Editorial
Moeen’s extraordinary India visit
and govt’s approval of security
cage on border
The unelected government of Fakhruddin Ahmed has visibly swallowed the Indian proposal of constructing a ‘security cage’ on both sides of the border to resume direct passenger train service between Dhaka and Kolkata – a humiliating proposal that the previous government had refused to accept. The people of Bangladesh have always been in favour of maintaining close contact with the people of India, with whom they share common history and culture in many areas, and therefore welcome the perceived train services. The people of Bangladesh, however, rightly felt uncomfortable with the Indian idea of passing the trains through a ‘box-type’ cage to be constructed on the ‘no man’s land, which, the Indian negotiators believe, would deter illegal immigration, if there is any. Bangladesh had, therefore, rightly been refusing to entertain the humiliating proposal. Subsequently, the agreement of the direct train service, initiated in July 2001 and almost finalised in July 2007, did not materialise. Suddenly, Fakhruddin’s cabinet approved the Indian proposal on Monday! Notably, India has direct train services with its arch rival Pakistan, but the trains do not pass through any cages.
What, however, is especially noteworthy is that the cabinet approval of the Indian proposal came the day General Moeen U Ahmed, chief of our armed forces, which propelled Fakhruddin to power, began his extraordinary visit to New Delhi, the capital of India. The visit appears extraordinary because the general, who is believed to have been the prime backer of the otherwise unpopular government of Fakhruddin Ahmed, is scheduled to hold talks with a couple of Indian cabinet members including foreign minister Pranab Mukharjee, and also the chief minister of the Indian state of West Bengal, Buddhadev Bhattacharya. This is alarming. In ordinary visits, our general is not supposed to have official talks with foreign politicians, particularly when the two countries involved have quite a good number of disputed issues to be resolved through political negotiations. That the visit is an extraordinary one is also reflected in the political enthusiasm of the Indian High Commissioner in Dhaka, who had reportedly visited prior to the general’s departure for Delhi, Khandaker Delwar Hossain, the secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Zillur Rahman, the acting president of the Awami League. None of the parties involved clearly told our people as to what transpired in those meetings, creating a lot of concerns in the public mind as regards what issues would come up during general Moeen’s discussions with Indian policy makers. The concern has further deepened after our government’s approval of the Indian proposal to construct the controversial security cage on no man’s land immediately before the visit. Are the unelected incumbents passing any message to the Indian political establishment? We do not know.
However, what we know is that the hegemonic powers, regional or global, usually like weak governments in the neighbourhood as the hegemon finds it easy to settle disputed issues with the weak to the former’s advantage. And the weakest government is the one which is not elected by the people, as is the case in Bangladesh today. The weak governments, if ambitious to cling to power without people’s mandate for long, usually seek cooperation of the hegemonic powers, and at times they succeed in it, albeit at the cost of national interests. We only hope that general Moeen’s extraordinary visit to Delhi would not cost us very dearly, and expect that he upon his return would apprise us all, at the least, of what issues he discussed with Indian leaders, and what are the possible implications of those discussions for our people.
Positive discrimination imperative
for our democratic future
We welcome the military-controlled interim government’s initiative to reserve a third of the seats in the Jaitya Sangsad for women, who will look to assume office through direct elections, as reported in Monday’s New Age. This has been a long standing demand of various rights groups within the country, who have underscored the great governmental role in fulfilling a constitutional mandate on gender parity. The final aim, of course, in this ongoing movement will be to see one half of the parliamentary seats allotted to women on the rationale of positive discrimination, and the desire to build a sustainable democracy. Given our experiences with past promises in this regard, however, we must emphasise that the government, along with the election commission, must now enforce a legal compunction on the political parties to nominate at least a third of women in the electoral bids. We want to see these assurances translated into action through the enforcement of this decision in the next parliament.
We note that it was the Awami League government of 1996 who shaped the first Women’s Development Policy, and it incorporated similarly admirable forward-thinking initiatives, though it was not perfect and left many more goals of the movement unfulfilled. It was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance government that succeeded that regime, which reversed many of the positive initiatives and retracted recognition of a number of rights without consulting any of the stakeholders.
We also want to point out that a Women’s Development Policy does not solely comprise of the issue of parliamentary seats, and there are many other initiatives on positive discrimination that the government must adopt. Principal among these would be to ensure that women represent at least a similar proportion of the cadre at every level of the state organs. The government must also immediately make public all the other initiatives it plans to adopt as part of its women’s development policy, which will be subject to debate and discussion among the citizens, within the public domain.
This paper believes that a sustainable democracy is impossible to build without the emancipation and inclusion of large swathes of society, whose voices till this day remain unheard. Gender parity is at the core of that challenge.
The fall of the House of Clinton?
Voters still don’t understand how a multi-millionaire wife of a former two-term president can claim to be pushing against the hardest ‘glass ceiling’ when her opponent is an African-American first-term senator with a Muslim sounding name that rhymes with Osama, writes Shameran Abed
Illinois senator Barack Obama has turned the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the United States presidential elections on its head. Even late last year, he had trailed New York senator Hillary Clinton by over 20 percentage points in every national opinion poll, and trailed by double digits in almost every state other than in his own. She had instant name recognition, had raised over a 100 million dollars that helped put together a national campaign and had some of the best Democratic strategists including her husband, former president Bill Clinton, on her side. There was an air of inevitability about Hillary’s nomination, something that her campaign tried to use to its advantage by making her run as an incumbent rather than as a challenger. In November, she said in a television interview, ‘It will be me.’
As of today, Obama has won twice the number of states than Clinton, a million more votes, has nearly a hundred additional delegates and has come off the back of eleven successive primary and caucus victories, all of them by double digits. He has also started to eat into groups that were once core Clinton constituencies – women, people without a college education, lower income whites, etc. While it is true that anyone who writes off the Clintons do so at their own peril, that is also the only thing that is keeping analysts and commentators from writing Hillary’s political obituary. Her climb to the summit now is steep and getting steeper by the day while Obama is out-raising, out-spending, out-strategising and out-hustling her to the nomination. But how did senator Clinton go from being front-runner and near-presumptive nominee to being thumped in state after state by someone her campaign has been trying to paint as an upstart who is all talk and no action?
Some political commentators have likened Clinton’s campaign to president George W Bush’s disastrous Iraq war plan – once it hit them that it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, there was no contingency plan, no plan B. Clinton had bet the 100 million dollars she had raised to out-muscle Obama by February 5, by which date more than half the states would have voted. She lavished 25 million dollars on the first contest in Iowa while Obama went about building an organisation from the ground up. Her campaign spent nearly 100,000 dollars on sandwich platters to be delivered to pre-caucus parties in Iowa and bought hundreds of shovels to clear the snow so that people could go and caucus for her on January. Obama won Iowa by 8 percentage points, Hillary came third and it didn’t snow on caucus night.
Clinton narrowly won the next two contests that mattered, New Hampshire and Nevada, but got thumped again in South Carolina. Clinton had been leading by wide margins in opinion polls even at the beginning of the year in South Carolina, but that all changed when her husband, the former president who was once affectionately named the ‘first black president’ by the African-American community, started invoking the race issue and comparing Obama to the last black presidential phenomenon, Reverend Jessie Jackson, who did not manage to win the Democratic nomination in 1984 despite doing well in several states. The former president was unleashed by his wife’s campaign on South Carolina because her strategists felt that his popularity among African-Americans would help ensure that the state’s large black community would vote for the New York senator. Instead, Bill Clinton managed to anger the black community by seemingly insulting the first viable African-American presidential candidate by playing the race card.
The Clinton campaign spun her loss in South Carolina by claiming that Obama won because of the state’s large black community, attempting in vain to paint him as a candidate whose popularity is restricted to the black community in the hopes of a white backlash, even though he had thrashed her earlier in Iowa, a state in which 96 per cent of the population are white. Clinton was still hoping for a February 5 blow-out, when 22 states would vote and she was confident of taking a sizeable enough lead among delegates to force Obama out of the race. The momentum Obama had gained had narrowed the lead in many of the states that were once solidly behind Clinton, and she spent millions of dollars and campaigned heavily to hold on to once guaranteed states – California and New Jersey among them. When the results came in on February 5, Clinton did managed to hold on to some of the bigger states, among them California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and her home state of New York, but she was unable to land a knock-out blow.
Instead, it was Obama who outperformed predictions by winning 13 of the 22 states, including presidential battlegrounds like Missouri and states that were previously Clinton-country like Connecticut. Also, the proportional representation system in Democratic primary contests meant that even in the larger delegate-rich states that Clinton won, Obama was able to pick up sizeable numbers of delegates. As a result, instead of Hillary wrapping up the nomination, it was Obama who was on the ascendancy after February 5, having tied Clinton on the number of delegates won through voting and trailing only in super-delegates – elected Democratic office-holders such as senators, congressmen, governors etc and members of the Democratic National Committee – who are given automatic invitation to the party’s national convention. Most of the super-delegates who had decided to endorse a candidate early – about half are yet to endorse – put their support behind Clinton sometime last year when she was the clear front-runner, some in the hopes of being rewarded by her if she became president. Almost every super-delegate who has endorsed a candidate in the last month or so have endorsed Obama, with even some who had endorsed Clinton switching their loyalties.
By handily winning all 11 contests that have taken place since February 5, from Maryland, Virginia and Maine in the east to Louisiana in south, from Wisconsin in the midwest to Washington state on the pacific coast, Obama has now taken a near unassailable lead among pledged delegates and is also closing the gap with Clinton among super-delegates. She now needs to win the remaining contests, especially the big states such as Texas and Ohio, which vote on March 4, and Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, by wide margins to catch up with Obama. However, given the momentum that Obama has gained with his 11-straight winning streak, even her campaign is unsure about how to take him on and beat him.
Almost everything that the Clinton campaign has tried so far has failed. At first, it tried to take advantage of the air of inevitability around her, but Obama burst that bubble in Iowa. Clinton next tried to invoke his race as an issue, it backfired spectacularly. After February 5, the Clinton camp claimed that Obama only does well in smaller ‘insignificant’ states, but voters didn’t take to her campaign’s ‘insult 40 states’ strategy. She tried to suggest that he only does well in caucuses while she wins primaries but he has won more primaries than caucuses. She has even tried the electability argument, but Democrats have realised that Obama’s popularity among independents and his ability to draw new voters to the polls make him more electable. After the inevitability bubble was burst, Clinton changed her tack to claiming that she, as a woman, was aiming to break through the highest and hardest ‘glass ceiling’ in American politics, but voters still don’t understand how a multi-millionaire wife of a former two-term president can claim to be pushing against the hardest ‘glass ceiling’ when her opponent is an African-American first-term senator with a Muslim sounding name that rhymes with Osama.
In truth, Barack Obama has been running the campaign that Clinton ought to have run, working tirelessly to build political organisations in each state from the ground up, relying on small contributions from millions of donors rather than large corporate donations to fund his campaign and running on an inspirational message of hope and optimism at a time when the country is demoralised after 8 years under a president who has neither made America more safe nor more popular. The people of America, it appears, want change in Washington, and Obama has personified change while Clinton has appeared dull and uninspiring. Ironically, Obama and not Hillary is the reincarnation of the Bill Clinton of 1992, a brilliant orator who has seized the moment and is carrying his country in a wave of hope and optimism. On the other hand, Clinton, as one American commentator has written in the New York Times, ‘must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.’
Clinton could yet be the Democratic nominee for president. Texas with its large Hispanic population, which has been a Clinton stronghold, and Ohio with its large low-income population, another group that Hillary has done well amongst, could provide a firewall for her to break Obama’s momentum. But it appears increasingly likely that something out of the ordinary, such as the uncovering of an Obama scandal, will have to occur for her to be able to win big. It is an unfortunate twist of fate for her, for at any other time and against any other candidate, Clinton would be a shoo-in to the nomination. It just so happened that she came up against an Obama type of candidate whose campaign is more akin to a movement. Many people know that it might be too good to be true or too good to last, but they still want to be a part of Obamamania while it does. For Hillary, her day of reckoning is March 4. If she does not turn the tide around and take Ohio and Texas by sizeable margins, the Democratic Party will anoint Barack Obama as its nominee for the fall elections.
shameran@gmail.com
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