A note from diaspora

Those of us who take the idea and practice of transformative politics seriously have good reasons to be encouraged by the recent formation of a citizens' group that emerged out of a joint initiative of The Daily Star, Prothom Alo, and Centre for Policy Dialogue.

The stated intention of the group includes the formulation of a mid-term development vision for Bangladesh as well as organisation of a campaign for electing honest and competent candidates in the next general elections. This is a long overdue intervention.

Given what is happening in the country, one cannot help feeling a sense of what Gramsci famously called the "pessimism of the intellect." There is an abundance of reasons for this pessimism. The fragile contour of our politics, the peripheral underdevelopment of our economy, the capriciousness of our law, the stagnation of our bureaucracy, the fractured fabric of our culture -- all of these can sufficiently subvert a well-grounded good life that the majority of the citizens of the country aspire to.

Yet, simultaneously, one has to keep, again in the memorable language of the great Sardinian, an "optimism of the will" alive. No significant transformation in the right direction is ever possible without this human capacity for hoping against hope. For many of us, this recent initiative interjects such a moment of optimistic desire into an otherwise difficult collective existence.

The task of building democracy in a world where old certainties are gone and new enclaves of empowerment are still in a flux, citizen intervention is a much needed political responsibility. While the notion of civil society is often casually tossed around by self-serving promoters of narrow status quo interests and crude defenders of parochial identity politics alike, the concept contains immense emancipatory potential.

The civil society is the vital conscience of society, situated outside the core terrain of institutionalised state apparatus and market economy. Not quite integrated with the constraints of organised state -- market nexus, civil society contains the ensemble of social relations that sustain the dynamism of social life. Civil society represents a decentering of the conventional epicenter of political economy.

This "outsidehood," to use Edward Said's expression in a different context, has its distinct advantages. The individuals who are engaged in this recent initiative do not seem to have a vested stake in the contested terrain of our inter-party rivalry. None of them seem to nurture ambitions for state power sharing. Their political-economic-ideological platform seems to have taken shape outside the boundary of hegemonic bi-partisanship. Only for this reason, if not anything else, they deserve our empathetic attention.

When our state tragically fails to resolve its crisis of legitimation, when our electoral politics is subservient to muscle and black money, when democratic accountability becomes an ever scarce phenomenon in our core political universe, when autonomous economic development remains an ever elusive goal, citizen intervention of this sort seems to be a much awaited option. It is imperative that viable narratives of development and polity are articulated within this sphere. It is crucial that conversations about the past, present, and future of our nation are vocalised within this discursive field.

But it is also important to understand that, its profoundly significant role as a point of departure notwithstanding, the citizen's group is just that -- a point of departure. Even the most enthusiastic defenders of this initiative will probably not argue that electing honest and competent candidates alone will produce an authentic democratic counter-hegemony. Even the most energetic architects of the mid-term developmental vision, I am sure, will not like to see it being reduced to a monolithic, infallible dogma.

These tasks will require long, protracted, yet somewhat open-textured, indeterminate processes the total complexity of which we cannot fully anticipate even in our most confident, imaginative moments. But more importantly, I would like to believe, even the initiators of the group recognise the nature of its immediate social constituency, its urbane professional-intellectual embeddedness.

The authenticity of democracy can ultimately be realised only by incorporating the citizenry that is marginalised or excluded by the core political-economic apparatuses into radically pluralistic conversational processes. Democracy is not a transhistorical, transcontextual signifier. It is always invariably anchored in specific slices of history, in specific structural contradictions and antagonisms.

The liberating essence of civil society can be most exuberantly released by continuously deepening and expanding democratic spaces, by including and empowering the multitude of subaltern citizenry -- the direct producers, the poor, women, religious-ethnic minorities, marginal nationalities and others.

The dialogue that was inaugurated by the citizens' group in the capital city needs to be continuously translated to multiplicity of subjugated social sites. In the end, the historical significance of the citizens' initiative will be validated if it can operate as a vital catalyst for that plurivocally engaged democracy. The fact that there are people in the group who have long histories of involved praxis in those sites is a cause for constructive optimism.

The author is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Culver-Stockton College, USA.