL in that direction. While it has always self-identified as a left-center, secular, modern democratic party, the AL seems to have had, always, a large dose of authoritarian DNA, and like other such political parties around the world, the will to power has been its driving force. Now this is the cruder version of “the will to power,” which Nietzsche would have disowned immediately as he used it in much more subtle and benign ways. Here I use it to mean an irrational force in all individuals that can be channeled it many directions, but in the case of political parties, is channeled toward getting and keeping political power whether for ideological, pecuniary, or psychological reasons. The party’s founder, Sheikh Mujib, ditched the first democracy in Bangladesh and set up an ill-fated one-party state. Sheikh Hasina fought for power from the time she entered politics as her record of using whatever means necessary to win elections, viz. her using alliances with blatantly non-democratic parties as electoral allies if they had a vote bank and could deliver it to the AL, and her demand for the adoption of a constitutional amendment requiring a neutral caretaker government for elections, and then removing it when she was in power and had the votes to do it. The primary motivation that drives her will to power is, as far as I can tell, vengeance for the assassination of her father, Sheikh Mujib.
Removing the caretaker amendment was key to her maintaining her grip on power since 2009. Since then, the AL’s authoritarian direction has never wavered, and progress toward that goal moves forward though at an erratic pace. The details of the 2014 election, which after losing the security of the caretaker amendment, the opposition BNP boycotted the election (a monumental political mistake that made its decline into impotency inevitable) as well as the 2018 egregiously and quite openly stolen election, are well known. Add to those shattering events, the Orwellian nightmare of surveillance and repression, the blanket of censorship and threat that creates a society in which fear pervades all levels and the human rights abuses of disappearances and extra-judicial killings exceed our imaginations, and there is no need further explication of an established and effective authoritarian system. One of the enduring threads that run through this history is Shiekh Hasina’s utter disregard for an opposition and her relentless efforts to demolish the BNP.
So when, at the end of January, the Daily Star reported in an off-handed way that Sheikh Hasina had suddenly floated a trial balloon, or possibly forecast her next step to true authoritarianism, at an insignificant inaugural ceremony, saying, “For a democracy, a strong opposition party is a must as we want our democratic trend to continue,” it was clear that her words should be taken seriously but not literally. She then added, “…the present opposition parties in Parliament could not attain the confidence and trust of people at the desired level due to lack of leadership.” The hypocrisy of this statement is breathtaking; the first question is, “what democratic trend?” The trend has been completely in the opposite direction for the past decade. And what opposition leaders in Parliament could she be talking about when she kept the leader of the BNP, the major opposition party leader in jail for an unconscionable period of time?
This did not create the stir I expected even though it sounded clearly like she was thinking, on purpose, out loud. A fortnight or so later, Prothom Alo, a very respectable and reliable source of political news reported that some (unnamed) important BNP members were considering joining the government. It did not say they were considering joining the AL and, thus it looks to me like Sheikh Hasina may have decided to add the only authoritarian touch that her regime has so far been missing—a captive opposition, what I have renamed a Potemkin Village opposition, one that only seems to be there but is really an empty shell.
Certainly a majority of the other prominent and outspoken authoritarian leaders—Victor Orban in Hungary, The Law and Justice Party in Poland, even Putin in Russia—have their house pet oppositions that they brag about and use to proclaim that they too are democracies even if they are pilloried by Western democracies just because the so-called opposition never wins or comes close to winning and never gets in the way either. Why shouldn’t Sheikh Hasina and the AL have the same bragging rights as other authoritarians? After all, Bangladesh’s society is locked down in a totalitarian stranglehold equally as effective as that of similar authoritarians.
In reflecting on this, I imagine it all goes back to the will to power, which Sheikh Mujib showed even before the separation of East and West Pakistan. Why else would he not have announced his intention to call for such a separation, for independence, at the celebrated March 7 speech? I was thumbing through the beginning pages of a novella, called “Under Such a Sheltering Sky,” about the 1971 war of separation recently, and there is a scene in which two young pro-independence men coming away from the speech saying, “why didn’t he say it?” meaning “independence.” “Because he wants to be Prime Minister of [United] Pakistan,” says one of them. Why didn’t he move, as he advised most of his acolytes to do, across the border to Calcutta when he knew the West Pakistan Army was coming with terror in their minds and in their orders, instead of gamely waiting for them to arrive? Probably because he intended to continue negotiations that would lead to his becoming prime minister, which he deserved after winning the election of 1970. Why does the story that his first reaction to the West Pakistan surrender was that he should be prime minister of United Pakistan seem so plausible? He had not yet learned that those acolytes he sent across the border had set up a government in exile which had declared its independence after the surrender and probably still wanted to be prime minister of a United Pakistan that no longer existed.
The writer is a former career diplomat who, among other positions, was ambassador to Bangladesh and Pakistan