By Bangladesh Chronicle staff
Effective democracies do not emerge overnight. With 40 years of democratic elections punctuated by few dictatorial governments, Bangladesh has to configure how to steer their country forward. This should come from he people and not from a few people who steer the respective parties. The concern is that only two parties run the country and we have to keep in mind how we can evolve democracy from within this these parties first and try to see what steps to take next.
Democratization is a process, not an event, and can take several generations. At different stages, it may require different electoral systems as may suit the public. It should always be done with a wider public consensus and acceptance by the intelligentsia. The lure of ill gotten money has to be out of this system. Otherwise, Bangladesh will not be able to get to the destination effectively.
Public representations prerequisites as parties with clear ideological profiles, well-defined platforms, and democratic internal-governance rules. An emerging democracy, by contrast, might be better off with a system that is more flexible and hence more likely to aid the development of democratic attitudes and the emergence of fully democratic parties.
In Bangladesh, each voter is primarily choosing a party, with seats in the legislature awarded to parties based on their respective vote shares. Party representatives owe their main allegiance to party leaders rather than voters and tend to stick together even if their party chief is steering things in a wrong direction. It is evident in the Bangladesh parliament today. Each member is always looking at their party chief for direction. They are afraid to use creativity in presentation of their ideas. Therefore, parliament has become stagnant and devoid of any new directions. Some people will go even further by accusing the parliament being dysfunctional.
The democratic assumptions underlying public representation are that all people will be represented in government through their respective parties, and that party members will share common ideas about most local and national issues. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh parties are dysfunctional in that their internal mechanism is dictatorial. When parties are dysfunctional or lack internal democracy or fail to faithfully represent their constituents’ interests for some other reason, the quality of representation in public representation systems can sink very low. This, in turn, brings a danger that ordinary citizens will become disillusioned with democracy as is the present case inBangladesh.
The only established parties in Bangladesh are the previous (undemocratic) ruling parties namely the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Both parties lack clear ideologies (the exception being the Islamist parties) or policy positions, have been the only players in the field. A big drawback in Bangladeshis that representative accountability is primarily upward to party leaders rather than downward to constituents. Because party leaders decide which candidates to put on the party’s list in each district, representatives owe their position to the party leadership rather than their own constituents.
The successive governments have been unable to pass the administrative functions to the local regions as they keep monetary functions embedded in the members of the parliament rather than with the local representatives. It has greatly undermined the effectiveness of the parliament members as they are too busy performing infra-structure tasks rather then performing legislative functions in the parliament. They should bring legitimate issues to the parliament and have a lively discussion and implementations of laws and other objectives. It is alarming that the parliament is scantily attended by the members as they are too busy in their districts to do publicly visible tasks to assure their successive winning the seat in the parliament. That has greatly impaired development in the rural and local areas both in administrative and judicial tasks as well as real developmental work (not the sham one’s).
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