Distrusting the people: The interim government’s original sin

Our current crisis is being narrated to us in two loud, competing stories. 

One insists that the uncertainty and fear around elections come from a betrayal of the July Charter, as Jamaat-e-Islami and its seven partners tirelessly repeat. The other warns of a vengeful Awami League waiting in the shadows, ready to plunge the country into chaos to derail any credible vote.

Both are convenient stories for their respective authors. Neither explains why, almost a year and a half after a popular uprising ousted an authoritarian regime, the road to an election looks more like a maze than a path. The truth is at once simpler and more alarming: we are not trapped by fate, or law, or some irresistible logic of chaos.

We are trapped by a set of profound misapprehensions among those who now run the interim government — about political parties, about how revolutions actually end, and, most fundamentally, about whether the people themselves can be trusted with democracy.

The first misapprehension is a deep, almost visceral distrust of political parties as such. Many in the interim set-up arrived with eminent reputations but very little lived knowledge of politics as a craft.

To them, parties are not the core machinery of democracy, but the main culprits behind its decay. "Old politics" is the catch-all phrase, as if the problem of the last decade was that parties existed, rather than that one of them converted the state into a personalised machine.

Within this frame, the BNP — by simple fact of being the only large party left standing after the decapitation of its main rival — looked less like a necessary anchor of any credible transition and more like the primary danger to be contained. Instead of bringing it fully into an inclusive roadmap, the instinct was to marginalise, to outmanoeuvre, to clip its wings.

Yet a democratic transition without real parties is a contradiction in terms. Parties are how interests are aggregated, conflicts channelled, cadres disciplined, and social anger absorbed into institutions rather than left to ferment on the streets. Distrusting this entire category, and especially the largest remaining party, made today's turmoil not just likely, but almost inevitable.

The second misapprehension is a misreading of the July Uprising itself and a hubristic attempt to manufacture, after the fact, a new revolutionary vanguard.

In many classic revolutions, a relatively cohesive organisation or small coalition not only fights the regime but then steps into the vacuum to build new institutions.

In our case, the uprising was deliberately "owned" by no one. All major parties, fearful of regime propaganda and of tainting a genuinely mass revolt, distanced themselves from claiming authorship. Student groups, professional bodies, civil society networks were all present; none asserted the right to act as a constituent authority.

The July movement was powerful precisely because it was broad, decentralised and morally unassailable — but that very breadth meant it did not naturally crystallise into a single leadership ready to govern the day after.

What we had, then, was a classic revolutionary situation without a clear revolutionary outcome. Power was up for grabs, and the interim government, instead of refereeing an open contest among existing political forces, tried to script its own cast. Jamaat-e-Islami was courted as a natural ally in a "reform first, elections later" project.

Then, even more adventurously, a new party — the NCP — was elevated in rhetoric and protocol as if it had somehow "led" the July revolution, when in fact it was one actor among many in a fragmented field.

The assumption seemed to be that, since the streets had no universally recognised owner, a new elite could be engineered from above and then endowed with retroactive revolutionary legitimacy. This is not statecraft; it is fantasy.

When a regime falls after a heterogeneous, partly leaderless mobilisation, leadership will inevitably be contested among old elites, organised parties, social movements and newly minted saviours.

The role of a serious interim authority is not to pre-assign victory in that contest by patronage and protocol, but to build a fair electoral and constitutional process in which the people decide who actually represents them.

By trying to manufacture a vanguard — midwifed in drawing rooms, burnished by media, anointed in ceremonies — the interim government turned an open transition into a rigged drama. The ensuing distrust should surprise no one.

The third misapprehension is the most corrosive of all: the belief that the people cannot yet be trusted with the very democracy they bled for. From the earliest days, the dominant tone from the top was not, "We will return power to you swiftly," but "We will fix the system first."

The menu of promised "reforms" was long: redesigning institutions, rewriting rules, restructuring politics itself.

At times, it sounded less like an interim caretaker and more like a self-appointed board of receivership, convinced that the citizenry, fresh from overthrowing one form of arbitrary power, had implicitly consented to another — this time in benevolent, technocratic packaging.

The irony is blistering. An anti-authoritarian uprising that shouted "no more decisions without us" has been interpreted as permission to make the most fateful decisions before asking us anything.

Into this already muddled landscape, Jamaat-e-Islami and its seven partners have marched with their five-point list of demands, framed as the true voice of the betrayed July spirit.

Strip away the noise, and two of those demands are central: immediate enactment of the July Charter, and a plebiscite on that Charter before general elections.

Both shimmer with revolutionary romance, and both are, in any serious constitutional sense, void. A charter drafted by self-selected actors in the heat of an uprising may have immense moral force and political weight. It does not, by itself, have constituent authority.

In every serious democratic experience, the power to overhaul a constitution flows through elected bodies — a Parliament sitting as a constituent assembly, or a specially elected assembly, often followed by a referendum. A people may embrace or reject a text; but they must, at minimum, be asked properly.

A "plebiscite" in which the "No" is not a clear, available, and consequence-bearing option is not a plebiscite at all; it is an acclamation ritual borrowed from the worst traditions of Caesarism.

The clean, democratic sequence before us is not rocket science. Hold a credible general election.

Let the resulting Parliament sit with a dual mandate — as legislature and constituent assembly — to debate and translate the broad principles of July into concrete constitutional amendments.

Then, if needed, place those amendments before the people in a referendum where a Yes and a No both mean something. Anything else is either wishful thinking or deliberate misdirection. Our present chaos, then, is not an inevitable aftershock of revolution.

It is the harvest of three avoidable errors: treating parties as pariahs instead of partners, misreading a mass uprising as something it was not and trying to retrofit a vanguard into it, and assuming that the people are not yet worthy of the ballot they fought for.

If those who now hold power can find the humility to correct these misapprehensions, the path to elections will clear faster than they think. If they cannot, it will not be Awami plotting or Jamaat posturing that derails this transition. It will be, quite simply, their own refusal to trust the citizens whose courage made this moment possible.

Sketch: TBS

Bobby Hajjaj is the chairman of the Nationalist Democratic Movement (NDM) and a faculty member at North South University. He can be reached at bobby.hajjaj@northsouth.edu.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.