A Note of Caution for BNP
The party's political and economic actions are not converging or complementing each other, and instead the party is letting its economic vision lead the governing process without considering the political consequences. This is a risky bet and may not work.
This is a cautionary observation. It’s only two months and thus, I don’t think that enough time has passed to make any concrete observation. But early warning signs are there that must be taken into account.
To be honest, whereas I can understand the logic behind BNP’s economic action, I am completely confused about the logic employed by the party’s strategists.
In my opinion, its political and economic actions are not converging or complementing each other, and instead the party is letting its economic vision lead the governing process without considering the political consequences. This is a risky bet and may not work.
My whole understanding on politics relies on a single assumption -- political actors are rational actors -- eventually they set a goal and then take rational action, and conduct logical calculations to achieve this goal.
The goal itself may be value-driven and may rely on the party's vision, ideology, and past experiences -- but the actions are logical ones.
And in this case, if the goal is not carefully selected, the whole calculation can backfire.
Usually a political party’s goal always is to get into power or to stay in power.
From that perspective, it is natural for BNP to set a goal that it wants to win in the next election and come back to power. That much I understand. But for some reason, BNP has come to the conclusion that to stay in power, it needs to establish a "strong government."
This is not surprising because the party has never hidden its intention. During the discussion on reform, the party made it clear that it wants the executive to play a strong role and rejected constitutional or institutional design that would challenge the executive.
But the problem is -- the party has failed to realize what a strong government means.
In a democratic system, you can have a strong government, when it has the capacity to deliver on its electoral promises efficiently and effectively. It also means that the government has not been captured by different interest groups and, in fact, can initiate or design policies that would go against the interest groups.
Such a "strong" government means a properly designed politics-administration relationship where bureaucratic efficiency will be achieved, where the policymakers will enjoy a certain degree of freedom from various interest groups -- they will of course listen to these groups but would not be captured by them.
If you look at the pace and intensity with which the BNP government is trying to implement its electoral promises, you get a sense that the party is trying to do that.
But here is the problem -- this "strong government" is not focusing on building the platforms required for carrying out these promises.
Contractual appointments within the top-tier of the bureaucracy are still going on, significantly undermining the principle of meritocracy and demotivating the serving ones, political consideration and loyalty are replacing the intention of choosing the right people for the right place, and the party has started to get too cozy with the fallen oligarchs.
The determination and intention is not being followed by proper strategy making.
It seems to me that the party has embraced an alternative definition of strong government, i.e. to the party’s political strategists, strong government is synonymous to executive dominance. That is a faulty and risky definition of strong government and it jeopardizes the prospect of democratic consolidation.
And more importantly, whereas BNP eventually considered strong government as a mean to the end of staying in power, by redefining strong government as executive dominance it is transforming the means to an end.
In other words, executive dominance is now being considered not as a mean or strategy, it itself has become the goal because it looks like party seems to believe that executive dominance and staying in power are the same. A goal-displacement is slowing but surely taking place.
If you consider BNP’s political actions, it is possible to argue that the party is going for an unconstrained executive. Forget about the debate on constitution reform assembly or the referendum and just consider the party's actions.
Judiciary’s independence has been weakened, Human Rights Commission has lost its power, it is not clear whether the Anti-Corruption Commission will be able to protect its autonomy, there are concerns about the role to be played by Bangladesh Bank and several questions regarding the role to be played by the political institutions have remained unresolved.
This is deeply troubling. Because when the executive starts to dominate over legislature and judiciary, when there is no effective checks on executive’s power, sooner or later, things will start to fall apart.
And, we are already observing the symptoms. The space for freedom of opinion and expression has already started shrinking, there seems to be a return of the oligarchs who helped the last regime to ensure the collapse of the economy, the reform initiatives are being sidelined, and the government is reluctant to share information with the citizens.
And mark my word -- this is just the beginning. If the party’s political strategists don’t start rethinking their approach and instead continue relying on the idea of executive dominance, if the means are redefined to become the end goal, we will see more violation of rights -- be it political or economic -- and we will have no institutions to protect us.
The sad reality is -- the reliance on executive dominance guarantees this. If an unconstrained executive is allowed to design and implement the social and economic policies, it effectively stops alternative ideas to come forward. Consequently, the policies suffer as voices of dissent are suppressed.
At the same time, dominance by executive allows people within the winning coalition to take control over the resource distribution system, opening the flood gates of corruption. An unconstrained executive never allows the democratic institutions and platform to stand on a sound footing.
It is true that unconstrained executive can help ensure survival and even a long term survival of a regime. We have seen that in the past. But for that you need some sort of performance legitimacy which may come from supplying economic benefit that initially allows citizens to forget about rights. BNP as a party can do that.
But there are two problems here. The first is that it never ends well. People tend to forget about negative liberty as long as positive liberty remains in abundance. But once the executive fails to deliver, citizens change their opinion about the government and the outcome is an uprising.
At the same time, this is also vicious cycle that embraces path dependency. Once an executive decides to make a choice, to rely on performance legitimacy or to prioritize positive liberty over negative one, there is no turning back. The executive continues to be more and more powerful, democratic principles, negotiations and bargaining get replaced with back door deal-making with the oligarchs leading the pathway to authoritarian re-emergence.
Secondly, BNP should also consider that global economic scenario is changing and with this change. It won’t be possible to produce performance legitimacy for a long time. More importantly, due to the bad economic projections, if the party fails to deliver its electoral promises or if the service delivery mechanism suffers from corruption, the price will extremely high.
The thing is, all of this can be avoided if the idea of executive dominance is dropped.
The surprising thing is that the BNP’s political history shows that this is actually a party that is happy to make compromises. In the past, whenever it showed authoritarian tendency, it failed miserably. And in contrast, this is the party that thrives on making compromises.
The party takes pride by making the claim it reintroduced multi-party democracy; in the post-1991 period, it was the party that embraced parliamentary democracy even though its top leadership was against that and it is also the party that introduced the Caretaker Government when it didn’t really want that.
The thing is, these uncomfortable compromises are the legacy of this party -- it’s shining achievement. On the other hand, whenever it tried to cross a line, be it by creating RAB or by manipulating the Caretaker Government system, it failed and had to pay a price. I sincerely hope that the party remembers its history. The party’s strategists would do well to do so.
We are in a Humpty Dumpty world. After a long effort, Humpty Dumpty finally sat on a wall but the possibility of a great fall is quite real.
And if we fail this time, the BNP would do well to remember how the nursery rhyme ends: "All the king's horses and all the king's men, couldn’t put Humpty together again."
Asif M Shahan is Professor in the Department of Development Studies at University of Dhaka.
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Asif Shahan
Asif M Shahan, PhD Associate Professor, Department of Development Studies, University of Dhaka
