Are We Being Fooled Twice?
Posted: Saturday, January 27, 2007
by Hasan Shafie
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me…. We should not let anyone lie to us as we did more than many times before. We, the general citizens of the country, were inappropriately been taken care off by the last caretaker government and were being fooled in several ways. However, now we are being reared by another newly formed government which is apparently engaged in rearing, good governance, fair politics and democracy. Or so we are being told. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to try to guess that these are mere empty rhetoric and meaningless posturing by some people pursuing some other objectives in disguise or behind its appearance and fooling us once more. Such apprehensions may or may not become real in their consequences. But before that, however, let us try to reflect on the present circumstances and symptoms beneath the surface and try to anticipate how free, democratic and politically stable we may expect to become in the days to come.
The successful intervention of the international agencies, especially the US State Department and the UN, coordinated and materialized through the Bangladesh Army resulted in the tragic demise of the orthodox last caretaker government seemingly headed by Professor Iajuddin Ahmed and sponsored by the previous political regime. The same forces catalyzed the formation of an improvised kind of government, which undoubtedly transposes some degrees of terminological ambiguity regarding caretaker or interim government, so as the nature, duration as well as the mission of such government. It would be too early to understand the purposes and motivations of the present government, but yet our previous experience and early morning symptoms suggest us to be skeptic because the US and the UN sponsored power might project their images as being pro-people, but behind their appearance, may owing their ultimate loyalty to otherwise rooted pragmatics and interests, besides the citizens of the country.
The present government though appears to be objective and value-free but the constitution and selection of the advisory body is quite interesting for several reasons, for instance the advisory body consists of; more than one retired army officers, several ex-world bank personnel, personnel explicitly expressive of political party ideology and being rewarded accordingly, personnel related by family ties, and, significantly most of them are blessed by and received benefits from varied US agencies whereby cultivate their strong roots in abroad. To whom this advisory body is accountable? It is not the mass people of Bangladesh to whom they are going to remain accountable or disburse their responsibilities.
As a parallel development, the present ruling elites simultaneously received the sponsorship of a group of national intellectuals to speak on their behalf and serving as intermediaries between the state, the civil society and the subordinated local people. These groups of intellectuals, strongly allied with the present state apparatus, are propagating different modes of evaluating and valuing society as a general and objective conception against the absolute failure of conventional leadership. They are providing the means for advancing the present interim government through articulating some optimistic ideas, particular sufferings experiences of subordinate general people, and practical dilemmas concerning the restoration of effective systems in the illusive future. These organic intellectuals are efficiently functioning in perpetuating such pseudo ideologies and using their positionality to cultivate optimistic ideas among local people. This may be seen as a process of ‘masking’ the international interests in Bangladesh, which is continuously developing camouflages and reinforcing a network of supportive ideas under the ‘guise’ of emancipation from the apparently disrupted political systems in Bangladesh.
These sanguine but blurred ideas of a better future are being espoused premeditatedly, while being promoted through ideological state apparatuses, serving as tools to control the general public. Now every other day, we are repeatedly being reminded of the rampant corruption and the collapse and malfunctioning of public institutions under the auspices of the politicians. Another such political fantasist Professor Yunus is also echoing these intellectuals by saying that Bangladesh is not at all safe in the hands of the local political elites. They are, in fact and in effect, intellectuals of capitalism and are strongly allied with the present interim government and the international forces behind it. Intellectuals like Professor Yunus may be seen as ‘organic intellectuals’ (Antonio Gramsci) having a conscious alignment with this particular political{economic} movement. However, they are functioning outside the Government per se as distinct, specialized, and often privatized institutions and nevertheless reinforcing capitalist ideology against developing sense of nationalisms by encouraging the mass people to overthrow their conventional leadership rather than having political unity and autonomy.
There are multiple facets and expression of power especially in an era of increased corporate global dominance. This interim government, using the apparatus of state coercive power, maybe legitimate though, is enforcing discipline on the great masses of the population to a premeditated direction, which may appear to have received the ‘spontaneous consent’ of the majority. The work of Antonio Gramsci suggests that such pseudo appearance of spontaneous public consent may be artificially multiplied by the so-called organs of public opinion – media, newspapers and associations, broadcasting and so on. At present, the apparent maintenance of the status quo in the political sphere has captured the hearts and minds of ordinary people, while the aforesaid intellectuals within our civil society are facilitating a synthesis between force and consent, for cultivating and sustaining ‘consensual control’ in the minds of the general public.
Let me make three concluding points. First, for the majority of general population, I would like to make them aware of the shifting nature and place of our intellectuals within political and economic space since they are actually intellectuals of transnational capital and are constantly engaged in changing our minds to expand markets and to a greater understanding of material reality by suggesting us to choose a new form of political strategy and actions favoring capitalist expansion . Additionally, to be aware of building any castles in the air, since corruption, in a more general sense of the term, in all public sectors is of course the central problem that is impeding our development, I also have mentioned in some of my earlier writings, but for a sustainable remedy, we need joint efforts for over years to counteract corruption successfully in Bangladesh. Second, to the intellectuals of capitalism, please remember that the relation between labor and capital is always and everywhere contested and prefer an intellectual position committed to majority population than being organic to some transnational corporations or corporate groups. The third point, for the present interim Government, is to remind about the enormous force of people behind their apparent ‘spontaneous consent’, ready to be risen up and resist enforcement of whatever sort, if this illusive consent is eroded by their experience.
This Article has been viewed 293 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.