On The AL MOU Scrapping and Reading Things Closely

One of the hot news items in the last couple of days has beenAL's scrapping of the MOU with Khelafat-e-Majlis. Defending the MOU required AL to twist itself into pretzels/jilapis (the most prominent recent example, of course, being Sajeeb Joy Wazed's blog post on this matter, which numerous commenters, such as many on Drishtipat blog, justly critiqued). Now the MOU has been scrapped.

Mr. Wazed writes (at the end of an otherwise good post that has some interesting thoughts about corruption that I hope to reflect some time) about the scrapping of the MOU today (see bottom of that post):

"Finally, I hope the cancellation of our much maligned MOU demonstrates that the AL is willing to listen and respond to criticism and suggestions. As I said, welcome to the 21st century Awami League!"

BUT if you look at the newspaper reports, the actual scrapping has exactly NOTHING to do with listening to and responding to criticism. NOTHING!

Daily Star quotes AL Acting Secretary Obaidul Quader:

"We had made some deals and agreements with some parties as part of our election strategy centring the January 22 poll. Since the election was cancelled, those deals and agreements have automatically been cancelled.... "

Daily Star continues:

Quader, who spoke as an AL spokesman yesterday, however said the political
unity among the components of the grand alliance will continue.

"But all the written deals or agreements and seat sharing with all the parties have been cancelled," said the AL leader adding that they will think afresh about signing deals or reaching agreements with the grand alliance partners in a new situation when a fresh schedule for the upcoming parliamentary polls will be announced.

Asked whether they will sign the MoU again with BKM, the AL leader brushed aside the possibility and said they have not thought of it yet. As the election was cancelled, their strategies will change in the new situation, he said.

And New Age gives us some more quotes

AL presidium member Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim also said, "Since there is no election, there is no agreement or MoU with any party."

So if the newspaper reports are to be believed, then the rationale for there being no MoU is not because AL has necessarily changed its mind about the matter (and Mr. Quader leaves the possibility of the MoU tantalizingly open), but because since there are no elections up ahead and the MoU was about the elections, the MoU is ipso facto null and void. If Mr. Quader and Mr. Selim are to be believed, this is not about "listening and responding to criticism" at all!

Yet, Mr. Wazed tells us that it is about listening and responding to criticism. As J. Caesar pleaded, "Et tu Brute?" Or should it be, "Welcome to the 21st Century Awami League indeed! Just as confusing as it has been for some time to even those who would give it the benefit of the doubt. And, perhaps, just as confused as it has been as well..."

Yes, welcome to the 21st century AL indeed... Say it isn't so, Sajeeb bhai! I really want this new transparency thing to work for you, and for all of us.


[Another quibble, to round off this post. I am a little disturbed by Daily Star's headline about the scrapping of the MoU. "AL Scraps MoU with Bigots". Now, it is likely the case that Khilafat-e-Majlis (KM) are bigots, but that's a normative term rather than a objective, descriptive one of the type one expects on the reporting pages of Bangladesh's largest English newspaper run by a sophisticated and experienced team. It's entirely appropriate to have KM be described as bigots in the op-ed or editorial pages. But to have a news account be headlined that way seems to me to be a breach of journalistic standards. Contrast again with the more objective language of the young'uns at New Age. Zafar Sobhan, e chithi pabe kina jani na, but seriously, you guys can do better...]

Fine Op-Ed on the Corruption Drive

Young Shameran Abed at the New Age has an insightful op-ed about the SOE Corruption Drive that meshes quite well with my thinking on this subject. He correctly notes that the SOE government needs to look beyond catching a few big fish, and highlights the need for institutional reform. He writes, in the key paragraph:

"Similarly, corruption in these institutions cannot be adequately reduced unless certain institutional reforms are carried out. The business community has time and again said that there needs to be less government, pointing out that the fewer offices that one needs to go to in order to get a plan or a project approved, the fewer times that a bribe will have to be paid. Inefficient systems and administrative bottlenecks only create opportunities for corruption, and a streamlining of the civil service to make it more service-oriented can significantly reduce the scope for corruption. At the same time, procurement, both in the civil service and in the military, must be made simpler and much more transparent in order to stop the huge amount of corruption that takes place through it. Unless these changes are brought about, the simple detention and punishment of the corrupt is unlikely to affect the levels of corruption in this country."

He hits on the the right notes, in my humble opinion: the need for less government, rationalization of administrative systems, transparent procurement systems, the need for a long term view of containing corruption rather than the ad hoc approach that seems to be in the offing. Read the whole thing before it goes offline. I do hope the New Age folks are keeping a good archive of the stuff that they've been writing recently. Good stuff.

UPDATE: Here's the permanent link to the op-ed. And they do have an archive, right where it says... Archive!

Anti-Corruption Botox

Over at Drishtipat blog, ZaFa and Asif have commented glowingly about some recent developments on the anti-corruption front, namely, the face-life (as ZaFa calls it) in the ACC personnel, and Bangladesh's signing on to the UN Convention Against Corruption. Nai mama-r cheye kana mama bhalo (a blind uncle's better than no uncle), I suppose. And definitely, there will likely be some short term impact. But unlike ZaFa, I do not see the long-run possibility of "cleans[ing] the institution from the webs of corruption". And unlike Asif, I do not see there being "pretty huge and ... far reaching implication" to the signing of the treaty.

First, the treaty. Notwithstanding any discomfort with the ability of an unelected government being able to sign on to international obligations, and notwithstanding the fact that UN itself is going through its own issues with regard to corruption (with various structural weaknesses revealed in the Iraq oil for food scandal that are not really being addressed very well) I do not think that the problem ever was about lack of laws or obligations on the books against corruption. Rather the problem was one of execution. I think we all recognize that we have plenty of good laws on the books, but not a lot of proper execution of them. Treaties are not self-executing devices (unless someone from the outside is pressing really strongly.) Some time last year I went to a very interesting seminar in Dhaka on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as it pertains to juvenile children. It was signed by Bangladesh in 1974. It's never been executed.

Second, the ACC face-lift: Now I share ZaFa's hope that the new kids on the block will be able to clean house. But again, I reiterate my point that the issue is not one of personnel, but one of institutional structures and checks and balances. Sure, we may have a clean house at the ACC for the next few months (or we may appear to have a clean house at the ACC for the next few months) but really, can we, given our historical experience, expect the situation to hold?

Structural changes in the way that the ACC does things need to be put forward. The one's that have been put forward do not give me much hope that the SOE really has thought through this issue in anything but an ad hoc manner. More on this in a later post...

Metril for Diarrhoea and Certain Niceties

Metril (which I think is called imodium here, but I might be wrong about this) is probably one of the most popular medicines in Bangladesh, ranking somewhere after Orsaline, Panadol (in its various forms: Napa, Paracetamol, Panacitin) and the delightful Civit citrus chewable tablet... Metril has saved me from quite a few embarassing situations in my time - unsoiled train rides, flights that otherwise would have been spent away from my seat, exams that I did not have to miss... But Metril should really not be taken if it can be avoided. The way it's been explained to me, basically all it does is stop the outflow without really doing anything about the cause of the diarrhoea itself, and might actually allow the underlying causes to fester and increase in severity, and may be lead to really bad problems in the long-run that could have been avoided if short-term fixes were declined. Disclaimer to the wise: I haven't taken any biology in many years - so, check with your doctor before throwing out your metril. What do I know about these things?

But I do know that the way that the State of Emergency government's been doing things , particularly the way that the current anti-corruption drive is being conducted, troubles me. (The much-criticized misguided removal of the hawkers last week is not, as has been claimed, a mistake per se, but really a highly probable and natural result of the tendencies of ad hoc decision-making that the SOE government seems to be resorting to.) And it also troubles me that even liberal elements of the press are basically cheering them on unreservedly today.

[I am also quite troubled by the ideas put forward for forced time limits at ACC trials - they seem highly problematic for institutionally achieving the ends that need to be - but I will post on this later.]

But Shamshir, I hear you protesting, these are bad people, and what is being done was long overdue. Sure - Shamshir responds - these may be bad people, and something needed to be done a long time ago, but that still doesn't remove the need for certain niceties - due process, transparency - to be maintained. This sort of thing is highly problematic:

"Entering our house, the forces asked him (Nasim) to go with them. As I asked why and where they are taking him, they gave no explanation and said they had orders from their bosses," wife of the former home minister told reporters. The forces searched the chest of drawers of Nasim and took away some of his diaries too."

Read the Daily Star editorial today that I linked to earlier - the second sentence:
"It seems a cleansing operation has begun through the non-party caretaker government as a number of former ministers and MPs of BNP and AL including a top industrialist have been arrested by the joint forces. Law at last appears to be catching up with them." [Italics are mine.]

Why seems? Why appears? Why is there this need for secrecy?

New Age's editorial from today rightly laments (again a sentence 2):
"We say ‘learnt to have detained’ because neither the joint forces nor the government has so far made any official announcement about the detentions. The closest that we have to a confirmation came in the form of insinuations that two advisers to the caretaker government made when talking to the media Sunday afternoon. Neither did they say who the detained were nor would they specify on what charges the detentions had been made. Whatever information that we have now came from sources in the government and the joint forces on conditions of anonymity, and friends and families of those supposed to have been detained, although they were not quite sure about the reasons for the detentions."

[A side note: Contrast the two sentence 2's - the quite correct sober assessment of the young New Age-r's with the somewhat juvenile cheeriness of the older Daily Star folks that belies their slogan, "Committed to People's Right to Know"! Reading the Daily Star editorial, we have to wait till the sixth paragraph to get any word of caution about the lack of process and transparency - and when you read it, it really feels like that relative who was invited to the wedding out of some sense of obligation instead of any real desire to have him be there... Zafar Sobhan: If you are reading this, I really think you guys can do better.]

No, I do not think that the corruption drive that the State of Emergency government is (or may be it's more accurate to say, appears to be) starting is not really of much long-term use. Yes, we'll cheer a few hundred illegally built houses on the bank of the Buriganga as the final triumph of law and order over the forces of evil, the cosmic triumph of good over evil. And we'll cheer on the arrest of a few bigwigs in what appears to be a committed drive to cleaning up the Augean stables. But I think it's all a bit like a assigning metril for what seems to be a bad case of diarrhoea - a temporary fix that may actually exacerbate the real underlying set of problems...

It seems to me that it's impossible that the caretaker government will make any headway on long-run corruption in the system. They may put away for a few months a few bad apples, but as I have argued before, the problem is not about particular people (even though particular people have very openly benefitted highly from it). Besides, one would think that the corruption that appears to be being combatted appeared precisely because of the kind of lack of transparency and process that we are seeing.

If the State of Emergency government is serious about rooting out corruption, then changing the rules of the game might be in order: Resort to due process. Resort to transparency. Realign the frame of reference to the rule of law instead of the arbitrary unchecked power of a few good (or is it appear to be good?) men.

Some thoughts on our political crisis and the Emergency

Not mentioning the State of Emergency in the first few posts of this blog would be as absurd as having a physical adda in the drawing room over cha and toast biscoot without mentioning , well, the State of Emergency.

Financial Times had an interesting item a few days ago, which many readers will surely have read already. Money quote, I thought:

“I don’t discount the possibility that the generals ask the two ladies to
take a holiday,” one Awami League leader said. “Pakistan is certainly a
model that could be followed here, even if they have far deeper grass-roots
support than Benazir and Nawaz.”

[Hat tip to Drishtipat Group Blog for the pointer. Check them out. There's been some interesting discussion there the last few days...]

There's of course been a fair amount of speculation from all over the place about what really happened. The FT article reports on what may be the emerging consensus view:

"Five days after Bangladesh’s president, at the insistence of the army,
declared a state of emergency, resigned his post as head of the caretaker
government and cancelled the elections that were due to be held next Monday, the
full implications of the latest twist in Bangladesh’s political drama are only
just becoming clear. Few now have any doubt that the country is set for a
lengthy period of military-backed technocratic rule."

My writing about the situation on the ground from 7879 miles (12679 kilometers) away would be nothing more than crass speculation. I am going to refrain from the temptation - hard though it is to do so. (I am hoping that some of our other bloggers who are on the ground shall have something to say about the situation). However, there are a few thoughts - long-term in nature - that might be worth sharing...

There's a troubling tendency to personalize the crisis in our political system, I think. In one view, the problem is about (or with) the two netris - their clash of personalities, their mutual suspicion, their pathologies, insecurities, particular qualifications or limitations... Get the netris to meet at some prominent personage's daughter's wedding and smile at each other, or at least acknowledge each other's presence, and we're well on the way to solving our (political, at least) problems! Or may be, send them away into early retirement - and things will all be fixed!

In another view, our problem is about politicians and the fact that they are (or have become) corrupt. Prevent them from standing in the elections, excise them from the political process, or alternatively, elect honest candidates to office - and things will be fixed! Our crisis, in such views, is about the absence of able staffing and leadership. Change the leadership, reshuffle the staffing - and the nation shall change, for the better!

A corollary that one often finds attached with such viewpoints is the dream of a leader-hero who shall emerge and clean our Augean stables of instability, corruption and injustice.

It may happen that a change of personnel will lead to a transformation of our lot. But I would not count on it. In fact - it's unlikely that it will do much, and we have enough data-points from our own historical experience to claim this with a fair amount of certainty .

For the underlying issues are institutional. It was almost inevitable - given a government of Men, not Angels - that we should end up where we have. In brief (I hope to flesh this out in a later post - and of course, this observation is not by any means original), the very combination of a first-past-the-post system and the ban on floor crossing in Article 70 leads us to the features of our political system that make it dysfunctional:

- the absence of internal party democracy

- the viciousness of the interactions between the two parties, and their propensity towards the use of violence

- the inability of credible third-parties to emerge

- and almost paradoxically, the unusual influence of fringe parties (and alliances with them) upon the stances taken by the major two parties

Zafar Sobhan was right when he wrote the extremely thoughtful and insightful obituary of the Fourth Republic a few weeks ago, before the emergence of the Emergency government. The Emergency government simply makes official the passing of our experiment since 1991.

The Five Point Program that seems to have been taken up by the Emergency government - of electoral reform, judicial and administrative depoliticization, fixing the power sector, good governance and jumpstarting an anti-corruption drive - is all well and good, and certainly very necessary. But it does not seem to be much of a move away from a view of our crisis as one of staffing and leadership. The underlying institutional issues still remain unaddressed. If we are at at a Constitutional Moment, should they be looking beyond mere administrative procedure? These are, of course, still early days - and not too much is known about the intentions and aims of the Emergency government. We wait.