Local And International Connivance To Promote Fake Democracy

Let me begin my overview of the media elite in Bangladesh with an autobiographical account. After the democratic transition of 1990, I did some research and the output was an essay called “Democracy: The Historical Accident”. I submitted the piece to the highbrow English weekly, Holiday. The editor changed the title, saying it was “too loud”.

Then I wrote an article on the emergency of 1958 in Ceylon, which I called “The Devil And The Deep”. The editor of the most widely circulated English daily, The Daily Star, Mahfuz Anam, objected to the title. “The devil of democracy!” he gasped. “People want democracy now.” The title was changed.

After a series of violent hartals and murders, I concluded another article with the one-sentence paragraph ‘We can have either democracy or safety, but not both’. The article appeared in the Daily Star, but with the last paragraph expunged, and the editor’s own words in its place, pleading for democracy.

My final and last encounter with the Daily Star occurred when an editor, Modon Shahu, told me “We know people want martial law, but we can’t print that”. If a newspaper knows what the people want, but won’t say it, that’s self-censorship. (Strangely enough, the motto of the Daily Star, blazoned across its online articles and print issues, is ‘Committed to PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO KNOW).

But these are mere peccadilloes compared to what the newspapers in Bangladesh got up to in order to connive at fake elections.

A little background first. As the reader will recall, General Ershad (always ‘General’) resigned the presidency on December 6, 1990. Illegally, he was kept in jail along with the vice president, Moudud Ahmed, who, by the constitution, was supposed to assume the presidency on the incumbent’s resignation. Instead, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, violated the constitution of which he was chief protector, became president, without a murmur of protest from the national as well as international community.

The first ‘free and fair’ elections were held in 1991, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) won, with Khaleda Zia as leader. The Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina was now the opposition.

At the end of her tenure, Khaleda Zia refused to budge and only a series of hartals, blockades and sieges by the Awami League succeeded in removing her from office. A Solomonic arrangement was arrived at: a neutral, caretaker government would henceforth oversee all elections, and not the ruling party, which would step down. (The advisor to the caretaker government would be the previous retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – what this would mean for the independence of the judiciary can be guessed at.)

Elections under the neutral, caretaker government were held in 1996 and 2001, with the parties rotating in power. The democratic miracle had been achieved – a two-party system, with opposition and ruling party changing place every five years.

After the election in 2001, a government officer told me confidentially that the election had been bogus. I didn’t believe him.

Then, I read an article in The Economist and felt like a fool for disbelieving such a reliable source. Now, our newspapers always report and even republish news items on Bangladesh published in prestigious western journals like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and, of course, the Economist.

Not a single word appeared in the newspapers of Bangladesh about the findings of Walter Mebane and his team at Cornell reported in the Economist. Mebane and others studied the figures for the three elections in this country in 1991, 1996 and 2001. The first was clean, the second showed that some 2% of results were problematic and the third, a glaring 9%. Yet the elections had been vetted by the Carter Center and the European Union.

The caretaker government had been a ploy to provide the illusion of an alternation of power. Its latent function – as opposed to its manifest function of overseeing true elections - was to ensure Buggins’ turn. Local as well as international actors connived at the chimera. (The caretaker government was ditched after the 2008 election held under a military government. Since then, Bangladesh has been a one-party state.)

The sentiments of the elite were echoed by writer Tahmima Anam, daughter of Mahfuz Anam, when she wrote for the BBC: “For three consecutive elections, we have had a large and enthusiastic electorate who have ushered in freely elected governments and representative parliaments. Although young and sometimes faltering, we have been understandably proud of our fledgling democracy.”  Apparently, we, the people of Bangladesh, are brains in vats being fed our stimuli by malevolent/benevolent forces.