Is Bangladesh heading towards becoming a popular autocracy?
Ali Riaz, head of the Constitution Reform Commission (CRC), has publicly revealed that he and his colleagues had examined 121 national constitutions in coming up with recommendations to democratise the constitution. Unsurprisingly, the proposed recommendations seem almost exclusively inspired by an ethos rooted in the idea of representative democracy practised by liberal democracies today, and not in the much older concept of direct democracy once employed by the people of Classical Athens. But was it the correct choice?
Consider how some of the liberal democracies are in an era of crisis. Their strong democratic institutions and systems of checks and balances seem inadequate in stemming the rising tide of authoritarianism. The American model of representative democracy, which shapes the ways democracy is understood and practised, which has left a veritable impression on democratic constitutions worldwide – a model that the United States actively promotes and sometimes foists upon others using military means – proved inadequate to thwart a second Trump presidency, thus jeopardising the future of a once stable and enduring political system. Instead of signalling the end of history, liberal democracy seems to have reached its own limits.
Liberal democracy in the US
In a way, such a development was inevitable, for despite being celebrated as a democratic achievement, by limiting the potential for more participatory forms of governance, the US Constitution represents an ideological victory against democracy. The key shift happened when the New Jersey Plan, which proposed a more decentralised confederation, was rejected in favour of the Virginia Plan. The classical notion of direct participation was superseded by a system where representatives were seen as authorised agents rather than direct delegates of the people. A large, centralised state was formed, making it difficult to envision or implement more participatory forms of democracy.
The ideology that facilitated this triumph was none other than liberalism – or, more specifically, liberal capitalism – which has always stood in a fraught relationship with democracy. After the arrival of the modern state and capitalism in the 18th century, liberalism joined democracy in an unequal partnership where liberalism both shapes its contours and sets limits on its practice.
In terms of how democracy is conceptualised, this meant a radical departure from the classical understanding of democracy. No longer rooted in its founding principle of “rule by the demos” – a balance of power between rich and poor – that defined Athenian democracy, under this new arrangement, democracy found its origins in “lords exercising their freedom”, i.e. European feudal lords and propertied classes seeking to protect their aristocratic privileges from the encroachment of both absolute monarchs and the rebellious multitudes. Constitutional principles such as limited government, civil liberties, and separation of powers were born out of this power struggle, which are considered today the defining features of any modern liberal democracy.
In terms of how democracy is practised, as first pointed out by Marx, a sharp conceptual distinction between the economic and the political was introduced ex nihilo. In practical terms, this meant that economic domination and exploitation, which are intrinsically political issues and mobilised political struggles in the past, were emptied of their political contents and transformed into mere economic matters. Meanwhile, the apostles of the free market made sure that political power would not intrude upon the economic sphere, enabling the perpetuation of labour exploitation by effectively foreclosing the scope of any democratic oversight.
Political power that was once employed to resist class domination was privatised and transferred to the economic arena. For politicians, political struggle amounted to no more than the competition for the control of state power. Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, could wage it only for the recognition or valorisation of particular group identities except for class. Allowing the principal mode of capitalist exploitation to remain undisturbed meant that rights to citizenship, racial equality and voting rights were essentially devalued before they were awarded to the propertyless working class, women, and people of colour.
With such a devalued currency of formal political equality, people subject to wage slavery and material inequality cannot afford democratic redress, as these concerns remain outside the purview of political oversight. Egged on by right-wing media, the resulting material grievances are consequently vented not against billionaires, but immigrants, refugees and religious, ethnic and sexual minorities. They are identified as the source of the malaises that plague society, and restrictions on their fundamental human rights are demanded. And it is by demonising these groups and promising retribution against them that demagogues like Trump and Modi have shot to power.
It transpires that even liberal democracy, with all its institutional safeguards against authoritarianism, has feet of clay. Its inability to address the structural injustices produced by the market economy means that liberal democracy is incapable of dealing with the two greatest challenges humanity faces today: rising inequality and climate crisis. Both are fuelled by the relentless drive for capital accumulation, forcing people to seek solutions in populist nostrums.
Revising Bangladesh’s constitution
Rehashing the constitutional safeguards of liberal democracy in the revised constitution may safeguard against an almost universally despised autocrat like Hasina. But it will prove inadequate should a demagogue with a popular support base enter the electoral fray. Because Bangladesh, too, faces the same economic and environmental challenges, perhaps even of a greater magnitude. In formulating its recommendations, the CRC failed to take this possibility into account.
Consider the Commission’s recommendation that five seats of the legislature’s upper house will be filled by party-unaffiliated ordinary citizens nominated by the President. Does such paltry representation, and that too in a chamber not allowed to propose laws, amount to more than a token representation? With such a minuscule presence, citizen representatives seem hardly equipped to make any positive impact, given the majority will remain party-affiliated. It is unlikely that political parties will nominate candidates in the upper house who will refuse to toe the party line. This would make the votes of citizen representatives irrelevant. Nor is there any guarantee that they will not be co-opted. If citizen representatives cannot make any meaningful difference, what is the whole point of having a bicameral legislature?
However, it is not beyond the range of possibilities to make the upper house an effective counterweight against the lower house and a bulwark against authoritarianism. The Commission members only had to expand their horizons, and be bold in their initiative. Instead of blindly following the Anglo-American model of representative democracy, they could have sought inspiration from its Athenian counterpart.
In particular, they could have looked into the reforms introduced by Solon and Cleisthenes that democratised Athens by granting its peasant population the right to have a say in the affairs of the state through a popular assembly. Thanks to these reforms, citizens interacted with one another not as rulers and subjects but as individuals and classes, as producers and landlords, limiting thus the scope for economic exploitation. Or, if Athenian democracy seems temporally too remote, they could have consulted the burgeoning scholarly field of democratic self-defence informed by its classical model.
Following the Athenian model, the upper house could be populated entirely by ordinary citizens selected by lot. Unlike their colleagues in the lower chamber, these citizen representatives would act as direct delegates of the constituents they represent. Thus, as a mixture of representative and direct democracy, the legislature will help establish democratic oversight and accountability, and citizens will have the primary responsibility of defending democracy.
Those who find all this rather utopian fail to recognise the possibilities presented when a system is upended, if not thoroughly rejected. Nevertheless, this may be seen as being informed by unnecessary alarmism, and may respond by arguing that it seems nigh impossible that a popular demagogue will suddenly appear, let alone get elected immediately after a mass uprising. While it is true that it is unlikely we will see people electing a despot in the next election, it is if and when those elected to the parliament fail to deliver as representatives of the ruling and opposition parties that we may see the rise of a demagogue from the fringes who will either start a new political movement or parasitise one of the political parties.
The road to a popular autocracy
The portents are already palpable. Bangladeshi social media demagogues, under the guise of journalists and influencers, are outstripping mainstream media and political leaders in terms of online engagement; their smear campaign against some of the interim government advisers has turned so vicious as to prompt the government to add an absurd provision on cyberbullying to the proposed Cyber Protection Ordinance (CPO), before it was dropped under public backlash. These demagogues have, meanwhile, identified a new target: the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the likeliest winner of the next general election.
Those who believe in popular sovereignty but reject majoritarianism must take note. Unlike Hasina, future autocrats will be popular, and will win elections fair and square. They will attempt to retain power by championing a majoritarian cause that helps them seize power, and will divide the nation to the extent that mounting a unified front against autocracy will no longer be as easy as it was with the Hasina regime. They will demonise minorities and, à la Narendra Modi, foment ethnic and religious violence to draw attention away from their shortcomings. They will rig elections strategically to increase their margin of victory to a level where opposition voices in parliament are rendered irrelevant. Constitutional safeguards may also turn ineffective because when push comes to shove, vox populi always triumphs over any constitution.
The proposed constitutional reforms are aimed at establishing fair competition among political parties vying for state power, but fall short in terms of contributing to the political empowerment of ordinary Bangladeshis. Without a citizen-led democratic oversight body, Bangladesh may end up falling into the thraldom of another variety of authoritarianism. To avert this danger and ensure their continued political survival, politicians aiming for power should welcome citizens to oversee the state’s democratic self-defence. The BNP must bring political maturity to the table, the student leaders must grow out of their Mazharite delusions, and the religious right must put an end to its polarising politics. Tempus fugit!●
Siddhartha Dhar is a political scholar and commentator.