Ground Realities

Politics cannot but be local

Syed Badrul Ahsan

THESE days you will hear much talk going around of why politics must not come into things local. The elections to the city corporations and municipalities were, we were duly informed, of the non-partisan and, therefore, non-political kind. That was because those who took part in them chose, or were compelled, to abjure their party loyalties as they sought office.

When you, therefore, reflect on whether it was, or is, a good thing asking politicians to cease being politicians if they are tempted to run for mayor or councillor, you might end up feeling that it might not be a bad thing after all if such individuals can really rise above the politics they have pursued over the years. You go back to Charles de Gaulle, who famously told a news conference in 1958, days after he had taken charge of France as a way of putting an end to the chaotic politics that had marred the quality of the state, that he was neither on the Right nor on the Left but above.

But that was De Gaulle. And even De Gaulle, as the French leader was to realise soon enough, needed politics to keep himself going. He fashioned the Fifth Republic and encouraged the growth of politics around his personality. Which is how you see all those right-of-centre French politicians today describing themselves as Gaullists. The point here is that you really cannot do without politics, not even at the local level. Recall the old American who once spoke of all politics being local? And that is the whole point.

Observe all these mayors who were elected to office a couple of weeks ago in Bangladesh. They may not have used their party symbols during the campaign; they may not have invoked their leaders while seeking popular electoral support. But it was obvious that they were men who actually (and naturally) identified with their political organisations. Khairuzzaman Liton will always be an Awami Leaguer, as Sadek Hossain Khoka will forever be associated with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

There is no point pretending that men and women who seek office at the local level are not loyal to parties. There is the brazen truth out there, after all: all these men and women have risen to prominence because of their parties. Why should they then be expected to turn their backs on those parties, to push away the ladder, as it were, once they have reached the top?

Perhaps questions of this sort have now begun to lead to new thinking within the Election Commission and indeed within the government. That is a reason why the upazilla elections may not be non-partisan after all. Before you go into any serious reflection on the issue, consider what happens in the rest of the world. In London a few months ago, it was the Conservative Boris Johnson who unseated Labourite Ken Livingstone and took charge as the new mayor. Note the operative terms here. It was a "Conservative" trouncing a "Labourite" rather than simply one individual demolishing another. In the United States, politics focuses, right from the local levels and all the way to the White House, on the policies pursued by the Republican and Democratic parties.

No one asks candidates for office to do away with their party affiliations, for a logical reason: no matter how often and how vociferously you proclaim your ascent from a parochial plane to a higher moral ground as you go for the bigger things of life, you know that somewhere in the core of your heart you uphold certain political principles. To you they constitute values and no matter how much you try, in the interest of the non-partisan, to push them aside even if momentarily, you cannot. That has been the reason why mayors and councillors all over the world (and that includes Bangladesh) have always been political beings.

And politics is important, for it is the one instrument with which you can do wonders, with which you can light up lives around you. That should have been the reality in Bangladesh, as it is the reality elsewhere. And yet we will not easily discard the thought that what has been passing for politics in this country over a number of years is but anti-politics at work. And, yes, many if not all the men who have been part of city corporations or municipalities or other local bodies have not lived up to public expectations, have indeed undermined the high calling of public duty through their overzealous work in their own and in their parties' favour. They and theirs have been aberrations, grievous ones, that have led us to this pass.

Beyond them, it has been our members of parliament who, in more instances than one, have spectacularly failed to take an objective view of social conditions once they were elected. But that is what you get in a country where even prime ministers cannot quite bring themselves to overcome their parties and their politics. It is, as you might suggest, a mediocre age all around the world, which is why there are not many men or women around who could be defined as national figures or as politicians who have risen to being symbols of a higher national purpose. Nicolas Sarkozy must prove, more than a year after his election as president of France, that he speaks for all Frenchmen and women. Barack Obama and John McCain will remain, until they do a miracle or reinvent themselves, symbolic of the parties that have pitted them against each other in the battle for the White House.

That is all very true. But what makes Bangladesh's political circle different from those outside it is that they generally have remained confined to the parameters of a narrow pond. Mayors and councillors and ward commissioners have demonstrated conclusively over the years that it is always the party that matters. Their offices (and it does not really matter what political ideology they have upheld) have been crammed with their followers (and their goons!); their rivals or adversaries, in the opposition, have not mattered. And, of course, corruption has gone on. That has passed for politics. It has been anything but politics.

Which is why politics needs to be restored in all our local institutions, as it must be restored at the national level. Just as it is risky business to keep parliament vacant for months on end, it becomes positively inflammable to decree that local bodies operate without a political base. Politics is power exercised in the enlightened interest of the larger social community. You take it out of life lived at the grassroots -- you might as well suggest that life and all the good it implies come to a dead end.




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