Bangladesh was not born through a historical accident. Nor was it the gift of a departing colonial power grown weary of bearing its imperial burden. Our nationhood emerged out of a long process of struggle which culminated in a bloody war of liberation. To move large numbers of ordinary people to pledge their lives for a separate existence we needed to inspire them with a vision for a better world than the one they were repudiating. This inspiration was what came to be known as the spirit which inspired the liberation war, what we popularly term: muktijuddher-chetona. This is a phrase which is used so frequently and so casually as to be rendered almost devoid of meaning. We invoke this spirit as a ritual incantation and rarely bother to ask ourselves what this spirit embodies. I would argue that the spirit of the liberation war is adequately captured in the four principles which have guided our constitution: Democracy, Nationalism, Secularism and Socialism (which has later been elaborated to mean social justice).

In this piece, I will discuss why these pillars of our constitution capture the spirit of the liberation struggle and how far we have departed from these guiding principles. Today: democracy and nationalism.

Democracy
Our emergence as a separate nation-state was the direct outcome of the persistent denial of democrat rights to the people of Bangladesh by the Pakistani ruling class. In 24 years of shared nationhood never once was central power in Pakistan exercised through the outcome of a free and fair election. The first such election in December 1970, 23 years after the emergence of Pakistan, led to the Awami League, under the leadership of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, capturing a majority of seats in the National Assembly, with an electoral mandate from the people of Bangladesh to establish self-rule. It was the attempt by the Pakistani military junta to frustrate this democratic mandate, through the instrument of genocide, which inspired the liberation war. The liberation war was, thus, the final phase of our democratic struggle when the Bangali people had to come to terms with the reality that democracy could never be realized within the Pakistani nation state.

It is the tragedy of Bangladesh that our nationhood emerged out of our quest for democracy, yet we have spent most of our national existence frustrating its realization. We have lived through long episodes of martial rule and civilian autocracy. In 1990, when the Ershad autocracy was overthrown through a mass mobilization, the nation experienced the excitement of a second rebirth of democracy. But what a mess we have made of this process of renewal. We have spawned a democratic order built on confrontation and intolerance where the party elected to office functions with complete disregard for the democratic rights of the opposition. The opposition responds by violating its democratic mandate and boycotting parliament. As a result, three successive parliaments have been rendered virtually dysfunctional and have totally failed to discharge their primary mandate of keeping the executive accountable to the will of the voters through their elected representatives.

The malfunctioning of our democratic institutions is compounded by the absence of democracy in our principal political parties. The major political parties, in turn, reflect the gradual ascendance of money and muscle power as the driving force in democratic politics. As a consequence, politics in Bangladesh has degenerated into a rich man's game, where both women and the financially deprived have been effectively disenfranchised. The dominance of money has ensured that issues of principle, policy and public service are no longer the motivating force for participating in politics. Rather, politics has become an extension of business and money has become the route to electoral office.

The proliferation of violence, which becomes more pernicious when it is patronized by the state, has increasingly been deployed to further political and personal objectives. The purveyors of violence, the mastaans, have served to undermine our public educational institutions, interfere with the working of the administration, challenge the credibility of our institutions of law enforcement and compromise the vitality of our investment climate. In such a malfunctioning democracy, every institution of governance is compromised. Our administration has become ineffective, where both recruitment and advancement have become politicized and divorced from performance or norms. The integrity of the Public Service Commission has been compromised by the politicization of its senior appointments. As a result, virtually all public services as well as law enforcement have become partisanized and commoditized to a point where the machinery of government has lost virtually all capacity for functioning as an instrument of public service. The last remaining bastion of the rule of law, the judiciary, is now under threat. The lower judiciary has degenerated into a politicized instrument of the ruling party. The upper judiciary is now being exposed to a process of creeping politicization, where judicial appointments, even at the highest level, are now made with an eye on who will be more serviceable as the head of the Caretaker Government. The appointments to the Election Commission have been similarly politicized so that the very institutions which are designed to safeguard the democratic credentials of our electoral process are being compromised. Prior to a national election, all recruitment and postings in the police force, upazilla administration, schools, and now the armed forces, which can in any way influence the direction of the national elections, are being politicized. In such circumstance, the scope for a free and fair election where the role of money, defaulters and mastaans can be contained, is becoming progressively more untenable.

The last recourse of democracy, the free media, is demonstrating considerable resilience. But the security of journalists has become increasingly endangered and the independent press itself faces a constant struggle to secure itself from both state pressure and private terror. Here again, people with money and state patronage are making inroads into the media and are investing both in the print and electronic media with the expectation of "managing" the news in the service for partisan gain. That our institutions of democracy and governance should have degenerated to a level where the very sustainability of the democratic process is endangered is particularly distressing when we consider our long and painful struggle for democracy.

Nationalism
Nationalism was identified as a pillar of our nationhood because our founding fathers recognized that liberation was tied up with our struggle to establish our national identity as distinct from Pakistan. Our founders were also conscious about asserting our identity vis a vis India, our friend and neighbour, who had played such a critical role through their support of our liberation struggle. However, in the day-to-day affairs of nation building, the issue of nationalism is more concerned with the need to recapture autonomy over our political as well as policy choices. Our founders were aware that their Pakistani rulers had surrendered autonomy over policymaking, in large measure, to the United States and the World Bank, on whom we had become heavily dependent for both military and economic aid. Nationalism, in the context of a sovereign Bangladesh, thus meant the assertion of our autonomy in policy and decision making. However, in a fast globalizing world policy choices available to a least developed country such as Bangladesh are severely constrained. Regrettably, successive regimes in Bangladesh have made little effort to design our policies and restructure our economy so as to enhance our flexibility in coping with the challenges of globalization.

In the last two decades, the maximum influence over Bangladesh's decision making process has vested with our principal aid donors who have attempted to influence the terms on which we globalize ourselves. This leverage was inherited from an era when our aid dependence in the 1980s exceeded 10% of GDP. We were then dependent on aid to finance our entire development budget and part of our current budget. Particular bilateral aid donors and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank used this dependence to influence our policies towards a more market oriented, private sector based development strategy. Donor pressure has compelled us to liberalize our imports at a faster pace than was even demanded by the WTO. This has threatened the sustainability of a large number of small and medium sized industries serving our domestic market as well as inhibited the growth and diversification of our manufacturing sector. Today Bangladesh is much less aid dependent but our principal aid donors continue to exercise a disproportionate influence over our policy direction. Successive governments remain unduly attentive to donor advice even though they have little capacity or even inclination to respond to such advise.

In the last decade, Bangladesh has moved from being an aid dependent to a trade dependent country. 75% of our exports are centred around readymade garments (RMG) whilst over 80% of our exports are directed to the markets of North America and the European Union (EU). In recent years, the US and the EU have begun to use political considerations in determining the degree of market access offered to any country. Governments in Bangladesh have thus remained unduly receptive to the policy advice of our principal trading partners and have remained disinclined to take any position which would be contrary to their strategic interests. This overdependence on RMG exports to two major markets to sustain the livelihood of close to two million (mostly poor women), has generated a sense of helplessness in our policymakers whose principal foreign policy goal has been to propitiate the US and EU in order to retain and enhance our access to their protected markets. In a world where these countries are increasingly using entry to their markets as a strategic resource, Bangladesh's foreign policy options are being compromised by our inability to diversify our economy and broaden out export base.

We have been no less dependent on the energy exporting countries of the Middle East who host our migrant labour who remit over $3 billion a year to Bangladesh. Whilst a few of these countries once made some effort to influence our social behavior, they made few, if any, policy demands on Bangladesh. Nonetheless, successive regimes have made it a point to remain on good terms with them.

India remains a major trading partner of Bangladesh as a source of imports but it has not been able to use this dependence to extract political leverage because Bangladesh also has access to other suppliers such as China and South East Asia to meet its import needs. Until India opens up its markets to Bangladesh to a point where they absorb at least 20% of our exports or can inject a significant volume of foreign direct investment as well as bilateral aid into Bangladesh, their leverage over our policy choices will remain limited. As host to a large number of "unofficial" migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and to a lesser extent Pakistan, could exercise some leverage over Bangladesh. But since Bangladesh does not recognize such migrants as Bangladeshi citizens, there is little India can do to transform this market dependence of Bangladesh into a political resource. Given the importance of India, not just as a trading partner, but also as an upper riparian which remains the source of 58 of our principal rivers, we need to develop a strategic vision rather than the ad hoc responses which guide our uneasy relationship. Designing such a strategy would be facilitated by a process of public consultation and would eventually need to be backed by all political parties so that India-Bangladesh relations should not be used as a source of domestic political opportunism. Such an agenda would need to be skillfully negotiated with the government of India but should also be intensively discussed between civil society in India and Bangladesh.

In recent yeas, the issue of resource nationalism has also surfaced. Bangladesh has few resources so that we have to ensure that these resources are optimally used. Issues relating to the development and export of gas and coal have become highly contentious which has constrained the extraction of our resources. Part of the problem of dealing with finite resources lies in the lack of transparency in addressing such issues. But our principal failure lies in our inability to develop a strategic plan for the most productive use of our resources which can be publicly discussed and its operationalization backed by a political consensus.

In the prevailing circumstances, Bangladesh's principle assertion of nationalism must lie in reestablishing our surrendered sovereignty over our policy direction. Now that aid accounts for less then 3% of our GDP, it should not be too difficult to recapture our policy autonomy. However, such an assertion of nationalism, whether in policy making relations with our neighbours or in exploiting our natural resources, demands political maturity and courage. Courage can be sustained through a willingness to reach out to as well as motivate Bangladesh's highly skilled indigenous professional community to develop policy alternatives to guide the country and to then explain these policy options to the public. To sustain any such assertion of sovereignty we would also need to build a domestic political consensus which would strengthen the capacity of the government to challenge the tradition of external hegemony over our policy choices.

Rehman Sobhan is Chairman of Centre for Policy Dialogue.