In Bangladesh, a Senior Ruling Party Politician Blasts Bureaucrats
Tofail Ahmed’s measured rant against bureaucrats reflects a widespread concern among the Awami League’s rank and file.
In a blistering speech on the floor of the parliament, senior Awami League politician Tofail Ahmed on June 28 sharply criticized the government’s increased dependency on bureaucrats. He particularly took issue with the government appointing secretaries — the most senior bureaucrats — in charge of the Coronavirus relief operations in districts while ignoring members of the parliament in their respective constituencies.
He reminded that according to the government’s warrant of precedence, secretaries are ranked lower than MPs, implying that MPs should not be superseded by them. “It is a political government,” he stressed. “This undermines politicians’ duties and authority.”
In theory and practice, he is wrong.
The order of precedence is supposed to be a symbolic hierarchical order. The MPs have legislative roles and have never been executive officials unless they hold cabinet positions.
However, semantics was not why Tofail Ahmed’s speech was significant.
Who is Tofail Ahmed and why his statement was significant?
The 77-year-old stalwart’s political career dates back to the 60s. He was an early and loyal ally of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father whose daughter Sheikh Hasina is now the prime minister. It was under the leadership of Tofail Ahmed that students at Dhaka University bestowed Rahman with the widely-used honorific ‘Bangabandhu’ (Friend of Bengal).
However, relations between Tofail Ahmed and Sheikh Hasina fractured in 2007, when under the auspices of the then-military-backed government, a group of senior politicians including Tofail Ahmed challenged Hasina’s authority within the party.
When the dust settled and the party came to power in 2009, Hasina did take a little revenge by filling the cabinet positions with new faces and dropping the senior politicians from the party praesidium.
However, she was too clever to permanently get rid of the cabal of senior leaders. Instead, she has kept them around and allowed them to contest in the elections and even made them ministers during the 2009-2014 period.
She utilized their political mastery when she needed it most because the political challenge from BNP and others was strongest during that period. In the post-2014 scenario, however, neither these party bigwigs nor other political coalition members were any longer necessary, thus disposable. With little to no political challenge, she now focused solely on economic agendas. Accordingly, the current cabinet overwhelming consists of politicians who are businessmen in the heart.
Therefore, Tofail Ahmed’s statement should be viewed as mirroring growing frustrations and grievances among the political rank and file of the ruling party. With the political opposition all but obliterated, the ruling government is increasingly relying on state organs and machinery to implement its agendas, which allows the latter to wield significant influence in the decision-making process.
In support of his argument as to why politicians should control power, he invoked a notorious statement of Lt. General Ziaur Rahman, a former military ruler who founded the opposition BNP.
“When Zia came to power after the killing of Bangabandhu, he said he would make politics difficult for politicians. Apparently, he was very successful in doing it,” he said.
Such a choice of language is intriguing and will resonate well among the party activists and politicians.
On the floor of the parliament, Tofail Ahmed was joined by Kazi Firoze Rashid, an MP with the token opposition Jatiya Party, in their condemnation of bureaucrats. Rashid also warned about relying on businesspeople and urged the Awami League to take lessons from his own party’s experience when Jatiya Party was in power in the 90s. “They lean towards where the wind goes,” he noted.
In particular, he complained that MPs are now relegated even by deputy commissioners (a district’s chief administrative officer, normally a mid-level bureaucratic officer).
The curious case of bureaucrats
Bangladesh has 300 parliamentary constituencies in 64 districts. Each of the districts has a DC (deputy commissioner) who oversees administrative affairs in their respective district. These officials are recruited through prestigious (colonial relics, in my view) civil service exams and are part of what is called “BCS Administration Cadre”.
While the public service examinations are relatively fair in Bangladesh, security officials check the political background of finalized candidates and can torpedo their recruitment if they are found to be even remotely affiliated with the opposition. To be fair, such a politicized method was used by previous governments as well. However, as the Awami League has retained power for more than a decade, the level of politicization is unprecedented at this moment.
The ruling party has had ample time to ensure that officials loyal to it are appointed to key positions. As the government has gradually consolidated power and the political opposition evaporated, the ruling party could nurture and raise a loyal cadre of bureaucrats and police officials and safely rely on them — more than its political core and activists.
DCs, along with police chiefs (called police superintendent or SP), are all in all in a district and have outsized influence in every decision-making process including, particularly, in the holding of elections. It is widely and credibly alleged and perceived in Bangladesh that these bureaucrats and police officials played the key role in dismantling the opposition and organizing an election in 2018 marred by, according to the Human Rights Watch, “[r]eports of ballot stuffing, intimidation of voters, and ruling party control of voting locations.”
Other state organs were also accused of colluding with the ruling party. But what makes bureaucrats different from others is their administrative positions at the grassroots levels. Many of the electoral anomalies were alleged to have been supervised by officials in the rural levels, while party activists were just the pawn or foot soldiers in the grand scheme of things. The election ridiculously resulted in the victory of the ruling coalition candidates in all 300 seats except for 5, drawing an apt comparison with elections in Syria and North Korea.
As the rule of nature dictates, the MPs elected in that election orchestrated by the root-level officials are now struggling to claim moral legitimacy and authority, while public servants feel emboldened.
Conclusion
The debate over the growing influence of bureaucrats at the expense of politicians’ is not new in Bangladesh. Previously, commentators, root-level politicians and even token opposition MPs spoke up about these issues. But a senior Awami League parliamentarian like Tofail Ahmed made a careful choice when he decided to blast civil servants. While many of his parliamentarian colleagues will sympathize with him, his party colleagues in the cabinet will disagree.
Planning Minister MA Mannan (also a former bureaucrat), previously defended bureaucrats by saying that even Egyptian pharaohs relied on them.
A day after Tofail Ahmed’s rant, a junior minister issued a soft rebuke. Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury, the state minister for shipping, noted that the prime minister’s decision to put secretaries in charge of district-level Coronavirus responses was “groundbreaking”.
But the party would be wise to acknowledge the grudges of its MPs, who — despite knowing that the pro-bureaucracy policy had the support of the prime minister — did not hesitate to show their appreciation by banging their desks when Tofail Ahmed was speaking.