It has been apparent for a while that the breakdown of key state institutions, especially of the law-and-order machinery, is a serious challenge facing the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government of Bangladesh. Much of the fracas over the pre-trial detention of former ISKCON leader Chinmoy Krishna Das — during which local lawyer Saiful Islam Alif was murdered — could have been avoided had the police and investigation agencies functioned to their normal capacities.
More than half the members of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, according to the newspaper Prothom Alo, are new to their positions. The effects are disconcerting: “Many of the officials and constables, who are in charge of raids, do not know the lanes and by-lanes of the concerned areas of Dhaka city”. The police in Chattogram have not gone through as big a change as Dhaka. Yet the security forces were woefully unprepared when supporters of the former ISKCON leader surrounded the van carrying Das from the court to the jail. Alif was reportedly leaving the court just as the melee between Das’s supporters and security personnel broke out. He suffered grievous injuries and was pronounced dead later in the hospital, triggering widespread protests. The president of the Chattogram District Bar Association said that “he blamed the authorities, especially police, for failing to prevent hours of violence”.
The interim government continues to enjoy a great deal of public support and goodwill. This is only to be expected, given the extraordinary circumstances in which it took power. The August 5 televised address to the nation by Bangladesh’s army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman announcing that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had resigned and that he was in talks with leaders of major political parties about forming an interim government, had the making and the promise of a democratic coup d’état.
A democratic military coup would sound like an oxymoron to most readers. But legal scholar Ozan Varol coined the phrase to distinguish those military coups that are “distinctly more democracy-promoting than others because they respond to popular opposition against authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, overthrow those regimes, and facilitate free and fair elections”. But democratic military coups, he warns, are rare — the exception and not the norm. Even if a coup begins with the promise of a transition to democracy, it is far from assured that such an endpoint will be attained.
Varol assumes that in a democratic coup d’état, the military will form part of an interim government. The composition of the interim government in Bangladesh would exceed his expectations. The student leaders of the protest movement that overthrew the Hasina regime insisted on a civilian-led interim government and proposed the name of the internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as its head. The government now includes academics, NGO activists, lawyers, former bureaucrats, retired army officers and student leaders. The army chief has promised to back this interim government and its mission of completing some essential reforms “come what may”.
Varol’s list of attributes of a democratic military coup includes the facilitation of free and fair elections within a short period. Setting a fixed date for the election is said to be “the strongest democratic countervailing power to the non-democratic dynamic of an interim government”.
Yunus, however, believes that it is crucial to complete certain institutional reforms before holding elections. His message for his people, he says, is, “Reforms, reforms, reforms. Unite for reforms. This chance won’t come again… Discuss and debate over which areas need reforms. But reforms must take place. Make sure after two days you don’t say, forget about reforms, we want the election now. We must not hold the election without carrying out reforms”.
The interim government has adopted an ambitious reform agenda. It has established 10 reform commissions focussing on the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the electoral system, anti-corruption, healthcare, mass media, labour, women’s rights, and the constitution. Few would quarrel with the need for reforms of many of Bangladesh’s institutions. And there are good reasons why many would like to prioritise reforms over holding elections. If there is an election soon, the BNP will most likely come to power. But its past record in power is not reassuring.
Yet, there are legitimate questions to be asked as to whether an unelected interim government has the mandate to carry out such extensive reforms. Reforms take time to design and implement, and to bear fruit. Can an unelected interim government maintain public support for a long enough period to carry out these reforms? If it fails to do so, in an extreme case, one can’t rule out a military take-over of the interim government.
Both the denial of bail to Chinmoy Krishna Das and his imprisonment, and the murder of Saiful Islam Alif, have been hugely controversial — for different reasons, and to different constituencies. The political sensitivity of such incidents and the political fallout they bring, expose the fragility of the interim government’s public support.
Given these circumstances, if the interim government decides to limit itself to a modest but strategic reform agenda, what could such an agenda entail?
The Constitutional Reform Commission appointed by the interim government consists mostly of lawyers and legal academics and is headed by Ali Riaz, a political scientist well-known for his work on Bangladesh’s democratic backsliding. He has persuasively argued in his work that the adoption of the constitution’s 15th Amendment in 2011, which eliminated the institution of the non-party caretaker government and thus allowed general elections to be held under partisan incumbent governments, was a critical event in the process of Bangladesh’s democratic backsliding. “The door for unchecked electoral fraud,” he wrote, “was opened through this new arrangement”. To be sure, the troubles of the non-party caretaker system precede the adoption of the 15th Amendment. But it had delivered results whenever it was not politically compromised and there were governments elected to power under that system that were seen as legitimate by the public. Perhaps the commission could initiate the process of bringing back the non-party caretaker system. However, it should leave the actual decision-making to a future elected Jatiya Sangsad.
The writer is Professor Emeritus of Political Studies at Bard College, New York
