Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Rational Reasons

[For Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Irrational Reasons, click on the title.]

Do the elite have extra-rational reasons for their faith in democracy? Yes, as we have seen. However, they also have eminently rational reasons for pretending to have faith in the system.

For depth of analysis, we will consider faith and pretended faith in the God that failed: Communism.

In the early 1950s, the Czech party member Zdenek Mlynar, then a student at Moscow University, was accosted by a very drunk Russian. The latter had just voted in favour of keeping out a friend from the party for a minor offence. Ashamed of himself, he asked Mlynar to “call him a pig” (we know from Dostoyevsky how those Russians are given to bouts of alternating criminality and contrition.)  When Mlynar inquired why, he received the following reply: “Because you are not a pig, you really believe in all this...You read Lenin, even when you are all alone. You understand? You have faith in all these ideas.” The Pig went on to become a successful military prosecutor. In the late 1970s, Mlynar went on to write, “No doubt he still gets drunk after a trial and gets someone to call him a pig” (Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), p 424). 

The children of the nomenclatura grew up, pigs almost to the last man and woman. They cared nothing for communism, and a great deal for their inherited privileges. As communism became more manifestly a failure, the Believers – there were still some – tried to reform the system. The Pigs made a show of ‘outward orthodoxy’, to use Vinen’s expression, but were in fact concerned only with their careers.

Of course, the Pigs twigged that capitalism would allow them to pass on their privileges better, and that they were in a unique position to benefit from the transition to capitalism. In the event, according to Vinen, the move to capitalism was a ‘management buyout’ (p 429). Some people lamented that self-interest, rather than idealism, had won the day. Istvan Csurka of the Hungarian Democratic Forum said that “his country had been cheated of the revolution” (p 432).

While the communist threat remained alive, it was American foreign policy to promote non-democratic rulers and strongmen in the Third World. We have seen that both Sheikh Mujib and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto appealed to the poor with their socialist ideas to win elections. The CIA actions against Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende constituted the end of the socialist wave that began in the late 1960s, according to Ayesha Jalal ( Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, A comparative and Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p 84). Both leaders were destined to be killed by the army. General Ziaur Rahman came to power in 1977; he founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and reversed Mujib’s socialism and nationalisation with a program of privatization and denationalisation, moving the country firmly towards free markets and capitalism. He was killed by army personnel in 1981. General Hussein Mohammad Ershad (1982 – 1990) continued the manoeuvre to the right. 

In the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick was perhaps Ronald Reagan’s most influential foreign policy advisor. In her obituary, The Economist observed that “she supported military interventions, covert proxy wars, the coddling of anti-communist dictators and the full-blooded, unapologetic pursuit of America's national interests”. America had loss its confidence under Jimmy Carter; she felt no need to compromise or apologise, coming out fighting against an ‘expansionist’ Soviet Union.

Her 1979 article ‘Dictatorship and Double Standards’ seethed with realism:

“No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratise governments, anytime and anywhere, under any circumstances.” “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse.” “The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers.”  

When the Cold War ended, the West reversed its policy: now it would champion democracy. The myth was born that on December 6, 1990 General Ershad was forced to resign by the thumotic student thugs of the political parties. The reality is more banal: The General didn’t jump, he was pushed – by the western donors. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the number of democracies in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 4 in 1989 to 33 in 1995 (The Economist, September 7th 1996, ‘Survey of Sub-Saharan Africa’, p. 5). About this epidemic of freedom, anthropologists Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in their book Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999) says: “It cannot simply be a coincidence that, now that the West ties aid to democratisation under the guise of multi-party elections, multi-party elections are taking place in Africa (p 118).” And in Bangladesh.  As The Economist observed: “…the cold war's end prompted western donors to stop propping up anti-communist dictators and to start insisting on democratic reforms”. And it was only in 1991 in Harare, Zimbabwe that heads of state declared that the Commonwealth should promote democracy and human rights. “When the Commonwealth moves collectively, that is, when all countries are pursuing the same objective of free and fair elections and good governance, it can act against countries that don’t even pay lip service to those values,” wrote Sir Donald McKinnon, Commonwealth secretary-general 2000-2008. “The fact that Zimbabwe and Gambia are no longer in the Commonwealth is because of a reluctance by the leaders of those countries to accept, adhere, commit and administer those values.” Apparently, Bangladesh at least pays “lip service” to the values of the Commonwealth (and no more, as we shall see.).

Money that had hitherto been channeled through the state now began to flow to non-state actors – NGOs. Unsurprisingly, these have proliferated. Again, Chabal and Daloz make an astute observation: “The political significance of such a massive proliferation of NGOs in Africa deserves closer attention. Our research suggests that this expansion is less the outcome of the increasing political weight of civil society than the consequence of the very pragmatic realisation that resources are now largely channeled through NGOs (p 22).” In other words, a rational response to monetary rewards.

Between, 2000 and 2005, Bangladesh languished at the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index; in 2013, the World Bank scrapped South Asia’s biggest foreign-funded infrastructure project, the Padma bridge, because of corruption by Bangladeshi officials. It is naïve to argue that there is corruption everywhere in Bangladesh except among NGOs. It has been estimated by economist Abul Barkat that only 25% of donor money reaches the poor in Bangladesh (New Nation, September 26, 2003); the remainder goes towards meeting administrative costs, including salaries. Chabal and Daloz observe that “...there is today an international ‘aid market’ which Africans know how to play with great skill. Indeed, there is very little doubt that NGOs spend an excessive proportion of their budget on furnishing their members with sophisticated and expensive equipment (from computers to four-wheel drives), leaving all too little for the development projects which justify the work of the NGOs in the first place (p 23).” This observation can be made of Bangladesh verbatim. Dr. Mozaffer Ahmed, economist and former chairman of Transparency International Bangladesh, echoed Abul Barkat when he observed that “Beneficiaries get only 20 to 22 percent of the foreign funds while [the] rest are used as ‘cost of fund’ meaning house rent, salary and other expenses”. According to The Economist: “There are about 20,000 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Bangladesh, probably more than in any other country.”

Therefore, it is not surprising that a BBC survey found that every section of society was suspicious of NGOs. Only three percent surveyed wanted to give them more power - and only two per cent admired social work, the 'least admired' of all kinds of work.

I became quite friendly with a top NGO honcho, and over dinner at a party, he gave me his job description. “I’m supposed to speak well of the West, say how good it is….” He had no illusions. Today, he lives in Baridhara, a posh enclave in Dhaka city.

Here is a sprinkling of facts about the income of NGOs and their connection with democracy. The reader should keep in mind the fact that the annual per capita income in Bangladesh is $4,200 (on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis). 24 local NGOs were given Takas 15 million - $260,000 – by USAID, DFID and the Swiss Development Corporation to observe the elections in 2001(at the exchange rate at the time). Another NGO – Association of Social Advancement – garnered Takas 10m - $175,000 - to meet monitoring expenses alone (The Daily Star, July 25, 2001 and August 11, 2001). And, again to meet election monitoring costs, the Coordination Council for Human Rights in Bangladesh received Takas 7.6m - $133,000 - from ‘an institution in the Netherlands’ (The Bangladesh Observer, April 5 2002). And Acting High Commissioner of Australia, Dr. Michele Forster, handed over a cheque for Takas 405,000 to the Executive Director of Democracy Watch, Ms. Taleya Rahman, for a Democracy Festival in northern Bangladesh (Observer, March 16 2002). Before the local (Union Parishad) level elections of 2003, eight NGOs were granted Takas 23,000,000 ($383,333) by the Danish aid agency DANIDA to monitor the elections – and some familiar names and acronyms crop up, such as, Democracy Watch, Bangladesh Manobadhikar Bastobayan Sangstha, ASA, NEOC, MMC....( The Daily Star, January 21, 2003).

The manifest function of NGOs is to promote civil society (as well as development); their latent function is to purchase the loyalty of the elite.

The total silence of the NGOs and civil society in general on the subject of student thugs killing each other over turf can be explained in terms of their eagerness to please donors: the thugs are an integral part of the democratic process. If they did not take to the streets (hartal), the ruling party would continue in power.

People like Tahmima Anam write for the BBC and the Guardian and, I’m sure, other western publications. In the latter, she wrote that “I can insist that the story of Bangladesh is not the story of a secular country that has turned to radicalism: it is the story of a country that has, against all odds, survived, even flourished.” Whether Bangladesh has flourished or not is moot: statistics on Bangladesh are hard to find. But for my present purpose that is neither here nor there. (When statistics are available, they are often depressing; for instance, the official unemployment rate is an enviable 4.4%. However, about 40% of the population is underemployed; many persons counted as employed work only a few hours a week and at low wages. The only industry, the garments sector, is incapable of absorbing these surplus workers. And the outlook for even this one industry is gloomy as labour-replacing machines take the place of unskilled workers.)

When I tried to portray an unflattering picture of Bangladesh and its toxic leadership (which is mentioned in neither the BBC nor the Guardian articles), I met with resistance, at least, and indifference, at worst.

I recall writing to New Hope International, and the editor sending me a terse note saying that if I found democracy so deficient, what alternative did I propose? Earlier, the chief editor had said that they would have been happier if I had attributed the violence I described to the market-friendly policies of the World Bank and the IMF!

I approached the Christian Science Monitor – they weren't remotely interested. I wrote to The Nation – thinking that this paper would surely be concerned about the plight of teenage boys used as thugs by the political parties; I never even heard from them.

I sent an article to the New Statesman. I got a reply saying that the relevant editor would get back to me after the Christmas holidays. I never heard from him again.

Then, my own analysis told me what was going on – these major newspapers were part of what I have come to call ‘The Freedom Industry’. Since their readers have been indoctrinated into believing that democracy is God's gift to humanity (George Bush's phrase), any criticism of democracy would not go down well with them. Prestige and money were at stake.

Finally, I learned about the Alternative Media/ Indy media.

My first ‘break’ came when Csaba Polony of Left Curve published a cycle of poems on the murder of student politicians by student politicians. I was grateful: I realised that criticism of students – who were supposed to have overthrown a dictator in 1990 – would only be acceptable to low-budget, low-circulation. non-mainstream newspapers and magazines.

And that turned out to be the case: I sent my article to an online journal called Axis of Logic. The editor was breathless with excitement: he immediately published it, and even tried to call me from America – but it wasn’t  easy to get through to Bangladesh. (The article is called The Freedom Industry and Student Politics in Bangladesh.)