Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

SOME leaders of the left-leaning 11-party alliance insist that they will not enter into the ‘grand alliance’ cobbled together by the Awami League although they will continue to be part of the AL-led 14-party alliance, so says a report front-paged in the Bangla daily Prothom Alo. The left leaders attribute their stance to the inclusion of the Jatiya Party led by the ‘deposed despot’ HM Ershad and the religion-based Islami Oikya Jote in the alliance, saying sharing the same dais with the communal forces and an autocrat merely for vote-bank politics will be detrimental to both elections and politics. While the position taken by the left leaders against mere vote-bank politics and the ‘grand alliance’ is commendable, their decision to stay within the 14-party fold appears no less opportunistic. Let us explain why.
   The people of this country fought the war of independence in 1971 with a view to securing for themselves a sovereign nation state built on secular-democratic principles; establishing therein representative democracy through sustained opposition to religion-based politics on the one hand and militarisation of politics on the other; and introducing an egalitarian economic order whereby they will be ensured equal access to public resources. Regrettably, the ruling elite or, in other words, its political parties have steadily veered away from the spirit of the war of independence into the clutches of illiberal politics and neoliberal economic policies, led worldwide by the United States and the international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank.
   While the mainstream political parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the Awami League, the Jatiya Party and the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh somewhat gleefully acquiesced to policies prescribed by the US and the neoliberal international financial institutions, the left-leaning forces have been no less culpable for allowing the slow but sure abdication of the spirit of the war of independence by the ruling elite. They have failed to put up effective resistance to such a practice on the one hand and hobnobbed with the mainstream political parties at different times on the other.
   The rationale the left-leaning parties put forth for choosing one major political camp over the other has been tenuous as well. Indeed, the BNP is no longer the centrist party it professes to be and is surrounded by Islamist and anti-democratic forces. However, the Awami League has also not hesitated to either sign a memorandum of understanding with the Khelafat-e-Majlish, a political party which makes no attempt to veil its aspiration to see Bangladesh transformed into a theocratic state, recently or recognise Jamaat as a democratic force back in the 1990s and take it on board in their movement against the BNP government. It has also welcomed into the ‘grand alliance’ Ershad, a deposed military dictator who drove the last nail into the coffin of the people’s secular-democratic aspiration by making Islam the state religion.
   Hence, the decision by the left leaders to stay in the 14-party alliance but not join the ‘grand alliance’ may be high on feel-good factors but essentially smacks of the kind of political opportunism that they castigate the mainstream political parties for. If they really want the national politics restored on the secular-democratic ideals, they should dissociate themselves from the opportunistic political parties right-away and rally the secular-democratic forces in society. It might not take them to the corridors of power immediately, but will surely give rise to an alternative and progressive political stream that they themselves envisaged when they formed the 11-party alliance a few years ago. Society needs such a political stream to keep the aspiration for a return to the ideals of the war of independence alive.

Illegal killings by legally constituted
forces must end

Not only have extrajudicial killings not stopped, they are now being perpetrated with greater recklessness. Odhikar, a human rights coalition, says the killings are carried out ‘with absolute impunity, as reported in Sunday’s New Age. The rights group has listed 116 such killings by legally constituted forces in the first nine months of the current year. The censure by the public, the media and civil society and national and international watchdog bodies do not seem to have had any effect in this regard. So defiant of the laws and norms these errant law enforcers have indeed become that they do not even think it necessary to give an elaborate report of the circumstances of deaths to explain away their conduct but hand out the same stereotyped make-believe story of ‘crossfire’ or ‘exchange of gunfire’. In January 2008 eight people were reportedly killed while in September, the last month of the period under survey, those killed in this way numbered 19. During this period ten people were allegedly tortured to death while in custody.
   While election and democratic rights are in the air, police reforms and accountability are being talked about, the law enforcers continue to commit the grossest kind of human right violation. The emergency rules have curtailed the freedom of common citizens to seek fair trial while they have given a new freedom to law enforcers to arrest, torture and kill. This is not to say that extrajudicial killings were absent before the declaration of emergency but the unabated deaths go to prove that emergency neither controls crime nor improves crime control mechanism or performance of law enforcers. And the way the government is giving indulgence to law enforcers and covering up their excesses is puzzling. We do not know of any instance of the perpetrators being punished for their acts. This may create the impression that the country is abandoning the universally accepted justice delivery system.
   We have admitted above that extrajudicial killings have existed for years and are not an innovation of the interim government. But if the most outrageous abuses of the past are to be perpetuated and made worse then it can further smear the record of the 21-month-old government. If the government remained true to its claim that it would clear much of the cobwebs of the past, then it should have probed the summary executions that took place in the past instead of adding about a dozen new instances every month. Extrajudicial killings and custodial deaths are a national shame that should no longer be tolerated.

WITH only four weeks now remaining till America votes for president on November 4, opinion polls show Barack Obama pulling ahead of John McCain in national as well as battleground state opinion polls. The bounce that the Republican ticket enjoyed following the party’s national convention in early September, which was in large part because McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate had energised the conservative base, has been entirely wiped out and Obama is now surging ahead even in some states that have been reliably Republican in recent presidential elections. With each passing day, it appears increasingly unlikely that McCain will be able to turn back the tide to make a late political comeback. Something like that has not happened in American presidential politics in a very long time and given the present set of conditions, McCain has a very steep uphill climb in front of him.
   At the root of the shifts in fortunes for Obama and McCain has been the financial turmoil and growing economic fears among average Americans. The Democrats, who are traditionally better trusted to handle the economy anyway, have been further boosted by the fact that a Republican has been in the White House for the last eight years and Republicans were in charge of both houses of Congress for the majority of that time as well. Also, Obama has been very successful in questioning McCain’s credentials on economic policy and tagging him to the failed Bush policies of the past eight years, hammering him for his plans to continue the Bush tax cuts for large corporations and for having been a supporter of less regulation. Obama has also been able to deflect claims from the Republican ticket that he would raise taxes by continuously stating that his economic plan would cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. McCain, on the other hand, has tried during the same period to distance himself from Bush by touting his ‘maverick’ image and he has also tried to advance a more populist message, arguing for greater regulation of financial institutions and Wall Street to check corporate greed. However, it is Obama’s message that appears to have caught on and it is telling that not only independents but also large numbers of older voters who traditionally vote Republican are now leaning towards voting for Obama.
   These shifts in voters’ perceptions and preferences have been reflected in opinion polls showing how the race has changed in the last three weeks. In the days following the Republican National Convention, McCain not only had a slight edge in the national polls but, more importantly, seemed to be doing much better than Obama in traditional battleground states like Ohio and Florida. Moreover, some of the Republican states that Obama was hoping to shift to the Democratic column, like Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, had shifted more towards McCain following his pick of Sarah Palin, while some of the Democratic states that McCain was targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, had become troublesome for Obama. It appeared then that Obama would have to play defence for the rest of the campaign and work very hard to hold on to all the states that John Kerry won in 2004 in addition to trying to win some of the Bush states like Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico which have generally leaned Democratic this year.
   What a difference three weeks can make in US presidential elections. The same electoral map looks vastly different now following the economic turmoil with Obama pulling well ahead in almost all the states that Kerry had won, including the ones particularly targeted by McCain. So dramatic has been Obama’s rise in the last couple of weeks that the McCain campaign announced on Friday its decision to pull resources out of the battleground state of Michigan to divert them to other states. Michigan, for much of this election season, had been the Republican’s top target, the Kerry state considered most vulnerable for the Democrats.
   In addition to solidifying his position in almost every Kerry state, Obama is now clearly leading in several states that voted for Bush in 2004, including in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico. Even more encouraging for the Democratic ticket is the fact that Obama is not only competing but leading McCain in opinion polls in several states that have not voted for a Democrat for president in decades, states like Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. While McCain is cutting down on the number of states that he campaigns in to concentrate on a few critical states because of resource constraints, Obama has been taking advantage of his superior fundraising by expanding his campaign into states that Democrats typically do not compete for. Buoyed by recent polling in states like North Carolina and Indiana, Obama is now pouring millions of dollars in these Republican states in television and radio advertising, direct mail, and ground organisations to ensure voter registration and turnout. That is in addition to the extensive ground organisations he already has in every battleground state and the millions he is spending every week in states like Ohio and Florida on television advertising.
   With 270 electoral college votes required to win the presidency, Obama is now clearly ahead in states carrying about 260 and looks likely to carry several other states that will put him well over that threshold. McCain, on the other hand, now leads in states which together make up less than 200 electoral votes and his route to the White House is narrow and getting narrower. It is McCain who will now have to play defence for the rest of the campaign to hold on to several major states that Bush had won four years ago. Having spent little money and built no ground organisation to speak of in states like North Carolina and Indiana for example, McCain will now have to scramble personnel and resources to those states to halt Obama’s surge, thereby leaving Obama with an easier task to pick up the more traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida.
   Given that the economic problems will not go away anytime soon, it is unlikely that the pervasive debate in America will shift from the economy, which is McCain’s weak suit, to foreign policy or national security, issues with which McCain is far more comfortable. It could happen, for example, if a terrorist attack was to take place on American soil, but short of something as dramatic and tragic, the economy looks set to dominate the conversation. Also, the time is running out for McCain to do something dramatic that will change the dynamics of this race. He tried a gimmick by apparently suspending his campaign prior to the first presidential debate to ‘work’ on passing the financial rescue bill in the US congress. However, that stunt seems to have backfired on him, especially after the bill failed to get through the House of Representatives on its first try and McCain, who had stated that he would not take part in the first debate unless the bill was passed, was later forced to take part anyway. That showed McCain as being erratic, something that the Obama campaign has now seized upon to discredit the Arizona senator. Although McCain’s campaign has been trying to advance the theory that Obama is unprepared and risky for the presidency, in recent weeks it is McCain who has appeared a risky choice for president during this economic crisis.
   The only real opportunities left for McCain now to change the direction of this race for the White House would be to significantly outperform Obama in the remaining two presidential debates. However, if the first debate is anything to go by, Obama’s debating skills have vastly improved over the course of this long campaign and it is more than likely that Obama will put in two solid performances. If that occurs, it is difficult to see how McCain will reverse the tide against him. Add to that the fact that the Democrats have registered many more voters than Republicans over the course of the last four years, particularly in crucial states like Virginia, and Obama’s superior ground organisations in most states that will be key to getting out the vote on election day, the outcome of this battle for the White House is fast becoming a foregone conclusion. McCain desperately needs a game-changer, and he needs one fast.