Ceylon Today 11 August 2024
Sri Lankans can pat themselves on the pat, though quietly or only in their minds. Decorum demands that any loud expression of self-appreciation over the Aragalaya setting the precedent for Bangladesh to follow in the shared South Asian neighbourhood is fraught with dangers and possibilities, which Sri Lanka comfortably has for long put in the past, as if it were a dream, good, bad or whatever.
In both nations, the armed forces facilitated the regime-change without being a real part of it. Sri Lankans did not care, and those should remember forgot it, but a three-member team of veteran commanders appointed by President Ranil Wickremesinghe reported back that the disorderliness and violence associated with what began as a nation-wide peaceful protest owed to Gen Shavendra Silva, the then chief of army staff (COAS), refusing to respond to even personal phone calls from President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and defence secretary, Gen Kamal Gunaratne.
In Bangladesh, army chief Gen Waker-uz-Zaman, obviously speaking also for his compatriots from the navy and air force, publicly declared that the security forces would not open fire on fellow-citizens if ordered by the elected government of then (outgoing) Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina. In the first phase of protests and violence, the army had joined the ‘security measures’ initiated when Hasina was away in Beijing, and killed fellow-citizens in dozens.
It was possibly the reason for the prime minister to cut short her much-touted China visit, to ‘take charge’, only to give up what became a lost fight. Her last fight, it was not, her son seems to imply now, by claiming that her mother, now in India, would return home to fight national elections, whenever held. The second phase of protests and violence was handled exclusively by the police, and they too killed near-equal numbers before Gen Waker told Hasina, a relative by marriage, to pack up and go.
Written into the script
Conspiracy theorists are already taking notes and making comparisons, seeing an otherwise unseen hand behind it all. They refuse to concede that the Bangladeshi student and youth protest leaders might simply have taken inspiration from Aragalaya in the neighbourhood. There are no reports of their leaders visiting Sri Lanka, or sending their friends and supporters in the academia, to go instead and study the Aragalaya’s elements and components that made it a success, however limited it was.
It can now be argued that the Bangladeshi protest leaders demanding and ensuring that a condemned social activist with untold political ambitions in Nobel laureate Mohammud Yunus, an economist otherwise, leads an interim administration now, too, was written into their script. Did they see that the vacuum in the Sri Lankan Aragalaya, or the absence of a strategy for the day-after put the post-revolution political leadership into the hands of the old guard all over again, and made amends?
If conspiracy theorists are to be believed, there is an unseen foreign hand in it all. If they also concede that Sri Lanka was an experiment and Bangladesh, the ‘real thing’, does it then mean that more of it could follow, beginning with the rest of South Asia, or such other Third World democracies? After all, western thinkers, policy-makers and political leaders, who are the unspoken targets of conspiracy theorists, are known to have created template-models into which they seek to fit in nations and societies, or societies and nations, to make for a homogenised world, in thought, word and action. Which then do you say is the ‘real autocracy’?
Natural consequence
Supportive Sri Lankans can still sit back and commend their Constitution, which provides for exigencies of the kind, letting the prime minister of the day to take charge for the moment when the presidency falls vacant and for Parliament to elect one of its members as the new President to complete the residual term of the outgoing Head of State. That was how Gota left and Ranil stepped in, but only in his place. The change-over flowed from the perceived failure of one political and economic ideology – so for the nation to try out another, or ‘the’ other, could be considered the natural and unavoidable consequence. There simply was no alternative – or, was there?
Looking back, despite the unprecedented mass protests and equally unprecedented episode of coordinated arson – violence otherwise was minimal, compared to Bangladesh, where the security forces, too contributed in no small measure, as it turns out now – the democratic transition was both smooth, legal and constitutional. Electing an alternative President through Parliament is there in the Constitution. Maybe, it was not what the faceless protest leaders, or those behind it all, supposedly from the JVP and breakaway FSP, wanted.
It should in turn explain why Aragalaya did not cause a ‘systems change’ as thought of by the masses and propagated by the mutually antagonistic JVP/FSP leaderships. Both the masses who expected it and the propagators who promised it did not know what systems-change was all about, then and since. They did good for Sri Lanka. Their counterparts in Bangladesh have achieved the politico-administrative part of such a systems-change now, but they too do not seem to know what it should be other than changing the politico-administrative leadership, wholesale, here and now.
Faulty system
Obviously, the protestors continue to enjoy the support and confidence of the armed forces. For, it was the army chief who announced the imminent formation of an interim administration, almost after Hasina had quit and left the country. It is another matter that Hasina’s vocal son Sajeeb Wazed (he recovered his voice after knowing that his mother was safe in neighbouring India) has since claimed from London, where he resides, that Hasina did not resign before leaving the county.
If so, did she at all resign, and if so, when and where? In a way, Sajeeb is implying that there was no vacancy for the head of elected government for President Mohammed Shahabuddin to fill, by swearing in Yunus as the head of the ‘interim administration’. The army chief is generally the sitting duck in such cases to take the blame, but in his case, Gen Waker is not known to have superseded the Constitution, for him to induct Yunus as the chief advisors and many others as advisors.
The Bangladesh Constitution does not provide for advisors and chief advisors. It has only talked about a prime minister and a cabinet of ministers. It could well have meant that if moved, the nation’s Supreme Court would have little option but to declare the regime-change unconstitutional, wholesale. Now you may know why two of those ‘advisors’ joined the ‘public call’ for the nation’s chief justice and the entire judiciary to quit en masse.
Yes, the judiciary may have identified itself too much with the discredited Hasina, who had survived all along only through a ‘faulty system’, if you want to acknowledge it that way. However, does the resignation of chief justice Obaidul Hassan solve any problem, if not all the problems? Any CJ in his place would still have to rule that the appointment of ‘advisors’ under a ‘chief advisor’ is still unconstitutional. Anything short of a controversial and legally contestable post facto constitutional amendment alone can do the trick – but a trick it still would be.
After Gen Waker publicly refused to order fire on fellow-citizens and talked Hasina to create a vacancy for the top job, the army may be in the good books of the new administration, however interim. Rather, they are both travelling now in the same boat. Yet, the interim administration needs the army more than the other way round.
If CJ Obaidul Hassan’s reported resignation is any indication, then the ‘transition leadership’ has also ensured that the Judiciary either quit en masse or ‘behaved’. The same cannot be said as yet about the civil administration, from top to bottom. If anything, there are suspicions if the long years of one-party or one-woman rule has institutionalized nepotism in return for personal political loyalty, so very completely.
Disbanding the system may then be in order, at least from the view of the nation’s ‘interim leaders’ – but will it also turn out to be violent? Or, could mass-sackings, transfers and threats trigger another round of popular protests, leading to street-violence? If so, what will the army chief have to say?
What will the security forces do? For instance, there is the visible gap during the second phase of protests, when alone the army chief declared the ‘no-use-of-force’ doctrine. But the police continued the firing-spree. Does it mean that top police heads would have to role? If so, would it be acceptable to that segment of the uniformed services?
Good governance
Of course, these are all only questions, at times obtuse. But looking at Bangladesh from a Sri Lankan experience and perspective, there is now less and less chance of anarchy taking over the latter nation now than on that evening in May 2022 when that coordinated arson, and the later-day burning down of the private residence of then Prime Minister Ranil, now President, took place.
The latter was in aid of the protestors’ perception that Ranil should not become President, nor should be made the President. Today, Ranil as President is the reality, the rest of it all has gone up in smoke along with his private home, in what turned out to be one more despicable act of Aragalaya and also in the nation’s contemporary history.
The question now is if Sri Lanka escaped not only the Gota kind of ‘autocracy’ as seen by the urban middle-class since the day elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa became the presidential candidate way back in 2005, without anything from their collective family conduct to go by. Maybe, the Rajapaksas lived out the urban elitist perception of a rustic, rude autocrat even when the urban elite did not know them – but which they turned out to be, again in perception-wise, for argument’s sake.
In Bangladesh too, their Aragalaya was preceded by an autocratic rule, which was elected under a democratic Constitution time and again, and the chosen one only used the popular mandate to legitimize the autocracy, even more. Hasina gave it depth, width and flight. Sri Lanka however escaped organized or unorganized or disorganized anarchy by the whiff when Gota quit and the original urban leaders of the movement began leaving the ‘Ground Zero’ Galle Face Green venue in capital Colombo, in droves.
The fear viz Bangladesh now is that there is unacknowledged anarchy that is systematic and is possibly getting institutionalized. The Bangladeshi leaders of the Bangladeshi Aragalaya have only to look up the Myanmar neighbor to learn how a popular leader like Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi failed miserably as an elected leader – mainly because she and her MLD leaders did not know what governance was, leave alone what good governance was all about.
There is an object lesson in it for the Bangladeshi protest leaders, starting with Yunus at 84, with his personal grudge against Hasina for harassing him and imprisoning him only because he did not fall in line and tell the world how great a leader she was. In Myanmar, the predictable return of the junta after yet another election victory for Suu Kyi owed to her own lack of political experience and administrative expertise.
Sri Lanka has survived only because the political class, however corrupt and inept, re-took the initiative, which at one stage looked like being with none and with everyone at the same time. That also made the difference, for the Bangladeshis to learn from.
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
