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Liberty, equity, and democracy…

Bangladesh is undergoing difficult times.
   With the political process stalled and senior politicians either in prison or keeping silent for fear of being arrested, the political parties are exposed to the threat of falling apart at a time when the restoration of the political process, which is central to the proper functioning of a modern state, still appears to be a far cry. With many top businessmen passing days in fear of being sued either on corruption charges or for running businesses beyond economic rules, the national economy has begun to lose its natural dynamism. The media, which was considered to be the most vibrant in South Asia only the other day, is losing its edge thanks to overt and covert interventions by the powers that be. On top of that all, there is no sign of the people getting back their fundamental rights, which were taken away for no fault of their own when a state of emergency was imposed some eight months ago.
   There is, however, talk of resolving all these problems by the unelected incumbents, but the proposed solutions, political and otherwise, and the timeline offered are hardly reassuring. The reason is simple. The crises were not created in a day, nor can the politicians be held solely responsible for the crises. The intelligentsia providing unqualified support to the autocratic, ideologically bankrupt politicians, the economic policy planners taking mindless diktats of the international lending agencies, the self-seeking bureaucracy exploiting the divisive political culture for coterie interests, the big businesses exploiting the corrupt administrative system further to secure undue benefits — they all must share the blame for the current crises.
   The essays that follow in this supplement have attempted to understand, explain and analyse how Bangladesh today finds itself in the midst of such crises and explore possible ways to overcome them. In our exploration, one conclusion can be drawn across the board, that nobody, civil or military, holds a magic lamp that can solve our cumulative problems in a day — it will take years of painstaking efforts to undo the past failures of the oligarchic elite. But for that process to even begin, the multi-dimensional democratic processes need to be set in motion immediately.
   — Editor

Politics: forms and contents

To many a mind ‘politics’ is merely a rhetorical word, primarily to be discussed and debated by and among politicians who violently vie for power, and the partisan intelligentsia supporting/criticising the political camps to sharply divide the nation along blind party lines. One can hardly fault this simplistic outlook of the ‘minds’ in question because of the crude political practices they have suffered through in the recent past. Still, we shamelessly continue to assert that politics, a sound democratic polity that is, remains the keyword for the sound social and economic growth of our people.
   While doing so, we also continue to caution the people that politics is not just political activism out on the streets, and democracy is not just handover of power through ‘moderately acceptable elections’ held on a ‘level playing field’ created for oligarchic political groups. Politics, which eventually shapes the future of a nation, is the art and science of power – the former being ideology and the latter being the tactic to materialise ideology. But there is not ever one ideology in play, but rather many, mostly contradictory to each other, such as the bankrupt ideology of the oligarchs and the pro-people ideology of the democrats, which are being coded in various existing practices – social, cultural, and economic – in any given country.
   New Age, committed to the growth of a democratic polity, believes that it has a clear obligation to work towards deciphering the oligarchic ideological essence of the dominant social, political, and cultural practices, and thus contributing to the people becoming consciously organised as a political community along democratic principles. Hopefully, some if not all of the essays carried in this section of our fourth anniversary supplement will help our readers discover the undemocratic essence of the apparently democratic social, political, and cultural practices of the oligarchs.
   — Editor