Why it’s so difficult to build a third party

Abdur Rashid (pseudonym), in his mid-40s, has been a political activist his entire life. His whole family, including his father and brothers, had been loyal cadres of erstwhile BNP leader Md Keramat Ali of Patuakhali. 

During an hour-long interview at a Nilkhet restaurant, he described to me the power struggle between Keramat Ali and another BNP leader, Air Vice Marshal (retd) Altaf Hossain, to assert control over Patuakhali BNP, which Altaf eventually won out. 

Rashid and his family paid a heavy price for ending up on the losing side – his father was hacked to death in their front yard, in front of his own eyes; Rashid and his brothers sustained a number of grave injuries and spent half their adult lives away from home, hiding from rivals or the police. 

I was speaking to Rashid as part of a long-term journalistic project looking at the internal power structure of political parties in Bangladesh. Once the interview ended, I closed my notebook and recorder and casually asked him, "What is it that you do now?"

"I work for Altaf Hossain now."

I did a double-take. Rashid gave me an apologetic look and said, "You have to do what you have to, to survive." I nodded, but I couldn't wrap my head around what I had just heard. Rashid had spent the last hour describing to me how his entire life had been turned upside down because of this rivalry. And here he was, now working for the other side, for the man who was at least indirectly responsible for much of his family's misery.

It was a system that BNP and AL had perfected through the decades before Hasina decided to usurp the entire system for herself. Before that, if for five years you took the heat on behalf of your party – including police beatings, NBR harassment and jail time – then over the next five years, you reaped the benefits of that sacrifice through lucrative handouts from the party.

This was in 2012. I had spent nearly two months interviewing many grassroots political activists like Rashid, belonging to BNP, Awami League, Jamaat-e-Islami and a host of other smaller parties. 

We were still two years from Hasina forcing through the one-sided 2014 elections and effectively turning the country into a one-party state; hence, when you went out to the grassroots, you would find robust local organisations of all the political parties. Most of the life stories I gathered from these activists, however, mirrored Rashid's, if not to that extreme.

I had gone into the project thinking I already knew everything you needed to know about politics in Bangladesh. BNP and Awami League had dominated Bangladeshi politics my entire adult life, and I assumed the country was neatly divided along who you thought was the country's greatest benefactor – Sheikh Mujib or Ziaur Rahman. But as I completed one interview after another around the country, I began to realise this stronghold of BNP and Awami League over the national psyche was a much more complex and nuanced phenomenon. 

Rashid and many others of his ilk actually have no particular loyalty to the BNP and Awami League. In fact, most of them came into politics almost by accident. Typically, Bangladeshi homesteads - be it in villages, towns or major cities - often get mired in vicious property disputes as a result of uncertain inheritance, poor land records, demarcation complications, etc, which lead to dangerous rivalries among family members or neighbours that can sometimes drag on for generations (the bulk of unresolved cases in Bangladeshi courts generally deal with property disputes). 

As things escalate, local politicians are usually roped into these disputes on behalf of one side or another. In Rashid's case, once his neighbours turned to the Awami League for help, there was no option for him and his family but to join the BNP. 

Like this, millions of families and neighbourhoods across Bangladesh neatly line up their loyalties to BNP or AL, not out of love for the party leader or its governance record, but for selfish personal reasons such as securing their property. 

As a result, the AL and BNP, especially, have built a massive patronage network that reaches every corner of the country. You want the rights to your village's fertiliser dealership or social safety payouts? Join BNP or AL. You want your son or daughter to secure a government job (sometimes even the private sector or NGO)? Join AL or BNP. You want to secure a lucrative energy or construction contract? Join BNP or AL. You want your NID or passport issued without hassle? Join BNP or AL. It goes on and on. 

It was a system that BNP and AL had perfected through the decades before Hasina decided to usurp the entire system for herself. Before that, if for five years you took the heat on behalf of your party – including police beatings, NBR harassment and jail time – then over the next five years, you reaped the benefits of that sacrifice through lucrative handouts from the party. 

The entire country, of course, was not okay with this system. As more and more people became educated and politically conscious, typically the urban population, there were calls to 'reform' this political system dominated by the AL-BNP dichotomy. 

Ever since the 1990s, self-styled power brokers toyed with the idea of a political force led by 'highly educated people,' typically a Barrister Kamal Hossain from then-AL, or a Saifur Rahman from BNP, to move away from the parochial, zero-sum politics of the Mujib-Zia clans. 

The Gono Forum, Badruddoza Chowdhury's Bikalpa Dhara or even Reza Kibria's Gono Odhikar Porishod, were to a degree a manifestation of that desire among the elite for an 'educated' leadership. The most dangerous manifestation of this was, of course, the army-backed government's efforts in 2007-08 to rid AL and BNP of the two clans, infamously coined minus two. 

And then there were the forces on the right and left, who typically want to turn the country more Islamist or egalitarian, although the former clearly has more takers in the vote bank, while the latter has a significant constituency among students in higher education institutions. 

But despite all their combined and individual efforts in the last few decades to knock them off their perch, the two clans and the parties synonymous with them have persisted and dominated Bangladeshi politics. 

It is indeed difficult to explain the dominance of a couple of families over an entire political system, although the phenomenon is fairly common around the world, especially in South Asia. Even when a third force did emerge somewhere, for example, Tehrik-e-Insaaf in Pakistan, you cannot help but notice that the entire movement is built around the personality cult of Imran Khan and now that he is in jail, his sister has become the spokesperson for the movement. 

One simple explanation is that voters in less educated nations typically rally around a 'hero' figure and don't have the bandwidth for a nuanced understanding of statecraft and policy, given the numerous travails of their difficult lives. These families serve as simple, easy-to-remember symbols, much like the party symbol. 

A number of years back, a University of Hong Kong study looking at the dominance of political dynasties in developing countries proposed an interesting thesis – that in the absence of strong institutions of the state that are typical to the West, these dynasties provide a sense of stability, economic or otherwise, to the people of these low-income countries. You can certainly see some of that in the motivation behind people like Rashid signing up for BNP or AL.  

This then brings us to the question of the proposed new political party led by July Uprising students.

There is no question that there is an appetite in the country for a political force outside of BNP-AL and the unhealthy grip they have had over Bangladeshi society. But the first question these students will have to resolve is how to dismantle the iron grip of the patronage network. After all, the whole point of having a new party is that we move out of the corruption typical of this rentier system. 

But can you build a political party in Bangladesh without a patronage network? Can you convince people to come out to the streets during election time without the promise of a handout once elected? Can you convince some people to even vote without actually paying them to vote for you?

The second question the students will have to deal with is the power of the family symbol. So far, the leading student leaders such as Nahid, Asif Mahmud, Mahfuj Alam, Sarjis Alam and Hasnat Abdullah have certainly built a public profile over the last six months but they are far from building any personality cult around themselves. 

They are young and energetic, full of courage, dreams and flaws, and seem to be defining their politics based on what they stand for, instead of who they are. But in a nation that constantly looks for a saviour to lift them out of the morass, is there an appetite for leaders who lead from among the people instead of from above them?

Keep in mind, we have not had a real election in over 15 years, so most of my observations here stem from a political landscape before that period. It is quite possible that as a new generation entered the political arena, as the country became more urbanized, and as the internet and political awareness spread through all corners of the country, we now have a new Bangladesh with different political aspirations. 

We will find out not too long from now if that is the case.