
‘Transition to Democracy’ is a compilation of articles published in newspapers ad magazines at home and abroad. The author writes on such developments which impinge on public policy issues and on strategic policies pursued by successive governments of Bangladesh. Tow major political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), elected by the people one after the other, ruled the country with the pledge to promote democracy and the rule of law.
In tracing the plight of the Rohingya refugees, the study shows that the Rohingya refugee problem was created in the course of several historical trajectories. It has been demonstrated that the Rohingyas are both stateless and refugees. First, they became stateless in their homeland and then eventually they had to embrace the status of refugeehood under conditions of persecution, discrimination and torture. The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have remained stateless amid their refugeehood.
Some two dozen countries are already classified as water-scarce, and this-as areas as diverse as Israel, southern California and even the Netherlands know - is not a problem confined to the South. Already, as this book shows, fresh-water shortages are becoming a major cause of conflict both domestically and between states. In the future, the growing world population, further spread of irrigated agriculture and industrialization will all make increasing demands on scarce water resources. Conflict resolution capabilities in many parts of the world will be sorely stretched.
At birth Bangladesh was a homogenous nation state with a promise to make every house a happy home. But soon after its birth, schismatic tendencies developed because of the ill motive and machinations of certain political forces. The lack of a clear perception of the civil society and of the politicians about Bengali nationalism and nation state of Bangladesh, resulted in some ambiguity about their identity. Additionally, the military rulers during their term of office impaired the constitution and dichotomised the nation in order to create their own power base.
Although the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty alone has hogged the worlds ---‘attention so far — because of its uniquely dazzling dominance and durability — it is not the only one within India, leave alone the neighbouring countries of South Asia and beyond. Indeed, the number of clans striding the political stage in the region is rather large. The Senanayakes and the Bandarnaikes were entrenched in SriLanka well before Indira Gandhi first became India’s prime minister in 1966.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the People's Republic of Bangladesh wrote into the Constitution the concept of the Non-Party Caretaker Government to ensure a smooth transition of power from one elected government to another. The two papers in the book authored by late Barrister Syed Ishtiaq Ahmed offer an insider's view of both the period leading to the 13th Amendment and the period of office held thereafter by the Caretaker Government of 1996.
These essays show that contrary to the widespread belief, nationalism is not all about the celebration of territory as a marker of identity and power; it is also about time in a fundamental way. The anxiety over time is as fundamental as the one over space. Indeed space appears as one in the distribution of the elements that go into making the time of nationalism. The author contends that, each time the nationalist destiny of Muslim Bengal took a clearly discernible turn, it seemed to the actors as final and irrevocable?the actors of 1937, 1947, 1954, 1957, or 1971.
Democracy in Bangladesh is of global interest as its success would provide a model for democratic transition in Muslim-majority countries. In 1991 Bangladesh embarked upon a new democratic journey but this journey has been fraught with various crises. The book argues that the nature of the Bangladeshi political parties was primarily responsible for this situation. The major political parties have merged, fragmented and proliferated at will all because of the political or factional interests of individual leaders.
Bangladesh is an account of a courageous man who has boldly faced every adversary which aimed to destroy him or his will to fight back. Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir was first jailed in 2002 for seven months, was made to starve and tortured by his political opponents. Subsequently, Dr. Alamgir was again picked up in the middle of the night by the military backed government’s Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) on February 2, 2007, without any warrant or charges drawn up against him. He was jailed by the government and was at times put in solitary confinement.
There are as many similarities as there are differences between the two military regimes which governed Bangladesh for nearly fifteen out of the first twenty years of its existence. Bangladesh would find it difficult to recover from the effects of the long periods of martial rule or of rule with an unrepresentative government which virtually destroyed the growth of democratic institutions.