I WAS at a seminar earlier this week where some speakers seemed to be advocating the emergence of a ‘cohesive’ or ‘coercive’ force to end the current political impasse and ‘bring some discipline back to this country’. Of course, the blockade by the Awami League-led alliance and the unwillingness of our two supreme leaders to compromise or agree on a solution was hanging heavy in the air, so the speakers were thinking of the next best option. The rationale as someone pointed out, quoting Voltaire, was, that predominantly rural populations can never understand the true value of democracy: an oft-repeated and flawed elitist suggestion masquerading as erudition (since Voltaire said it, it must be right!). Now, this line of thinking was not unexpected, as a certain section of our intelligentsia who speak long and tall of democracy but secretly harbour ambitions of becoming ministers during non-democratic regimes. I was surprised nonetheless to find that we seem to have already reached the point where such men feel it is no longer necessary to disguise these ambitions. In all of this anti-democratic talk, however, the word ‘army’ was never spoken, but always implied, and it was only when a senior retired bureaucrat got tired of the word games and said ‘If you’re talking about the army, they’re not interested because they’ll lose their UN peacekeeping payroll,’ that it suddenly became okay to talk of a military takeover. Someone cited the example of Pakistan, where General Pervez Musharraf’s autocratic regime has been in power for most of the last decade and still managed to contribute peacekeepers. Someone else mentioned that such a takeover in Bangladesh was a ‘temporary solution’ until fair elections could be held, while yet another wondered whether it wouldn’t be worth our while to check whether Thailand contributes to UN peacekeeping and whether Thai troops were sent back home in the wake of the recent coup.
   This is not a matter of vilifying one or two people, I know for a fact that many in Dhaka put their faith in such radical anti-democratic processes. The point is, that these suggestions were not coming from laypersons, and that at this point in our politics, when a crisis is already planting state-capture ambitions in undemocratic forces, it is crucial not to undermine the democratic process. ‘Why?’ my detractors could ask. ‘Look at the corruption of the last three democratic regimes that have been in power since 1991!’ It is after all true that since 2000, Bangladesh has held on to its top ranking position in the global corruption perception index that the Berlin-based corruption watchdog Transparency International computes annually. Although I don’t put full faith in a perception index, and refuse to believe that there could be more corruption in Bangladesh than say Nigeria or Zimbabwe or Cote d’Ivoire or even Pakistan which are all rich in natural resources and hence offer more to ruling parties or autocratic regimes to plunder, I am fully aware that the culture of corruption has spread to the grassroots across Bangladesh.
   Having said that, I also believe that my support for the enduring, if stumbling, democratic political process of Bangladesh also finds its origins in the grassroots. Firstly, there is an inherent hypocrisy among Dhaka’s elite that makes them believe they have the moral authority to criticise ‘grassroots corruption’. It is as absurd as the story of the emperor’s new clothes. Dhaka’s ex-bureaucrat-buddhijibi-boys club never think dirty thoughts like loan default, fraudulent manpower business, exploitation in the garments industry, or the crime-business-politics nexus, engineered by their own friends, when they blame illiterate rural populations for the breakdown of democracy.
   At the risk of overusing a cliché, may I point out that it is the women that Professor Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank lends small amounts to who bother paying it back even at the unusually high rate of interest that the micro-credit institutions charge them. It is the sweat on the backs of the 2.2 million garments workers of this country that rakes in a valuable $8 billion a year, that is used to import the cars we drive, the Kellogg’s breakfast cereals we eat in the morning, and the imported Italian toilet seats we install in our homes. I have no doubt that Dhaka’s rich would indeed be very rich, even if the garments boom or the manpower export boom had not happened, but really where would you get those dollars to buy Italian marble? So perhaps a little bit of respect is due to the illiterate people of small economic means.
   My argument in favour of democracy, however, is not entirely devoid of economic rationale. In the last three decades, since we attained democracy, Bangladesh has made incredible strides in development in terms of health services, education, access to water, maternal mortality and a clutch of other development indicators. Statistics and facts presented at that same seminar where the speakers were advocating military rule give a startlingly positive picture of how far we have come. Barrister Manzoor Hasan, who is the director of the Centre for Governance Studies at Dhaka’s BRAC University, showed in his paper that on a number of counts Bangladesh is doing better than the fifteen countries ranked above or below it in Transparency International’s corruption perception index. Of the fifteen most corrupt countries in the world, five have had UN peacekeepers flown in to avert or control a civil war in the past half a decade. Bangladesh, in contrast, has supplied the largest number of peacekeepers to these missions, compared to any other country.
   According to the US think-tank Freedom House’s 2006 rating of political rights and civil liberties, only Bangladesh is assessed to be partly free, among those same countries. No doubt, this rating internalises the fact that with the advent of the electronic media in Bangladesh, people across the country have access to more information and hence have better information to rely on when they make their choice during elections. The paper went to show as well that save the East European country of Belarus, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan share the lowest rate of under-five child mortality, an interplanetary leap from the days when a small infection had the power to claim an infant’s life in rural Bangladesh.
   There is more (especially for those who advocate military rule). In terms of stone cold economic growth, Bangladesh’s GDP has grown at a phenomenally higher rate (between 3-5 per cent) in the last decade compared to the 1-2 per cent growth over fifteen years that preceded it. Given that the dividends of this growth is distributed unequally, with the rich gaining more from it, perhaps Dhaka’s elite should rethink their allegiances.
   The United Nations Human Development Index reveals that Bangladesh’s average annual growth rate in the index languished at 54 per cent annually between 1975 and 1991, compared to the 93 per cent average annual growth from the early nineties till 2003. In terms of some development indicators, Bangladesh is in fact better off than India or Pakistan those economic powerhouses of South Asia who are achieving phenomenal growth. According to the UNDP, in 2003, around 95 per cent of Bangladesh’s population of one-year-olds were immunised against tuberculosis, whereas in India the coverage was only 81 per cent.
   In terms of the population who have sustainable access to improved sanitation, India’s 1990 figure was 12 per cent and its 2002 figure is 30 per cent. In contrast, Bangladesh has gone from 23 per cent in 1990 to 48 per cent in 2002, as revealed by the regional Human Development report of 2003. In terms of infant mortality, Bangladesh and India had 145 and 127 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1970. Bangladesh has brought that figure down to 46 in 2003 compared to India’s 63.
   These are not figures that we can ignore today. That they are not taken into account by Dhaka’s intelligentsia is because this development happens beyond Dhaka’s reality and has to do with the lives and the prosperity of the crores of people who live in Bangladesh’s villages, wondering whether their children will survive a bout of diarrhoea or if there will be a measles epidemic in the village.
   These are real gains. And they have happened not despite our politics — I staunchly oppose this view — but because of democratic political processes, and perhaps despite our politicians. Societies aspire to move forward. Bangladesh’s ‘predominantly illiterate and rural population’ know what it is to live in feudal societies; it has been seared into their collective memory by centuries or exploitation. So, perhaps it is not a stretch to suggest that this same rural population does not want regressive autocratic governments who perpetuate feudal practises and rule by fiat. Most of all, as a member of the post-liberation generation, I can say our predecessors carried out some bad experiments with military dictatorship, and now it is our right to choose to carry out our own bad experiments with democracy, without their meddling.