DT e-Paper 06 April 2017

Opinion 13
DT
THURSDAY, APRIL 6, 2017
They’ll be
watching you
Is it the government’s job to act like a
parent?
• Fardin Hasin
Iain Mcleod was not the
most memorable of British
conservatives being credited
with the rapid collapse of
Britain’s African empire while
serving as secretary of state for the
colonies (a now-defunct ministry).
This didn’t really matter to Iain.
He understood that imperialism
was over, and any attempt to hold
on to it would only damage Great
Britain.
History proved him right.
But my point is neither about
the politician-journalist nor
about decolonisation. It’s about
something he wrote in late 1965
while serving as the editor of The
Spectator (a British conservative
magazine) about a government
that intrudes into the privacy of
ordinary citizens through invasive
means and enacts draconian
solutions to run-of-the-mill
problems.
More specifically, Iain was
talking about the plans to restrict
the speed limit to 112km/h.
While we Bangladeshis have
seen enough deaths on roads to
desire such measures, Iain, being
the citizen of a more systematic
country, found them “illogical,
patronising, and paternalistic.”
To him, it seemed a path only the
“nanny state” (a state which views
its citizens “inherently incapable”
of driving at 130km/h) would take.
What other things would the
nanny state do?
Flood the cell phones of its
citizens with messages one after
another about how all boilers
should be run by expert and legal
(read: “licensed”) boiler operators,
or that sustainable development
is only possible if we are always
prepared for (natural) disasters,
undertake various awareness
campaigns over issues that the
public ought to understand quite
well by now (if the masses still
don’t realise why killing infant
hilsha fish is a bad thing, I fear
they never will).
On a side note, the police
helpline initiative sounds quite
good actually; and so do the
messages about how child
marriage must be prevented at any
cost.
The rest of it is still
irremediable. It’s been about time
-- if the public hasn’t learned yet,
let it go. Wait, don’t let it go, just
enact the existing laws. Is that too
much to ask?
Seems like, in Bangladesh, it
is. Someone somewhere up the
ladder thinks it’s a brilliant idea to
send messages.
That a privileged Dhaka city
teenager has nothing whatsoever
to do with infant hilsha fish and
that a pharmacy store-owner in
a distant Rangpur haat bazaar
doesn’t really care about jute
seems to be lost in transition.
Some of the people who do
catch infant hilsha fish and drive
recklessly don’t even know how to
read cell phone messages. A few
of them don’t even own mobile
phones.
But who cares about results.
People are indeed becoming
aware, not all of them but some,
over and over again, and again,
and again, and again.
Then there’s the question of
nationalised culture and religion.
Banning Facebook
and policing book
fairs are the most
luminous examples.
Once you get to the
Digital Security Act
2016, it stops getting
even remotely funny
State-regulated khutbas and
mongol shovajatras (good thing the
former was cancelled).
It seems as though past
failures of command economy
and command politics have been
forgotten and now we have its
replacements with command
culture and command religion.
This point requires deep analysis
on its own right.
And that’s just the tip of the
iceberg. You dig a bit deeper and a
newer set of draconian measures
come into our view. Banning
Facebook and policing book fairs
are the most luminous examples,
Internet time is a private matter
and then there was the rumour
going on that list of visitors of porn
sites will be publicly disclosed.
Once you get to the Digital
Security Act 2016, it stops getting
even remotely funny. Phrases
like “subject to any reasonable
restrictions” raise many questions,
namely as to whose reason it
would be and what would be the
extent of such restrictions.
The government has
intentionally left it all very
ambiguous. Except the clause
which allows the Directorate
General of the Digital Security
Agency (agencies that China and
North Korea have too) to bypass
court orders. That part is crystal
clear.
Now, this sort of legislation is
derived both out of a morbid and
often violent desire to control
and direct the population, and
an innate but equally destructive
belief that the public does not
possess the necessary wisdom to
survive out in the tough world.
And it also needs controlled
democracy, which allows them
freedom over a certain spectrum.
Anyone and everyone who
disagrees is an enemy of the state,
and must be crushed at any cost.
A wide variety of leaders
across the spectrum ascribed to
this ideology. Some of them were
revolutionaries (Fidel Castro),
others were nationalists (Mahathir
Mohammad or Lee Kuan Yew), and
a considerable bunch represented
the military junta (General Ziaul
Haq or Augusto Pinochet). A few
countries did achieve considerable
development this way.
At the cost of a suppressed
democracy, that is.
Yes, Malaysia has developed at
an amazing rate, but we should
keep in mind that Anwar Ibrahim,
the Malaysian politician and leader
of the opposition party, is still in
jail.
The case of Singapore is even
better, except for the people who
opposed Lee Kuan Yew and were
sued into oblivion using taxpayer
money.
The two countries are still
examples of progress. But they
are also examples of suppressed
democracy. There are states in the
world which have taken a lot more
time to achieve the same things,
but have done so without sending
the opposition to jail on absurd
charges.
Bottom line: Economic
development shouldn’t come
at the expense of civil rights.
There’s a reason they call it
sustainable development. Josip
Tito’s Yugoslavia seemed to have
it all going well, but it all collapsed
BIGSTOCK
within a few years of his death.
But the case of Bangladesh
is even more complex, it’s not
just economic development that
the government is promising,
but also security against the real
threat of terrorism. While we keep
hearing about how bad the threat
is, we are seldom told the cost of
this protection. We are not told
because we wouldn’t understand,
because somebody somewhere
prioritises our safety over our
choices, without understanding
either.
One only needs to remember
the Rampal issue and subtle
comments from government
officials implying that the public
was misunderstanding the
environmental question -- to
understand that the public will
forever be considered as naïve,
ignorant, and uninformed, and
the government will forever be the
parent, the leader, the decider.
Struck between its inability
to be politically aroused and an
inability of the political opposition
to provide the least amount
of stimulus, the Bangladeshi
masses will, for the unforeseeable
future, play obedient children to
unreasonably stern parents. That
is to say, they will suffer. •
Fardin Hasin is a freelance contributor.