No exit in Dhaka(Bangladesh)

In Dhaka, there is a sense of a lull before the storm. At the beginning of last year – nearly 16 months ago – a quasi-military interim government swept into power riding on popular sentiment and vowing to put an end to the country's endemic corruption and acrimonious politics. Today, that government is coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile, a repressive state of emergency, coupled with the omnipresence of military fatigues in the corridors of power, is providing the enforcement of this non-elected government's authority on the streets. But any façade of moral authority or popular endorsement once wielded by either Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed's cabinet or the army leadership that backed it is fast crumbling. As rumours abound that the intelligence agencies are tightening their grip on the sceptre of power, Dhaka has become a city of whispered conspiracies.

Every public pronouncement by the government is greeted with smiles of assent by the country's elite, but next to nothing is taken at face value. In the anxiety that their worst fears of full military rule are about to be confirmed, ordinary Bangladeshis have taken to seeing the black hand of intrigue behind every major political, economic and social development. It can become quite convoluted. This includes the current rice crisis (which has its roots in high world cereal prices), but also the three spells of flooding and the devastating Cyclone Sidr that took place last year. All of this is, one way or another, being seen by many as a conspiracy to discredit the civilian face of the current regime, which will allow the army leadership to take charge as their 'patriotic duty'.

It does not help, of course, that Army Chief Moeen U Ahmed, who is one of the principal architects and the powerhouse behind the current regime, continues to chant a public mantra that the army is only 'aiding' civilian government. In other words, he and his forces refuse to own up to the government's failures. But those failures are aplenty, as any unelected government that comes to power promising to rid a country of 'corrupt politicians' will inevitably come to discover. The interim government's attempt to implement a 'minus-two' formula – which would see the country's two former prime ministers, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, sent into exile like some of their counterparts in Pakistan – has profoundly backfired. Both leaders remain in detention, along with scores of their parties' senior leaders, being sentenced to decades in prison on various corruption charges. But all the while, few if any believe that they are getting fair trials. Meanwhile, the government's bid to split Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) into two factions has fallen on its face, with the rank and file of the party continuing to stand by their beleaguered leader.

No confidence
Meanwhile, inflation of over 11 percent is the highest seen over the past two decades, with the fallout of global rice prices in particular wreaking havoc on the rural and urban poor alike. The government and the army chief have tried their best to assuage the market and the public by denying that any food crisis is afoot. But this has partly been bravado, and partly an attempt to conceal the official failure to foresee the crisis when natural disasters damaged the monsoon aman paddy last year. But the snaking queues at government-run cut-price stores, along with the thousands who have to be turned away empty-handed, are realities with which the public is living daily. In April, protests by export-based garment-industry workers demanding higher wages were cowed by police actions. But the government is certainly aware that anger continues to simmer just below the surface of ostensible normality.

Worse, Bangladesh's economy is in tatters. Local investment has been stifled by the government's overzealous anti-corruption drive, which last year saw scores of top business leaders arrested or intimidated – with scant regard for the rule of law. During this government's first year in power, investment overall fell by 55 percent, with foreign investment declining by an astounding 84 percent. In an environment in which rice prices alone have risen by more than 40 percent, economists say that the consequences of this economic slowdown on job creation and poverty reduction will be devastating. In a desperate bid to reverse this stagnation by re-energising the private sector, the government has been looking to form a 'truth commission', at which allegedly corrupt businessmen would be able to 'confess' and seek legal absolution. Whatever the providence of this undertaking – and it seems to be the only way to rescue the economy at this point – it too looks condemned to failure. The government has shown no consistency in the way in which it enforces the law, and businessmen are unlikely to respond to the call to come forward and confess. Meanwhile, ordinary Bangladeshis are seeing the commission as a crooked deal-making route between the incumbents and big business. All else aside, what has emerged as the greatest worry for this regime is its own lack of a viable exit strategy.

The current administration's legislative actions are beyond the ambit of legality, failing to satisfy even a generous interpretation of the constitutional provision for a neutral 'caretaker' regime. At some future point, every action that the current regime has taken could be deemed illegal and its architects culpable. That is, unless a two-thirds majority in the next Parliament amends the Constitution and ratifies these various interim legislations. This single compulsion has midwived the births of at least two 'king's parties' in the wake of extra-constitutional regimes of the past – namely, the BNP and the Jatiya Party of former dictator H M Ershad. Figures such as Ershad tended to transition to 'democracy', nominal or otherwise, by sponsoring a party that would come to power with a two-thirds majority in rigged elections, and grant the necessary ratifications. The push to find a safe exit strategy could now determine the political future of Bangladesh by the end of the year, as the recalcitrant BNP and Awami League look increasingly likely to seek reprisals against this regime if and when they return to power. Unfortunately for Fakhruddin Ahmed and his colleagues, their best laid plans to obliterate the two parties and usher in a new political epoch have failed.