Nazmul Sultan
“Each time an event unfolds or erupts hope and anxiety accompany it, in different ways and to different degrees during each event. And many initially outside its compass are rapidly moved to intervene, in attempts to support it, to redirect it, or to squelch it. An event starts out of apparent uncertainty and foments a wider band of uncertainties as it expands and morphs. Events emit contagious and infectious energies. Sometimes democracy or dictatorship hangs in the balance. Or the creation of a new right, faith or identity. Or the denial of one or more of those.”[1]
ERUPTION OF AN EVENT
What has now been named as the Shahbag Movement was not an expected event. This is not due to the lack of historical conditions of possibility or for the absence of a popular base. Having held state power with a popular mandate to prosecute war criminals, the Awami League (AL) appropriated the political narrative that demanded trial of war criminals. This issue of war criminals’ trial became a deux ex machina for the AL’s political operation: finding the conspiracy to halt it in every oppositional gesture to the regime.[2] Parroting their support for a “proper” trial, the opposition parties accused the AL of politicising the issue, while they continued to be in political alliance with the party that contains most, if not all, war criminals. After almost three years of the trial process, the tribunal declared its verdict: death-sentence for a war-criminal-turned- televangelist. Since the convicted does not belong to any political party (and his was a trial in absentia, as he fled the country before he was charged), it was politically safe for the tribunal (and for the government) to hand him a death sentence. However, for the crimes of an even greater magnitude, the current assistant secretary-general of Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Quader Mollah, popularly known as the butcher of Mirpur, received life-sentence[3]. What had become apparent by then was that either the AL-led regime had succumbed to the vandalising show of strength by the party of war criminals (Jamaat-Shibir) or that it had reached a backroom deal with the Jamaat. Few had suspected this verdict would spark a fire, although it was predicted the verdict would leave people disaffected. Even when a handful of “online activists” gathered in Shahbag to protest against what they deemed a negotiated and unjust sentence, few had imagined it would swell into the gigantic mass that it is now. What is crucial here – and what I believe to be the defining element of the evental nature of the movement – is its ability to draw distance from the state-appropriation of the Bangladesh liberation war and the attendant trial of war criminals. This act of drawing distance from the hegemonic power and its satellites, I would argue, is behind the popular kernel of the movement, even as the movement is still led by people sympathetic to the regime. This not only provided a public-political legitimacy to the movement, but also placed the movement in a greater context than the single-issue movement that it might appear to be.
The “singular” demand for the highest punishment for war criminals expanded itself around the call for boycott of and resistance to the Islamist party (and its large financial network) that assisted and participated with the Pakistani military in the genocide of 1971. Apart from the legitimate demand for justice against the worst form of crime, what is significant about the demand raised by this movement is that it sits outside of the political projections of both the political and civil society. This feature of the movement does not solely reside in the declarative aspect of the demand (i.e. hang the war criminals); it rather lies in the performative signification of the demand in the relational context of Bangladeshi politics. While the apparently pro-movement regime seeks to align the demand for the trial of war criminals with its otherwise corrupt and anti-workers’ political logic, the movement, by virtue of its performative externality from the state, clearly expresses the non-congruence between the partisanisation of the issue by the AL-led regime and the popular significance of the issue. This popular significance is clearly distinct and even oppositional to the regime’s politics insofar as the AL’s appropriation of the nationalist discourse is challenged by the coming to the fore of an otherwise apolitical new middle-class youth. The main opposition party – Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) – has found itself at the margins while trying to respond to the movement. After tagging it as a government-orchestrated drama in order to distract people’s attention from the BNP’s movement for reinstating the caretaker government during the upcoming national election, they have been forced to identify the difference between this popular movement and protests sponsored by the AL government. Thirdly, the representatives of civil society, vacillating between their fear of an “ochlocracy” and the extra-institutional assertion of popular sovereignty, are maintaining an ambiguous relationship with the movement. While all these constituents of the “integral state” support the movement in varying degrees, the movement itself has remained at a distance from their respectively distinct political orientations. Owing to the symbolic distance that the Shahbag movement has drawn between the people and the integral state, the movement quickly became one of the most remarkable popular movements of Bangladesh after the anti-dictatorship protest in the 1980s and the student uprising against the military-backed regime in 2007. If there is any evental significance to this movement it, to repeat an earlier point, lies precisely in this act of drawing distance from the integral state. This is not to say that this movement has given itself a solid basis and has overcome the uncertainty that still surrounds its future. The uncertainty primarily emanates from the volatile relationship of the movement to the new ground that it itself has, meanwhile, generated. Although this movement is inextricably tied up with the political demand that it is putting forward, its political significance is something more than that single-issue mobilisation. As I will try to show, this movement might have been a culmination of the long-process of refounding the national within the Bangladeshi political horizon.
REFOUNDING THE NATIONAL
“[A]n absolute, namely with a truth that needs no agreement since, because of its self-evidence, it compels without argumentative demonstration or political persuasion. By virtue of being self- evident, these truths are pre-rational – they inform reason but are not its product….”[4]
Mapping the Shahbag Movement
The story of the bloody birth of Bangladesh is well-known to South Asian readers.
The event of 1971 inaugurated a new political horizon – limning out the line between tradition and historical becoming, it gave expression to a specific way of national-political life that bases itself on a continual renewal and reliving of the cultural-historical “essence” of the perceived community. Concomitantly, it sets up an indeterminate, but bordered, way of political interpretation, signification and, ultimately, the process of meaning-production. Of course, this mode of political life was specific to the urban middle class; the militarised state (at least, since 1975), while operated within the political trajectory of the national, maintained a dubious distance from it. Historically, the AL claimed to be caretaker of that new political reality under the name of Bengali nationalism. Their negotiated form of Bengali nationalism, which is a specific way of accessing the national, was soon ousted from state-power. During the long period of military regime, state-politics fluctuated from anti-political militarism to the emergent developmental discourse (from 1980s on). That, however, did not amount to a flight away from the foundational plane that emerged through the liberation war. Despite jettisoning the Bengali nationalist ideologies, the ground of “the national” remained unchallenged, although its lack of influence upon the state contributed towards its gradual erosion. The dominance of developmentality, and its attendant discourses, perhaps helped the process of the decadence of the national. To put it briefly, the national had been losing its networking factor. However, this scenario began to change from the early 2000s. The national seems to have acquired unprecedented networking power. And that is on account of the new spatiotemporal configuration of Bangladeshi society effected through a new wave of capitalisation. From a more explicit sociological perspective, this rejuvenation of the national imagination could be discerned from the popularisation of certain festivals,social movements for preaching the “correct” history of the Liberation war and so on. This re-enchanted expression of the national does have a mooring, which is the event of 1971. The evental presence of “1971” works as a marker of certainty, as it lays out the concepts of political antagonism (for and against 1971), subject and non-subject (freedom fighters and collaborators/Razakars), the narrative of political origin and the promised destination, and so on. If the national is being presented as an ontological horizon, the evental presence of the liberation war of 1971 contributes toward more actualised drawing of political lines.
In other words, the narrative of 1971 operates as a self-evident source of political legitimacy. This is thus an absolute which grounds – rather than being grounded in – the political. The political essence and configuration of the Liberation war – polarised between the Muktijoddha (the true subject) and the Razakar (the permanent heterogeneity, which I would term as the constitutive other of the national) – makes it clear. Insofar as that absolute is an authority, it is necessary for the political discourses internal to it to derive their legitimacy from its ground. In the last decade, nothing perturbed the existential state of an entire generation of Bangladeshi people as much as the national flag bearing images of two well-known war criminals-turned-ministers. The ontological horizon of the national got disrupted with the intrusion of what it took to be its constitutive other. Since the middle of the last decade, the renewed demand for the trial of war criminals began to gain ground. That discontent was most vigorously manifest in the Bangladeshi blogosphere, where self-employed activists for the demand of the trial and its attendant issues launched a vigorous effort to identify and denounce those who may contain the remnant of “Razakar-ness”. A campaign that at times resembles witch-hunts. It was thus appropriate that the first spark of the Shahbag movement would be the human chain of those bloggers.
Instead of simply seeking to resolve the lingering question of history, this movement is arguably accomplishing something more than that: it is re-founding what we earlier termed the national. The national, of course, never left Bangladeshis. Since the Jamaatis have held state-power and have some public support, they often claim to be equally naturalised and the term Razakar no longer exists. While the members of Jamaat may win seats in national election and get one or two ministerial posts, the symbolic form of the term Razakar remains an outsider. This thus does not make the symbolic form of the Razakar integral to “the national”. The Jamaatis’ argument is something like this: their political opponents construe them as outsider or Razakar, while they do not actually fit the term. By arguing so, they speak in the terms of the very language that seeks to banish them from the ground of the countable (or the legitimate). The empty place of Razakar, the constitutive other, remains intact even when the signified Razakars come to share state power. The Razakars are those who can neither be absolutely excluded from the national (for the national needs the other to demarcate itself), nor can they be counted as an inclusive category of the national.
By mobilising the demand for excluding the Razakars from the legitimate space of politics, the Shahbag movement is not only seeking to resolve a historical question, but also performing the re-foundation of the national – i.e. it is tantamount to a call for re-asserting the absolute that is the national. The desire to negate that which denies the self-evident reality of the national accomplishes more than provisionally clarifying the unfinished assertion of the foundation. Without this recurrent negation of the other – that is the Razakar – the national cannot lay a positive foundation for itself. This negation, in other words, is a positive negation. The re-foundation is neither a return nor a plain continuation of the foundation. This is a renewal that seeks to re-assert the foundation, but the renewal takes place at a distinct point of conjuncture, and thus open to political prospects and pitfalls that often overflow the logical form of the idealised foundation.
The reclaiming of the slogan Joy Bangla (“victory to Bengal”) – the slogan that unified freedom fighters of distinct ideological persuasions during 1971 – is one of the more revealing instances of the movement. After Independence, this slogan was appropriated by the Awami League, becoming as it does the signal word of the party. The Shahbag movement, despite its conscious efforts to maintain distance from the AL, chose to reclaim the slogan – a risky move that reflected the desire to form a unitarian ground by re-evoking the code-word of the Liberation war. Indeed, as some participants of the movement have phrased it clearly, what they want is that no political tendency be allowed to deny the absolute that is the national.
Constructing the people:
If there is anything paradoxical about the popular character of the Shahbag movement, it lies in the way it constructs the people. While most emancipatory or populist movements construct the people in opposition to the state, the Shahbag movement seems to be doing so by internally dividing the people, while its relationality with the state is still non-antagonistic. Being distanced from the state, the movement is seeking to decide the normative political ground of the community – the act of constructing the people, as it were, concerns the desire to determine the political. Does that mean this movement is seeking to ground the political in an ethnic or an identitarian ground? I differ from such an interpretation. The distinctive feature of ethno-populism, to quote Laclau, is that it attempts to “establish…the limits of the community…there is no plebs claiming to populus, because plebs and populus precisely overlap…. The ‘other’ opposed is external, not internal, to the community.”[5] The Shahbag movement is constructing the people in terms of fidelity to the 1971 Liberation war. While that fidelity is being located in the continuity of tradition, the pre-existing populus does not work as a determining factor, rather it is the political fidelity to the “spirit” of the Liberation war that is at stake. Nor is the “other” (i.e. Razakars) absolutely externalised. This externalisation takes place internally – while the symbolic place of the Razakar is otherised, it works internally to normatively differentiate the people.
The Shahbag movement, regardless of its appearance, is anything but a movement delimited within the traditional trajectory of single-issue movement. It is a popular movement proper, one that, by way of returning to the founding instance of the national, goes so far as to re-construct the concept of the people. Bangladesh experienced an intense experience of national liberation movement, which was of course part of the global wave of anti-colonial movements. In the Bangladeshi specificity of that historicity (not unlike many other third world nation-states), the fiction of social contract theory (i.e., that there is a conscious transference of sovereignty from the individual citizens to the sovereign state) does not shed much light on the political landscape. The primacy of people over the colonial ruler conditioned and provided political legitimacy to historical struggles, and this way of locating the source of legitimacy did not fizzle out even after the Independence. One way of explaining the routine uprising against oppressive regimes in Bangladesh is to analyse how the intimate identity between the “people” and sovereignty makes the state often an illegitimate agency. Once the crowd occupies the street (the political space proper in Bangladesh) and claims itself to be the people who own sovereignty, the ruling regimes, in trying to contest them in terms of legitimacy if not in terms of brute force, crumble. The Shahbag movement is taking place precisely in the continuum of that historical sequence of political struggles. This is a movement that explicitly claims to define the people who can legitimately lay claim to sovereignty. Now let us specify the form in which the movement is tending towards conceptualising the people. This is not an easy task to settle upon, since this approach to the people is neither taking place in the general equation of people-against-the-state, nor is it locatable in a palpable concern of pre-existing social antagonism.
One way of approaching the question is the articulation of political demand, since it brings forth the category of “demanding” people. The explicit demand of the movement is clear and simple: the government should ensure everything so that the death sentences are given to known war criminals. The energetic chanting for death sentence led many westerners to compare the protest with a lynch mob (see footnote for an explanation of why such an interpretation is mistaken).[6] This is a political demand rather than a pre-political expression of anger. The movement performatively expresses the political desire to negate the specific politics of the Jamaat-Shibir, which is more than sheer rage against a handful of war criminals.
If that is a popular movement with a popular demand, the question then is how does it relate with other political demands of the existing political agencies? Does it play a symbolic role in combining other demands around itself? I think what this movement does is neither subsume other political demands nor does embody an all-embracing popular demand. Instead, it posits an order of demand, where the political mobilisation against war criminals is seen as a priority without which no other political demand can be expressed. The “essence” of the perceived (legitimate) people, so to say, relates with the very ordering of the demand, rather than solely with the demand itself.
Generally speaking, this movement construes the people in terms of their fidelity to the Liberation war, but that fidelity strictly pertains to the level of recognition and acceptance of the event and its accompanied political configurations. This is not an identitarian or ethnically-oriented movement insofar as the lines of politics are drawn around the political configuration of the Liberation war that I previously laid out.
This conceptualisation of the people, by way of asserting distance from the permanent heterogeneity that is the Razakars, presupposes a deeper unity of those who maintain fidelity to the event. As such, this concept of people is not able to reckon with the internal division and difference that may override the sense of unity. Also, insofar as the act of maintaining fidelity to the event of Liberation war requires a participation (or organic expression) in a certain way of political life, it means that a large chunk of the population (especially, garments workers, informal sector workers, if not the peasants whose “organic” way of life may automatically present their fidelity) remains de facto externalised to the imagined people. In fact, the most noticeable absence in the Shahbag movement was that of Dhaka’s industrial workers, doubtless the most militant political agents in contemporary Bangladesh.
Limits and Prospects:
Ever since the movement has surfaced, some critics of this movement have been reiterating the accusation that this populist movement entails fascistic aspirations. The specificity of the target of this movement – i.e., Razakars and their party – prompts those critics to identify the desire to annihilate a certain political tendency. Some even go further, claiming that this movement entails opposition to Islam – i.e., it is the deployment of extreme instrumentalist secularism against the adherents of Islamism. At the primary level, such critiques are informed by a mechanical understanding of mass psychology, as if any mass movement that expresses opposition against apparently non-statal agents are in some way connected to fascism. While this movement does dovetail opposition against the primacy of religion over the national, this movement is far from aiming to radically reconfigure society so as to pose the risk of fascistic development. Additionally, the party that this movement opposes is something already more akin to fascistic tendencies, not least in their institutionalisation of terrorism and communalism as a political strategy. The neoliberal form of governance incorporates the exception (which one may ascribe to fascism) in its normal procedure. The routinisation of extra-judicial killing – primarily targeting the Maoist radicals, but also other criminals (which provides popular support to the practice) – is an apt case in point. Nor would it be appropriate to put it under the received discourse of secular Bangladesh against Islamic Bangladesh.[7] This movement does not in any way pose challenge to the cultural and political imbrication between religion and politics.
The widening gap between the Bangladesh state and the principles and promise in the name of which the state was founded has made the political apparatus of Bangladesh deeply undemocratic. While political sovereignty oscillates between the street and the state, the lack of their interconnection other than in moments of contest owes to the absence of the political substantiation of otherwise popular movements. If there is any single virtue of the current movement, it lies precisely in registering that there can be a people that stand outside of the integral state, providing basis to their demands and expectations. What is also clear is that Bangladesh’s existence as a political community is still under the shadow of the event that founded it, and no politics can define itself without negotiating with it. Furthermore, the act of re-founding the national – an act which is fraught with multiple possibilities – has opened up the possibility to intervene and mobilise popular-democratic demands. Given the absence of popular politics outside of the state and its integral parties, this is a profoundly important development for the future of Bangladeshi politics.
This movement of re-founding the national, as I have argued so far, operates within considerable historical limits, not least is the limit that is constitutive of the national. Nationalist political discourses, needless to say, are constitutionally delimited within the idea of horizontal unity that non-antagonistically co-exists with vertical inequality (e.g. class relations). The normative way of defining the people, while not ethnicity-oriented, still seeks to pre-determine the ontological horizon of the political. The Bangladeshi left, by and large, has embraced the movement, and that is a justified political move (and this is not surprising either, for the Bangladeshi left has historically emerged through the nationalist experience). Nevertheless, those who are seeking to intervene and radicalise the movement should remain aware of this constitutive limit. What is, however, clear is that no politics, howsoever novel, can readily step outside of the political horizon which has been named here as the national. Even the politics of transcending the national, if there ever be any, will have to work internally, and not from an Archimedean point of leverage.
Notes:
[1] William Connolly, “The Politics of the Event” April 3, 2011, http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2011/04/politics-of-event.html
[2] The most poignant specimen of that practice is probably the government’s claim that a veteran left-wing leader of the readymade garment workers’ movement, Moshrefa Mishu, has secretly conspired with the Jamaat-e-Islami. The only evidence that they could present was that she chatted with a fellow prisoner in a prison van, who also happened to belong to the Jamaat!
[4] Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin Classics, 1965 (192).
[5] Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. Verso Books, 2005 (192).
[6] The demand for death sentence is a combination of several elements. First, it is being regarded as the expression of highest condemnation of their crime. To not come up with such a sentence is popularly seen as a failure to recognise the severity of their crimes (this is independent of the justified ethical objection to death penalty as such). Secondly, the leniency in the case of Quader Mollah has convinced people that it is either an outcome of Jamaat’s political threatening or reconciliation between the regime and the Jamaat. Thirdly, the volatile nature of state power means the criminals will walk once the regime changes. The combination of all these factors placed the demand of death-sentence at the centre of the movement. Given the de facto heteronomy of the juridical-procedural system, the movement initially began as a countervailing political force to the Jamaat’s threat of destabilising the nation if their leaders are sentenced. In addition, this is a movement for a particular kind of founding injustice, not a hysterical expression of mob anger. Nor is it a movement purely with the desire to force the juridical agency to follow public opinion, for the juridical is reflected in its displacement in the political. Even though the movement seeks to ensure a juridical solution, its primary significance is political.
[7] This article is an exemplar of such simplistic misinterpretations: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/bagladeshi-protests-reflected-londons-east-end?INTCMP=SRCH
Radical Notes 
Theorising the Present Political Crisis in Bangladesh
Predictably enough, with the arrival of the scheduled parliamentary elections, Bangladesh has once again become entangled in a rather inextricable political crisis. The recently held national parliamentary elections—boycotted by the major opposition parties—is only a prelude to further political contestation over the occupation of state power. The crisis is structural and constitutive of the political system— the moral bankruptcy and the lack of will that the concerned political parties show is not the cause, but rather the effect, of the structural conflict. Elections—that is, the process through which the occupier of the centre of explicit political power is periodically shifted—take place amid chaos and unrest across the world. The procedural concern regarding elections might be a problem in its own right, but this is not the fundamental source of the present crisis in Bangladesh. The crux of the problem lies in the irresolvable contradiction constitutive of the distribution of explicit political power in Bangladesh. What is at stake is not simply the dysfunctionality of institutions such as the election commission, nor is it primarily a conflict between the two political parties over the occupation of power. To be sure, the power struggle between the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is the occasion that triggers the crisis. However, the fundamental source of the crisis, as I will seek to show in this article, lies in the conflictual instability over the very distribution of political power, involving the political society, civil society, military apparatus and, not so obviously, the people.
Elections and the Suspension of Power
Let us start with a plain narration of the crisis at stake. Apparently, the crisis is about the failure of the two parties to reach an agreement regarding the procedural arrangement of national parliamentary politics. The terms of procedural arrangement concerns this central register of dispute: the suspension of political power of the elected ruling party. The provisional Non-party Caretaker Government — once orchestrated as an apparently innovative solution to this crisis — is no longer a viable option for the political society. The legally-sanctioned arrangement of the caretaker government required the elected ruling party to suspend its power three months prior to election so that the non-party provisional government could oversee the electoral process. Although the chief of the provisional government was required to be chosen from among retired Supreme Court chief justices, the advisers were chosen from the recommended candidates by the political parties. As a result, the political society collectively retained control over the provisional government. Despite the presence of the non-party provisional government, the pre-election period had always been marked by political confrontation between the major parties. The contention over the appointment of the Chief Adviser of the provisional government in 2006 ended up in a political stalemate and resulted in a quasi-military coup that installed another Caretaker Government for the next couple of years. The coming together of the civil society actors and the military to occupy the place of governmental power added a twist to the preceding contestation that was limited to being one between the political and civil societies. Heavily persecuted by the military-backed regime, both the major political parties share a common opposition against the extra-political-society agents. So now, while the BNP demands that a national government be installed prior to the election, the AL dismisses the demand by claiming that the non-partisan provisional government would pave the way for the intrusion of non-political actors (a not-so-hidden reference to the civil society) in the sphere of political power.
The explicit political power – at its institutionalised locus — is disproportionately concentrated in the ruling regime. The power of the ruling regime appears to be an almost permanent prerogative. The ruling regime holds sway over almost all the central registers of political power, perhaps with the exception of the civil society. In most cases, the ruling regime is also able to secure its political control over the military, a force whose relative autonomy nevertheless remains fairly obvious. The concentration of power is generally explained by the lack of functionality of the institutions. The lack of will among politicians to allow institutions to function autonomously is then singled out as the source of the problem. The lack of autonomous procedurality in the political institutions is, of course, apparent. However, to delimit the problem to the moral lack of the politicians is to overlook the underlying logic that generates the concentration of power. Although, as I remarked earlier, there is a “conflictual instability” in the distribution of power, this instability should not be conflated with disequilibrium. Often in the form of parallelism with the supposedly “ideal types” of democracy in the West, the political arrangement of non-western countries is theorised as the lack of equilibrium among institutions. Such an understanding of our political horizon misses the presence of a distinct organism that cannot readily be understood in terms of western political models. The arrangement of power is unstable, but this instability forms an equilibrium of its own. Regardless of the impression that the facticity of political institutions provide, political power is not an unmoored force reproduced by the monopoly over violence. The question of legitimacy is crucial here. This is so not only because of its justification of the relationship of domination (as pointed out by Weber), but also because of the production of political power through the contesting process of legitimation. There is a gap that separates the claim of popular sovereignty from the institutions. In the putatively universal mode of modern democracy’s self-description, the constitutions of the post-colonial nation-states state that the people are the sovereign, and they transfer that sovereignty to the elected regime through periodic elections. In other words, the elected government and the political institutions claim to represent the people. This normative account is inadequate in understanding the disseminated form of political sovereignty, as it misses how the claims of sovereignty remain more volatile, contingent and tied up with the staging of the extra-institutional people.
In the case of Bangladesh, the foundation of the present political order was laid by the event of 1971. The political horizon of “the national” conditions the form of political legitimacy and draws the spectrum of partisanship. The dominant form of legitimacy that exists in Bangladesh is correlated with the “Bengali nation”—i.e. the Bengali nation’s right to rule over itself. This form of legitimacy has no determinate dovetailing with the institutionalised regime of the political. If the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and other legally autonomous spheres of political order cannot lay claim to be autonomous agencies and are easily folded under the agency of the ruling regime, this is primarily because of the reason that these institutions cannot appeal to the founding legitimacy in the way the extra-institutional people do. Granted, these institutions have their own logics of operation, and yet they have no agency to assert their political autonomy. Even whatever legitimacy the operation of pastoral power provides to the ruling regime, it is always vulnerable vis-à-vis the claims of the extra-institutional people. In any case, the imbalance of power, I would suggest, has a deeper root than sheer institutional dysfunctionality. The ruling regime is in a position to control and navigate the institutions at the level of decision, if not at the level of institutional logic. The concentration of power in the hand of the ruling regime results in an irresolvable tension within the sphere of political power. At the moment of election – that is, the moment when the power is to be transferred — the systematic absence of an autonomous procedurality and the attendant concentration of power in the ruling regime enter into a sharp contest. The opposition party — along with the civil society and any other actors concerned with a “fair” election — cannot but oppose the occurrence of elections under the aegis of the ruling regime. There are two forms of determinate contest in the political sphere: (i) the apparent and predominant contest between the political parties, who, in their identity and difference, form the political society; (ii) the simultaneous tension between the political and civil societies. The Non-partisan Caretaker Government was a solution that kept the suspended power within the political society with the aim of mitigating the tension between the two main parties. This option has lost its credibility owing to the introduction of the second form of contest following the rupture of the military-backed regime. The military-backed caretaker regime has established that the suspension of political power for the “caretakers” to come into being is not immune to the intrusion of the civil society into the sphere that the political society claims as its own. There is clearly a generalised opposition to the civil society from the partisans of political society. Evidently, both the BNP and the AL are not willing to leave power to a caretaker government that is open to the influence of extra-political-society actors. Thus the BNP came up with another option, that of the “national government”. Clearly, this would be more immune to the risks than what the old model of the caretaker government faced. The problem is there is not enough political force present in the political sphere to make the AL accept this otherwise amenable demand. The political ambition of the ruling party lies in outdoing both the external civil society and the opposition party (internal to political society) by way of rhetorically reducing the opposition party and the civil society to the same level.
French political theorist Claude Lefort famously argued that the locus of power is empty in democracy.(1) In contrast to the monarchic regime, wherein the king embodied society by virtue of being the mediator between the other-worldly and the worldly, the source of the legitimacy that hierarchically ordered society broke down with the arrival of modern democracy. Against the grain of the much-vaunted claim of modern liberal democracy concerning its ability to represent the will of the people in an institutionalised form, Lefort has argued that neither the people nor the institutionalised structure can occupy the empty place of power. The place of power is impersonal, and thus it is impossible for any political agency to identify itself with the locus of power. It is a form of society that internalises the impossibility of representing the people in the political institutions, despite taking the former as a symbolic ground of power. According to Lefort, it was not for nothing that many socialists and liberals protested against universal suffrage in its inaugural moment. The numericalisation of the will of the people would effectively displace the substantial and extra-institutional emergence and assertion of the people. Since the locus of power is empty and society is instituted without an organic body, the tendency of disincorporation introduces a gap between the sphere of power, and law and knowledge. Legality and the sphere of knowledge assert their independence from the sphere of power. Lefort’s argument hinges on the observation that only the mechanism of the exercise of power is visible, not the locus of the power itself. The government, or that which possesses the executive register of power, is posterior to the institutionalised form that conditions it. And thus, says Lefort, the government is not capable of embodying the power in itself, nor can it use the power for its own end. It does exercise power explicitly, but the government cannot identify with the mechanism and process that allow it to exercise power. In that sense, the institutional-form that makes it possible for the government to exercise power is prior. Furthering Lefort’s argument, Ernesto Laclau contends that there is a permanent gap between the form and content of political community in democracy. As a supplement to Lefort, Laclau argues that democracy “requires the constant and active production of the emptiness.”(2) The particular hegemonic “aggregation of demands” tends to be generalised and, in so doing, it seeks to represent the (incomplete) universality of the community through the particularity of its own constitution.
Lefort’s theorisation of modern democracy poses considerable questions and problems. His account is based on the transition from monarchy to democracy. While for someone like Foucault the ruptural shift from the old monarchic regime to the modern institutionalised democracy coincided with the expansion of disciplinary practices to the finest grain of society, Lefort’s account describes the political organisation of the form of modern society as indeterminately determinate, claiming a rupture among the spheres of (political) power, knowledge and legality. Lefort is certainly correct in arguing that the marker of certainty has dissolved in modern democracy insofar as the ordering of society is concerned, as the political order of society was no longer strictly hierarchised. However, it is unclear how would he theorise the empty locus of power itself other than referring to the void that had been produced through the disappearance of the monarchic form and reproduced by the sustenance of the institutional arrangement of modern democracy. Insofar as the empty locus of power acts as a foundation (as its emptiness determines how the sphere of power is arranged and correlated with other spheres), it is imperative for us to think whether it is pure emptiness or a form of (incompletely and contingently) saturated political foundation. The case of Bangladesh is an interesting instance. Coming out of the colonial experience, Bangladesh is certainly not the ideal site for thinking Lefort’s Europe-centered account of democracy. That being the case, the distribution of political power in Bangladesh clearly poses certain questions that are akin to Lefort’s problematic. Given the concentration of power in the ruling regime and the lack of autonomy of the political institutions, there is a profound imbalance in the distribution of political power. This adds complexity to the form of political sphere. As our discussion of election and its attendant suspension of political power has shown, there is a fundamental uncertainty regarding the very form — and not just content — of the political community. If all the contests were over the content of power, there would not have been enough reason for disputing the suspension of power. The otherwise banal ideological debates among political parties indicates that the core of their political reasoning is not so much concerning governance, but rather about instantiating the border and order of the political community. The political parties thus manifest the drive to collapse the distinction between the prior empty place of power and their occupation of it, as though their particular occupation of power is the only means to safeguard it. This centripetal force of power also explains why the sphere of law and knowledge are so closely tailed with the political sphere in Bangladesh. The subordination of legality to politics — whether in the form of para-legalism or simple suspension — is barely a matter of dispute. More interestingly, the intellectual sphere of Bangladesh shows a remarkable tendency to divide itself between the rival camps of Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalism, while the autonomy-seeking section of it remains trapped in unreflective contrarianism. While the constitutional democratic political structure formally generates a necessity for extricating the place of power from the particular contents that occupy it, this institutional drive is neutralised and outdriven by the presence of a saturated political foundation that collapses the distinction between form and content of politics. Unlike the Laclauian hegemony that explains the occupation of power through the becoming-universal of a particularity amid the plurality of demands and groups, the appeal to the foundation of political community generates a desire for an immediate identity between the form and content of the polity. The drive to saturate the empty locus of power is that which explains both the danger and potency of Bangladesh’s political horizon. The articulation of this claim would require us to make a foray into how the people construct themselves by bypassing the logic of institutions.
The People and the Institutions
Between the people and the sphere of political power, there is a lack of correspondence. This is, however, a lack that is systematic. To be sure, the failure to reflect the political will of “the people” in the institutional order of the political system is the perennial crisis of modern representative democracy. This is a constitutive failure of constitutional democratic system — it is inherently incapable of accommodating the extra-institutional entity that is the people. In the West, “public opinion” emerged as a mediating process in introducing the institutionalised correspondence between the people and the political institutions. Public opinion, of course, is not the pure will of the people. Its form is institutionally determined, whereby the opinion of the individuated citizens – which is distinct from the truth-claim that a political collectivity pushes for — operates within clear limits. Given the absence of the role that “public opinion” plays in the West, there is a vacuum between the institutions and the people. As I said earlier, the gap is constitutive of constitutional democracy. What is, however, specific to the Bangladeshi scenario is the absence of any mitigating correspondence between the two poles. No absence, however, is pure absence. This structural particularity is also at the root of the extra-institutional politicisation of the people in the Bangladeshi context. What we call the people is far from being a readily accessible political category. Instead, it is one of the most complex political entities. Partly because of the “failure” of the institutions to set up a neutralising correspondence with the people a la public opinion, the Bangladeshi people are in a privileged position to extra-systematically contest political power. As the diagram shows, the political construction of the people leaps over the realm of non-correspondence and directly enters into the realm of power.(3) The Shahbag movement is an apt example. The current scenario is complicated precisely because of the Shahbag event. It heralded a new political configuration. To portray the post-Shahbag crisis as merely a contest between proponents and opponents of the trial of war criminals is to fall short of understanding how the congealed image of Shahbag has transformed the ordinary regime of power distribution. Moving beyond the myopic concern with what the demand of the movement was and who constituted the sociological formation of its ranks, we need to look at the way in which it amounted to a contestatory construction of the people and, in so doing, mobilised an extra-institutional source of legitimacy.
The political power that the movement generated did not arise through any institutional process, nor did it gather force in the manner of issue-based social movements that operate through channeling the demands and mounting pressure on the concerned authority. The event came into being abruptly, and mobilised political claims by way of reclaiming the founding legitimacy of the polity. The people that the Shahbag Movement brought into being by way of re-invoking the political community form founded by 1971 is political in the sense that it generated political power independently of the permanent agencies of the sphere of political power. The virtual impossibility of affecting the sphere of political power through an institutionalised process breeds the possibility for the people to put themselves in the sphere of political power through bypassing what I have called “the sphere of systematic non-correspondence”. As I argued above, while the Shahbag movement contended with the state over the source of legitimacy, it did not result in an antagonistic contestation with the state over political power. This is precisely the feature that made it susceptible to the cooptation of the ruling regime. With the symbolic fulfillment of the explicit demands that the movement put forward, the AL regime could articulate the afterlife of the movement in its own terms. Political events do not just burst through the surface and then vanish without any effect. They do disappear, but in so doing, they alter the relations of forces in often not-so-apparent manner. The continued presence of the Shahbag Movement registers such a transformation. On the one hand, it has made it nearly impossible for the political parties and platforms to negotiate with what the movement had identified as “anti-1971” forces, thus affecting the border of the regime of political power. On the other hand, its claim to the source of legitimacy –and the attendant construction of the people — provided it with a political authority that, however, was not directly antagonistic to the state. These paradoxical features have rendered the event amenable to cooption by the ruling regime, which through such cooption sought to boost itself with the power that flowed from the Shahbag Movement. If the Shahbag Movement is reduced to the demands that it voiced, then it is possible to find the cooption acceptable. The present crisis is not a crisis centered on the war-criminal issue. It is a structural crisis integral to our political system, whereby the afterlife of the Shahbag movement has added productive complexity to the crisis.
The empty politics of “good governance”
The civil society is once again at the forefront of national politics. The civil society — or what is rather barbarically translated as Susheel Samaj (civilised society) in Bengali — is a complex entity whose understanding requires close theoretical and historical investigation. This is a task that I cannot undertake here. The grotesque name that they have given themselves is more than a symptom of mere linguistic incompetence. It designates the preconception that posits both the political society and the people as unqualified subjects of politics. Nevertheless, let us consider some of the prevalent (mis)conceptions about civil society in the context of Bangladesh. While it is obviously true that the Bangladeshi civil society did not evolve in the way in which western civil societies have, this contrast does not warrant us to conceptualise this civil society as historically parasitic or an entity without any social root. The civil society is neither simply a conglomeration of self-interested agents bent on procuring their economic and cultural interests. To be sure, they are self-interested, but that does not tell us much about their political drives and actions. The modern theorisation of civil society that came into being with Hegel explicates it as a mediator between the natural realm of family and the rational sphere of the state. For Hegel, individuals operate as self-interested subjects in civil society; but, in so doing, they conjure up a collective rationality which, in turn, results in a form of society that strikes a balance between the individual and the collective. The self-conception of Bangladeshi civil society expresses the desire to mediate between the “development-seeking” people and the “corrupted and irrational” state. However, since they deem the state as utterly irrational and self-serving, and the people as incapable of acting at the institutional sites, that dual presuppositions lead them to decide for both the state and the people. The task of mediation, as it were, is nothing less than dictating the logics of the entities between which they purport to mediate. In one sense, the political constitution of civil society captures the paradox of our political community in a rather actualised way. The paradox resides in the duality of the nation and the state. The civil society is as much under the condition of the national as any other political agent in Bangladesh. The cultural imagination of the civil society, however westernised, clearly feeds into the horizon of Bengali nationalism. The border and order of the political community that it envisages is under the condition of the national. As I noted above, its commitment to the liberal-democratic structure as the form of governance – with its attendant institutionalism, moral and cultural configurations and so on — puts them in an antagonistic relationship with regard to the political society. Indeed, there is clearly a generalised opposition to the civil society from the otherwise diverging entities of the political society. If the ruling regime does little to ensure the autonomy and independence of the institutions such as the judiciary and administration, it is because these institutions do not figure in the production of legitimacy and its attendant political power in the way in which the street does. Missing this central site of political power, the civil society takes institutions as the objects of politics. The liberal democracy that they push for is one that only knows institutions, extricated as it is from the extra-institutional sources of politics.
Being preoccupied with the task of ostracising corruption from the institutions, the politics of “good governance” is unable to intervene in the extra-institutional sites of politics. As a result, it is an ideology — regardless of its intentions — that strives to negate and excoriate the unruly self-representing people from the sphere of politics. The true subject of the politics of “good governance” is a non-subject proper. From the student rebellion of 2007 to the Shahbag Movement, the civil society had found itself incapable of — if not always indifferent to — dealing with the extra-institutional grounding of politics. The signature characteristic of the civil society’s political vision is the fear of disorder. Constitutionally incapable of realising how the moments of “disorder” are the fecund sites of politics, the civil society locates the source of all crises in the corruption of institutions. Owing to the lack-based understanding specified above, it transposes political contestations on to an empty normative horizon. The failure to influence both the institutional terrain dominated by the ruling regime and the extra-institutional sites, the ideologues of good governance have no other option than relying on the superlative intervention of western diplomats and the military.
The Crisis of the Left-Over Left
This complicated scenario of national politics has dragged the left into a quagmire. The modest success of the post-1971 Left has been dependent on the mobilisation of the nationalist condition of politics. With the emergence of a group of strong nationalist political activists in the last decade — a group that ideologically leans towards the Awami League and yet maintains a distance from its institutional aspects — the Left has been encountering contest and resistance in the attempt to short-circuit between nationalist and traditional leftist discourses. Nor can the Left lay claim to represent the urban workers and poor, the conspicuous outsider in the national politics. In short, the left is unable to instantiate any particular people as the legitimising ground of its politics. The stage-ist left, by and large, is happy to hibernate, while waiting for the coming of the pure (and thus mythological) class-conscious working class. The more active section of the left is oriented to the social issues. In the recent past, they have rather successfully led few social movements. This otherwise promising social-content-oriented section of the left’s crisis lies in its failure to transform social issues into political contest proper. While the Left’s pointing out of injustice and oppression normatively makes sense to the public, that act of making-sense does not get catapulted into a political contestation by itself. The precondition of the emergence of a political contestation requires not only an articulation of the terms of opposition, but also a contesting horizon of the collectivity, i.e. the possibility of a political community. This is precisely what the Left has been unable to generate in the recent years.
As an insignificant actor in the equation of electoral politics, the Left does not hold any effective leverage in shaping the terms of parliamentary elections. A large chunk of the old Left has allied with — or rather tailed behind —the ruling regime. At the level of ideological articulation, this section of the Left has little bearing on Bangladeshi politics. This political inaction is exacerbated by the Left’s understandably ambivalent relationship to the afterlife of the Shahbag movement. The epochal importance, if any, of the Shahbag movement resided in its instantiation of the possibility to re-enact the politics-form of the national by way of constructing the extra-statal people. With the subsumption of the afterlife of the movement by the ruling regime, the persistent presence of its after-effect has got crystallized into something that tends in the direction of lending legitimacy to the Awami League regime. Clearly, any provisional alliance with the AL has to reckon with the fact that the Shahbag movement does not have primacy here — it is the AL’s internal contest with the oppositional party and the civil society that dictates the terms.
Although it is true that the national is the dominant condition of the political in Bangladesh, there is no reason to resign and hold that there is no possibility of articulating a political grounding that would stand outside the present condition. I argued that the crisis of the Left owes to their growing dislocation from the internal order of the national, resulting in a redundant tailism with the mainstream Bengali Nationalist forces. The “outside” that the left needs is not necessarily an absolute outside — the possibilities of constructing a new ground of politics is present in the society. The possibilities themselves must be seized upon — the task of politics is more about subjectivating those possibilities than about waiting for a fully interiorized outside. The manoeuvre to dislodge this state of politics must re-examine the unquestioned ontological presuppositions and discursive strategies of the traditional Left. Hopefulness is empty and self-circling when it obdurately bypasses the facticity of despair. The Left must recognise and reflect on its apparently unmoving negativity, if it wants to break out of the existing state of political order.
Notes
(1) Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
(2) Ernest Laclau, “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 12.
(3) I do not consider the anti-Shahbag Hefazat-e-Islami movement as another example of constructing the people. For sure, the Hefazat reaction drew huge crowds, garnering considerable support. However, in terms of the politics-form, it was neither able to carve out a space outside of the national nor was it able to appeal to the existing political foundations. As a result, notwithstanding its numerical force, it remained caught up in the moment of its negative energy vis-à-vis the Shahbag Movement.