Did Bangladesh have a free and fair election? Westerners think so...but then they would, wouldn't they?
According to a reliable bureaucratic source, the election of 2001 was rigged in favour of the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by the wife of General Zia, against the Awami League. A brilliant mathematical analysis reveals fraud in two out of three elections: "One example concerns an analysis of the last three elections in Bangladesh. The 1991 election showed no strange results. For the 1996 election some 2% of results were problematic. And fully 9% of the results in 2001 failed the test. The 2001 election was fiercely contested. Yet monitors from the Carter Centre and the European Union found the election to be acceptably, if not entirely, free and fair. Tests like Dr. Mebane's one could provide monitors with quantitative estimates of exactly how free and fair an election has been....*" And that's the last thing that western election monitors in banana republics would want!
Johan Perera reported form Sri Lanka that “it seems the ritual of voting in the Third World is not so much for the purpose of democracy, but is rather for the purpose of legitimising stable government.” His observation was based on what had been happening in Sri Lanka’s 2000 elections. “Election observers attached to the local monitoring bodies, People’s Action for Free and Fair Election (PAFFREL) and the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV), expressed shock and revulsion at what they saw happening in the Kandy district on the day of the election. They saw armed gangs of 20 to 100 going about from polling station to polling station....The rigging of the election that took place in the Kandy district extended to many other parts of the country. In the election monitoring offices in Colombo, telephone calls and faxes came in a flood from the election observers in the field. They gave detailed accounts of what was happening....In a post-election statement, the Election Commissioner stated that in the context of the conditions that apply in the Third World the election should be considered satisfactory....Unfortunately, it was not only a chastened election commissioner who thought this way. The teams of foreign observers from the European Union and British Parliament seemed to think that way too.”**
* The Economist, February 24 2007, p 82
** Report published in Holiday, Dhaka, Bangladesh, October 20th, 2000, page 4
Showing posts with label Sri Lanka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sri Lanka. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sunday, November 11, 2007
where failure pays
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, in his otherwise stimulating article ‘India, West Bengal and East Bengal’ overlooked two leaders who would disprove ‘the fact...that no responsible political or military leader has ever played with the security of his people when military resistance seemed irrational’. They are Napoleon and Nehru.
The French revolutionaries had every reason to fear that their cause would not succeed: they were surrounded by monarchies bent on killing the infant republic in its cradle. By all rational calculations, republicanism was bound to fail. That it did not was largely the work of Napoleon. However, his astonishing military successes were due to that epochal innovation in military history: the National Army – a body of people dedicated to a set of ideas for which they were willing to die by the thousands.
Again, on his return from Elba, Napoleon knew that this time, not only was all Europe against him, but even his own country: he still destroyed 100,000 lives on a personal gamble.
In our own day, we have seen similar revolutionary wars undertaken by a nation covetous of dignity and freedom against – by all rational reckoning – seemingly invincible military might. Vietnam and Iran are the latest examples. As Joseph Conrad said, “It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world; great achievements are carried out in a warm, blessed mental fog.”
Therefore, pace Nirad Chaudhuri, it is not the “fact of the matter that East Bengal Muslims and their leaders did not know the basic principle of seeking or continuing a political conflict when faced with an overwhelming military superiority of the opponent”. The fact of the matter is that there was no revolutionary, national sentiment shared by the whole people. As Mr.Badruddin Umar has observed, the winners of 1971 were the new elite, totally divorced from the aspirations of the people. As Mr.Afsan Chowdhury has pointed out, those villagers who took up arms did so to protect their homes or as a reaction to violence against their villages, not for the ‘nation’.
There is another parallel to the actions of Sheikh Mujib: those of Nehru during the border-conflict with China. Here was a ‘responsible’ political leader who had been advised by diplomats and military experts not to confront China on the battlefield. He chose to ignore them. Nehru refused to negotiate; he was goaded on by the political class; he firmly believed that China would not attack; the army was politicised at the top and the officers were inefficient.
The very possibility of Chinese retaliation for Indian provocation was rejected. Without a shred of evidence, the Intelligence Bureau endorsed this illogical view; those officers who questioned the assumption were shunted aside to make room for more docile soldiers. And the most docile of them all was General Kaul. The chief of general staff, without any combat command experience, was moved to active command despite the knowledge of his total unsuitability for the post! When General Thapar suggested that China might counter-attack, Nehru said that he had ‘good reason to believe that the Chinese would not take strong action against us’. Soon, the situation was out of his hand – he was a pawn of the powers he had encouraged, both national as well as international.
Therefore, it is not the Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim who has 'the disease’, as Nirad Chaudhuri put it. Rather, it appears to be a South Asian trait: intransigence, the inability to accommodate any other point of view but mine, an unrealistic appraisal of the situation – all these qualities are on abundant display in South Asia. We see them at work in the Kashmir question in India, in the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, and in our own domestic politics in Bangladesh.
However, the real lesson of Nehru’s debacle is different. Despite losing the newly-won freedom of India to China (but for Chinese forbearance), he not only did not resign, there was not a murmur against his continued leadership. Moreover, his daughter and his grandson went on to inherit his position. Similarly, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, despite losing half the country, managed to bequeath power to his daughter. The Bandaranaike family, notwithstanding the fact that it was father who started the Tamil-Sinahlase division, managed to keep the prime ministership as well as the presidency simultaneously in the family! Our dynasties have their similar origins in fiascoes and debacles.
The experience of being ruled for several hundred years by foreigners must have eaten away the intellectual fibre of our elites. Surely, it will take several generations before we start thinking for ourselves, and not let others do our thinking for us. Perhaps 60 years of ‘independence’ is not enough for independent thought. How long before the slave mentality finally disappears?
In South Asia, failure pays.
The French revolutionaries had every reason to fear that their cause would not succeed: they were surrounded by monarchies bent on killing the infant republic in its cradle. By all rational calculations, republicanism was bound to fail. That it did not was largely the work of Napoleon. However, his astonishing military successes were due to that epochal innovation in military history: the National Army – a body of people dedicated to a set of ideas for which they were willing to die by the thousands.
Again, on his return from Elba, Napoleon knew that this time, not only was all Europe against him, but even his own country: he still destroyed 100,000 lives on a personal gamble.
In our own day, we have seen similar revolutionary wars undertaken by a nation covetous of dignity and freedom against – by all rational reckoning – seemingly invincible military might. Vietnam and Iran are the latest examples. As Joseph Conrad said, “It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world; great achievements are carried out in a warm, blessed mental fog.”
Therefore, pace Nirad Chaudhuri, it is not the “fact of the matter that East Bengal Muslims and their leaders did not know the basic principle of seeking or continuing a political conflict when faced with an overwhelming military superiority of the opponent”. The fact of the matter is that there was no revolutionary, national sentiment shared by the whole people. As Mr.Badruddin Umar has observed, the winners of 1971 were the new elite, totally divorced from the aspirations of the people. As Mr.Afsan Chowdhury has pointed out, those villagers who took up arms did so to protect their homes or as a reaction to violence against their villages, not for the ‘nation’.
There is another parallel to the actions of Sheikh Mujib: those of Nehru during the border-conflict with China. Here was a ‘responsible’ political leader who had been advised by diplomats and military experts not to confront China on the battlefield. He chose to ignore them. Nehru refused to negotiate; he was goaded on by the political class; he firmly believed that China would not attack; the army was politicised at the top and the officers were inefficient.
The very possibility of Chinese retaliation for Indian provocation was rejected. Without a shred of evidence, the Intelligence Bureau endorsed this illogical view; those officers who questioned the assumption were shunted aside to make room for more docile soldiers. And the most docile of them all was General Kaul. The chief of general staff, without any combat command experience, was moved to active command despite the knowledge of his total unsuitability for the post! When General Thapar suggested that China might counter-attack, Nehru said that he had ‘good reason to believe that the Chinese would not take strong action against us’. Soon, the situation was out of his hand – he was a pawn of the powers he had encouraged, both national as well as international.
Therefore, it is not the Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim who has 'the disease’, as Nirad Chaudhuri put it. Rather, it appears to be a South Asian trait: intransigence, the inability to accommodate any other point of view but mine, an unrealistic appraisal of the situation – all these qualities are on abundant display in South Asia. We see them at work in the Kashmir question in India, in the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, and in our own domestic politics in Bangladesh.
However, the real lesson of Nehru’s debacle is different. Despite losing the newly-won freedom of India to China (but for Chinese forbearance), he not only did not resign, there was not a murmur against his continued leadership. Moreover, his daughter and his grandson went on to inherit his position. Similarly, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, despite losing half the country, managed to bequeath power to his daughter. The Bandaranaike family, notwithstanding the fact that it was father who started the Tamil-Sinahlase division, managed to keep the prime ministership as well as the presidency simultaneously in the family! Our dynasties have their similar origins in fiascoes and debacles.
The experience of being ruled for several hundred years by foreigners must have eaten away the intellectual fibre of our elites. Surely, it will take several generations before we start thinking for ourselves, and not let others do our thinking for us. Perhaps 60 years of ‘independence’ is not enough for independent thought. How long before the slave mentality finally disappears?
In South Asia, failure pays.
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