DHAKA: A new subject has appeared to be taking hold of the public imagination. The question of whether or not Bangladesh is a failed state these days exercises the minds of a lot of people across the spectrum.
Seminars are beginning to be organized around the theme and politicians appear all too willing to deliver their judgment on it. And, of course, in the media, there are columnists and others who clearly have been falling over one another to tackle the issue in all the seriousness they can muster.
That is natural, given that in recent weeks the kind of violence which has rocked the country has left people wondering about the way the state is going. When you add to that the alacrity with which people from Interpol and the FBI have been making their way to Bangladesh as part of the investigations into the tragedy of August 21, you will perhaps realize that the overall weakening of the law and order mechanism in the country may have been considered a sign of the weakening of the state itself.
Finally, with the much publicized trip of US counter-terrorism expert J. Cofer Black to Dhaka has come the clinching argument, for a lot of people, about Bangladesh being really in the pit.
Our argument, one that we believe is based on objective reality, is that Bangladesh is not a failed state. There are particular characteristics which generally underpin countries that become dysfunctional.
Among these are an overall collapse of the established political process, a breakdown in security and a general proliferation of anarchy. You will have reason to notice that none of these characteristics (though law and order has become a matter of intense worry) has so far come to define the state of Bangladesh.
In other words, what has happened in a few countries in the past few years, such as Somalia or Afghanistan, has not happened here. The good thing is that those characteristics appear to be far removed from the political troubles we have been encountering here for the last many years.
Our politics is yet thriving and even if you are inclined toward partisanship here, you cannot fail to make note of the verve and spontaneity which have kept politics going.
The business community is worried about security, as which of us is not? Even so, business has gone on and so have other institutions such as schools, colleges and universities, with of course their fair share of problems.
In essence, therefore, we present the argument that ours is not a failed state, that it shows no signs of turning into one, that indeed the state has kept itself well-positioned despite the tumultuous nature of national politics.
Does that mean that everything is in place, that there is little need to worry? Far from it. There are things that have been going badly wrong; and out of all those happenings has come a spiralling effect on everything else in the country.
Politics, in the way it is supposed to operate in a democracy, has simply not been there largely because of the inability or reluctance or both of the major political parties to work with one another. The principles which generally define the workings of a parliamentary system are yet to take deep roots. And therein lie the problems.
Our predicament, then, is not in the failure of the state. It is in the bad health which politics has generally been afflicted with. And yet our political classes must remain aware of the dangers that may arise when politics keeps taking a battering, for such relentless battering in the end undermines the foundations of the state. -By arrangement with New Age /Dhaka