Abedin Quader

Bangladesh: Transition to Democracy and the Process of Power Fragmentation

Contemporary Bangladesh is still at odds with democracy

Several aspects contributed to a situation of unregulated power fragmentation in post-military-authoritarian Bangladesh. The picture delineated in the last 27 years has been extremely propitious for the emergence of parallel laws ruling over society, leading social conflicts to be solved through "official" and "unofficial" violent means. These aspects contribute to make Bangladesh society pervaded by inequalities of different sorts and by gaps that seem to be deeper and deeper. If for a democratic rule of law to take place it is necessary that processes of political decisions be constitutionally grounded, but contemporary Bangladesh is still at odds with democracy. I will here discuss some of the aspects that I consider to be determinant for the chaotic partition of power in present-day Bangladesh. It is by looking at the character of the long process of democratic transition (since 1991 till date) and democratic consolidation that one can unveil the aspects that lie on the basis of the high rates of social violence, financial corruptions and misappropriations of power by the politicians, bureaucrats, and their insidious relations with the military and business elites.

The first determinant aspects for us to understand the relatively 'autonomous' (in the sense that it is apparently hardly accountable to anyone on earth) character of the police as well as the increasing levels of social violence in contemporary Bangladesh, and these are the terms of political civil characters of all governments. Consequently, no such thing as a "truth commission", as in Argentina, Chile or South Africa, took place in Bangladesh to probe into the persecutions the military regimes of Zia and Ershad perpetrated, at least to set the record straight, even after a civilian turned to occupy the government in 1991. Thus, political violence was never really "healed" by those that suffered the tougher consequences of the violence inflicted by the military State apparatus. A bitter feeling of impunity, then, prevailed among the sectors of society that wanted to push the process of democratization farther. It was, as though, the civil government installed in 1991 had not recognized the incongruence of a democratic regime meshed with the former anti-democratic forces in its very core.

The character of the political parties explains a second important aspect of the transition to democracy in Bangladesh: the lingering power of the military forces throughout the subsequent civilian administrations. A large number of retired military officers were kept on the jobs in the institutional structure of the civil government. Moreover, some key positions were held by the retired army officers in the newly elected cabinet of Prime minister Khaleda Zia, wife of former military dictator Zia. These retired army officers were close allies of that dictator and a kind of instrumentals to his ascension to power through a military coup. But that was not all. The post of the chief of the national security Intelligence NSI was also held by the army officers. Furthermore, the military also controlled the National Security in charge of tasks regarding national security, the charge of administration and development of the politically turbulent areas of Chittagong Hill Tracts region, and other economic resources, such as state-owned corporations. Some other posts vital to the government, like the post of chief of Civil Aviation, were held by the retired military or Air-force officers too.