Why do civilian rulers of Bangladesh have wicked dispositions?

Is it possible that every one of our military rulers had good dispositions, and that every one of our democratically elected rulers had bad dispositions?

This seems farfetched. Instead of appealing to dispositions, explanations along situationist lines would be more illuminating.

First of all, there is no political hatred when politics is in abeyance, almost by definition. Society under military rule was not divided between us and them, ingroup and outgroup. Under military rule, there is no political hatred, simply because there is no politics.

Even in a peaceful democracy like America – invariably held up as a model for the world, ‘the city on the hill’ – democracy creates civic or situational enemies. Even before the election of Donald Trump, more than half of Democrats told pollsters that they were afraid of Republicans and almost half of Republicans said the same about Democrats.

Cass Sunstein observes that in 1960, only about 4 to 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats would be ‘displeased’ if their children married members of the opposite party; now, about 43% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats admit they would be displeased (Against Democracy, p 234).  

Violence is never far below the surface even in the oldest democracy. After a Republican congressman was shot by an unstable gunman last summer, leading Democrats expressed outrage at the idea that their rhetoric had played any part. Yet they used the attempted bombings and the synagogue shooting to begin a debate about the precise degree of presidential responsibility for domestic terrorism.

In the Mother of Parliaments, tribalism has descended like an evil mantle. On June 16, 2016, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a troubled, far-right 52-year-old gardener. Working-class Labour voters, like the ones who put her in Parliament, tend increasingly to be pro-Brexit and nativist. Mrs Cox was a fervent pro-European.

She had complained to the police of abuse, but MPs do not receive police protection. This year, British Members of Parliament were advised to take taxis home, over fears that they could be attacked by members of the public over the handling of Brexit. "Personally, I have never felt this level of tension during my time in the House and I am aware that other colleagues feel the same," wrote the Deputy Speaker in an email. "Many colleagues have already been subject to widely publicized abuse and intimidation."

On January 1, the day after the national elections on December 31, 2018, a mother of four was gang-raped in the city of Noakhali, Bangladesh, for voting for the opposition (Daily Star, January 2, 2019).

“They had repeatedly insisted that I should vote for boat [the symbol of the ruling Awami League] but I cast my ballot for 'sheaf of paddy' [that of the opposition],” she said.

Around a dozen ruling party men armed with sticks entered her house after midnight, tied up her husband and children, took her outside and raped her. The woman alleged the rapists were accomplices of Ruhul Amin, a former member of Char Jubilee Union Parishad.

Her husband said that she had gone to cast her vote at Char Jubilee-14 Government Primary School centre around 11:00 am on Sunday. She took the ballot paper from the assistant presiding officer and went to a booth.

At that time, Ruhul, an Awami League man, insisted she vote for the “boat”. He allegedly tried to snatch the ballot paper as she said she would vote for the “sheaf of paddy”. But she put the paper inside the box.

This made Ruhul furious and he threatened her, he said.

We began this essay with an earlier case of political hatred, as the reader will recall.

Second, and this is closely associated with the above, is the absence of the monopoly of legitimate violence. In his lecture “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), the German sociologist Max Weber defines the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” In short, under democratic rulers, the state is missing in Bangladesh (and India as well, where the RSS, the Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and others routinely act outside the state; the use of thugs in politics is widespread, as depicted in the Hindi movie Vaastav (1999)).

Sheikh Mujib had a private army (the Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini), his daughter, Sheikh Hasina, has the Chatra League and Jubo League, her rival, Khaleda Zia, has the Chatra Dal and Jubo Dal. After the slaughter by the Rakhi Bahini in the early ‘70s, we see slaughter again after 1990 – more than 80% of all hartals on this land since 1945 occurred after the miraculous year. Hartals require enormous personnel, in short, a private army.

With General Zia (1977-1981), General Ershad (1983-1990) and General Moeen (2007-2008), the military possessed the monopoly of legitimate violence. By means of democracy, it seems, we have reverted to the Hobbesian state of nature. These men may or may not have had good dispositions, but the situation they were in made for goodness.

Third, we must recall that the quality of the electorate determines the quality of the candidate pool, and ultimately the quality of governments and the rulers. Norman Davies described German voters in the 1930s as “cannibals” who elected a government of “cannibals”. The European elite have been vigilant against the return of this species of voters. In South Asia, the elite, by pandering to the people, have produced toxic rulers.

When extra-judicial killings, disappearances, battery of child and student protesters by student-thugs, allegations of threats to the former Chief Justice’s friend, and so on, and so forth, increase the popularity of the government, it can hardly be faulted for a rational course of action, aimed at maximising votes. After all, it is not Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch that put the party in power, but the people.

On the campaign trail in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, in speaking of an Australian missionary who had been raped and murdered during a prison riot, lamented that he had not been first in line to abuse her sexually. He treated allegations of his links to vigilante killings in the city of Davao, of which he had been mayor, with pride. And when he promised that he would, as president, dump the corpses of 100,000 gangsters in Manila Bay, the crowd went wild. After he was elected president of the Philippines, the country’s police killed at least 40 suspected criminals in the following two months, more than in the preceding four months combined. A human rights worker, on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, told a newspaper that Duterte was “our most popular president since Cory Aquino”.

Thaksin Shinawatra, former prime minister of Thailand, meted out bloody vigilante justice to alleged drug-runners and to government opponents in the Muslim and often strife-torn south of the country. In a shooting spree in 2003, over 2,500 people died in three months, making the prime minister a hero. The police blamed gang violence; human-rights groups accused the government of condoning extra-judicial killings by the security forces. And a panel set up in 2007 by the outgoing junta concluded that over half of those killed in 2003 had no links to the drugs trade. The panel blamed the violence on a government “shoot-to-kill” policy based on flawed blacklists. His popularity was such that it took a military coup to remove him from office. Yet, his mantle passed easily to his sister.

That the quality of voters would determine outcome is an observation as old as democracy itself. Thus we have Plato’s famous lines in The Republic:

“And those who have been of this little company and have tasted the sweetness and blessedness of this possession and who have also come to understand the madness of the multitude sufficiently and seen that there is nothing, if I may say so, sound or right in any present politics, and that there is no ally with whose aid the champion of justice could escape destruction, but that he would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all, and that he would thus, before he could in any way benefit his friends or the state, come to an untimely end without doing any good to himself or others – for all these reasons, I say the philosopher remains quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, standing aside under the shelter of a wall in a storm of blast of dust and sleet and seeing others filled full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep himself free from iniquity and unholy deeds through this life and take his departure with fair hope, serene and well content when the end comes (496c-e).”

Compare Thucydides:

“Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude –in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude (History of the Peloponnesian War, (trans. Richard Crawley, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65).”

For Aristotle, democracy is a perversion of constitutional government: “Of the above-mentioned forms, the perversions are as follows: of kingship, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all (Politics, 1279b4-10).” “But when the many administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name – a constitution (1279a36-37).”

Aristotle’s view of democracy was to have a lasting effect on Europe. According to John Dunn, democracy was “a form of government which simply did not aim at a common good. It was a regime of naked group interest, unapologetically devoted to serving the many at the expense of the wealthier, the better, the more elevated, the more fastidious or virtuous…. Not only was democracy violent, unstable and menacing to those who already had wealth, power or pretension, it was, Aristotle taught many centuries of European speakers to mean, ill-intentioned and disreputable in itself through and through (Setting the People Free, p 50).”

It is interesting to note what Aristotle has to say about democracy, the rule of law, and demagogues. “For in democracies which are subject to the law the best citizens hold the first place, and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. For the people becomes a monarch, and are many in one; and the many have the power in their hand, not as individuals, but collectively…. At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarchy, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour; this sort of democracy is to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. The spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens; the decrees of the one correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other. Both have great power – the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind we are describing. The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all things to the popular assembly…. Such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it is not a constitution at all; for where the laws have no authority, there is no constitution (1292a6-32).”

We find an echo of this in Byron:

I wish men to be free

As much from mobs as kings—from you as me.

We have seen that democratic practice, such as it is, in South Asia, has been inconsistent with the promotion of human rights and the rule of law. There is nothing axiomatic or universal about the latter: they are values, shared or un-shared, with or without consensus. The question of abortion may be recalled.

It would be tempting to join Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in their struggle for human rights and the rule of law, but it is a fruitless endeavour. Violation brings popularity, the life-blood of toxic leaders. The followers and the followed are on the same page.

Besides, there is, as always, the problem of translation. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘rights’ must be translated into the local language. Without going into a detailed analysis, let us consider the famous definition offered by Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa. “You have more rights because you’re a majority; you have less rights because you’re a minority. That’s how democracy works.” Or take the equally revealing translation of the word ‘democracy’ made by Turkey’s toxic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said that democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.

Words travel; ideas don’t.

We recall that democracy had been a pariah world. Today, we glibly pronounce ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ as somehow entailing each other, a Holy Trinity. But, as Helen Rosenblatt, author of The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), points out:

“A common mistake we make today is to use the expression “liberal democracy” unproblematically, as if “liberalism” and “democracy” go together naturally. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably as if they were synonyms. However, for the first one hundred years of their history, most liberals were hostile to democracy, which they associated with chaos and mob rule. Certainly, the founders of liberalism were not democrats. Although he believed in popular sovereignty, Benjamin Constant insisted that it be limited and advocated stiff property requirements for voting and office holding. Madame de Staël championed the “government of the best,” which she distinguished from democracy.

“To Constant, de Staël, and many other liberals, the French Revolution proved that the public was utterly unprepared for political rights. People were ignorant, irrational and prone to violence. Under popular pressure, the rule of law had been suspended, “enemies of the people” guillotined, and rights trampled upon. Napoleon’s despotic rule, repeatedly legitimized by plebiscite, only confirmed the liberals’ apprehensions about democracy.  They watched with horror as demagogues and dictators manipulated voters by appealing to their lowest instincts. It was obvious to them that the masses lacked the judgement necessary to know their true interests, and even less those of their country. Liberals accepted democracy very late and even then they thought hard about ways to contain it.  They pondered methods to “enlighten” and “educate” democracy and make it safe.”

Clearly, there is a leadership role here for the elite, one that the South Asian elite is incapable of fulfilling, not having got over their colonial hangover. The post-war European elite have shown a sense of responsibility forged in the furnace of history.

In Charles Taylor’s prophetic words, “European societies have tended to follow along behind their elite cultures more than American, we said above. But this effect is magnified at the “European” level, where the running has been entirely made by these elites - with consequences which have emerged recently in referenda in various states on the Continent (A Secular Age, p 831, n 46).”

We have seen Louis Michel’s heroic manoeuvring to side line the Freedom Party, which had Neo-Nazi roots. However, in 2017, the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) formed a coalition government with hardly a susurrus from Europe. When the two last formed a government, back in 2000, the news provoked diplomatic sanctions: visits and meetings were cancelled. The Freedom Party has redefined the outgroup as Islam in lieu of their former anti-Semitism (recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital long before Donald Trump).

The refugee crisis was, in the argot of psychiatrists, the ‘trigger’ that drove voters into the arms of far-right xenophobes. The sudden upswell of an outgroup, alien in language and religion (though not the latter in Britain), made a salience for the ingroup: nationalist feeling re-emerged. This has strained the compact between the cosmopolitan elite and an increasingly nationalist society.

In 2013 the Alternative for Germany (AfD) fell short of the 5% of votes needed to enter parliament. The party had been founded to oppose EU bail-outs of debt-stricken countries like Greece, which many Germans saw as a transfer from industrious German taxpayers to feckless Greeks. The AfD was then transformed as nationalists took it over and began to rail against immigrants and Islam – an outgroup that afforded greater scope for hostility. Unsurprisingly, the AfD won 13% of the vote in 2017, making it the third-biggest force in parliament, causing some disquiet.

Although the AfD’s agenda is not remotely like that of the Third Reich (people seen giving Nazi salutes have “nothing to do with our party”, said Beatrix von Storch, its deputy leader), a new paper finds an uncomfortable overlap between the parts of Germany that support the AfD and those that voted for the Nazis in 1933.

German expellees after the war flocked to the north, where the Nazis had done well, thus upsetting pre-war demographics. In the south-west, these were preserved. It is only in areas where pre-war demographics still persist that electoral maps show strong echoes of the past. Parts of the south-west that backed the Nazis in 1933 also embraced the AfD, and those that shunned Hitler rejected it. Overall, the paper’s authors found that among municipalities with average far-right support but few expellees, a 1% increase in the Nazis’ vote share in 1933 was associated with an extra 0.3-0.5% gain for the AfD from 2013-17. The Nazis are not coming back, but nationalism has deep roots.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the Northern League, a populist party that forms part of Italy’s governing coalition, has a ready explanation for the global rise of movements like his. “It is a common factor,” he says. “The confrontation of the people versus the elite.”

Scholars agree. Since 1999 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has surveyed political scientists about European parties’ policy positions and rhetoric, yielding ideological ratings for each party on various issues. The attribute most correlated with gaining votes since 2014 has been criticism of elites.

The repression of nationalism by the European elite has been a Herculean effort at cleansing the Augean stables. Nationalism is a formidable religion, founded on the atavistic human need for ingroup-outgroup hatred, and requiring little or no education, its doctrinal dimension being well-nigh a black hole. Any enterprise built on rational foundations, such as the European Union, and not resting on a visceral myth, will be sorely tested by hoary impulses to the contrary. One can only hope (one is almost tempted to say, pray) for its future.

Whatever may be the future of the European Union, it is an undeniable fact that in certain ‘suitable’ situations, human behaviour will become pathological. “The banality of evil” is one of the most insightful expressions to have come out of our experience of evil.

Toxic leaders do not occur only in politics. They occur in business and non-profits as well, where leaders do not have the coercive power of police, spies and thugs at their disposal. One of the most toxic leaders in history (and much admired by Machiavelli) was the Pope - until one of his followers got up the guts to revolt. More recently, it took nearly fifty years for lay members of the Catholic Church in Boston to call for the ouster of toxic religious leaders involved in the sexual abuse of hundreds of young parishioners (The Allure of Toxic Leaders, p 126).

Leadership is not an action, but an interaction. People seem often to prefer toxic to benign leaders. Lippman-Blumen observes: “During their heyday, Enron’s Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, WorldCom’s Bernard Ebbers, ImClone’s Samuel Waksal, Tyco International’s L. Dennis Kozlowski, Sunbeam’s Al Dunlap, HealthSouth’s Richard Crushy, Adolf Hitler, Boston’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Bernard Law,  TV evangelist James Bakker, and Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight, for starters, enjoyed – and many still enjoy – enthusiastic support from followers (p 4).”

To this illustrious list may be added such luminaries as Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan….

An example of toxic followers in the corporate world can be given. When a jury convicted Michael R. Milken, the ‘junk bond king’ of investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, former DBL employees arrived on Phil Donohue’s TV show. Unanimously, the still unemployed stockbrokers and administrative assistants spoke glowingly of their former boss, despite the fact that Milken’s illegal actions led to the closure of the firm and the loss of their jobs (p 4).

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Communist Party played it down, declaring it a “disaster”. Yet Maoists maintain that the Cultural Revolution was a good idea: China needed one to prevent the kind of slide towards capitalism that the country was now suffering. In May Maoist websites in China published photographs of a meeting of Mao-lovers in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province. “Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” proclaimed a red banner along one side of the room, where more than 50 people sat in rows before a large portrait of Mao.

Do not look for saints among formal leaders, warns Lipman-Blumen. Saints rarely seek elected or appointed office. She adds that “followers knowingly tolerate, seldom unseat, frequently prefer, and sometimes even creates toxic leaders (p 5).”

The best example of a created toxic leader must be Aung San Suu Kyi. A long-time military prisoner in Burma (Myanmar), she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic determination to bring democracy. However, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees streamed out of Rakhine state in south-east Burma to Bangladesh, Ms. Suu Kyi (who rules as the only ‘state councillor’, remained shtum. The UN said Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya was tantamount to “ethnic cleansing”.

Hatred of the Rohingya is the one thing that unites almost everyone in Myanmar, said another diplomat: “The extremist Buddhists, the masses, the army, and even the NLD [National League for Democracy, Ms. Suu Kyi’s party].” Even somebody of her charisma cannot stand up to her own ingroup against an outgroup perceived as alien. Nyan Win, a party spokesman and Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal lawyer, voiced the views of many in Myanmar when he told Radio Free Asia: “I think everyone knows the Bengali. There are no facial features like Bengalis’ in our Myanmar, nowhere in the country.” The Rohingya are regarded as illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh.

“If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep,” the South African social rights activist and fellow Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote.

When she finally broke her silence, her speech was described by Amnesty International as a “mix of untruths and victim-blaming”.

She found herself at the centre of global ire. Her face again adorns placards at protests across the globe but this time the chants are angry. An attempt to revoke her Nobel peace prize has garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. More recently, one of South Korea’s largest human rights groups said it will strip Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of its 2004 Gwangju prize because of her "indifference" to the atrocities against the Rohingya minority.