TIB, polls and unpalatable truths
Photo: star archive
People in the police administration are unhappy with Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB). So is Home Minister Sahara Khatun. They ought not to be. What they ought to have gone for is a serious assessment of the recent TIB findings, which squarely inform the country through an opinion survey that Bangladesh's police are regarded as the most corrupt of the country's public service oriented organisations.
A good government responsive to public opinion possesses the courage and the liberality to take criticism in its stride and go forth into correcting the wrongs that opinion polls of the kind undertaken by TIB suggest. In this particular case, Bangladesh's government has opted for a denial mode and would like us to believe that TIB is all wrong and that the police have been doing a good job. The home minister does not, however, consider it particularly important to inform us of the modalities upon which she has convinced herself that the TIB's indictment of the police is ill-intentioned.
Nothing can be more damaging for a country whose government feels happy when it is praised to the skies and goes ballistic when it is given a public lashing. The home minister (and there are many who might concur with her) thinks the TIB report on the police is aimed at undermining the police. She goes a step further, to let us in on the thought that what TIB has actually been doing is to promote instability in the country.
It is language that has historically been the preserve of extra- or unconstitutional regimes, all the way from Ayub Khan to Hussein Muhammad Ershad. It is military regimes which have traditionally mistaken public criticism of their performance for a commission of seditious acts against the state. You expect better than that from elected civilian governments, for such governments operate on the basis of acknowledged public support.
And yet the truth is that both the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League have, in government, fallen for the kind of knee-jerk reactions we generally associate with those who seize the state in the belief that it is their religiously ordained task to save the country from all its enemies, within as well as without.
Sahara Khatun takes issue with the figures cited in the TIB survey. Only 1,049 individuals, she tells us, cannot speak for the rest of the population. Oh yes, they can. That is what a survey is all about. In developed countries, opinion polls, particularly in relation to upcoming elections, do not take entire populations into consideration but only focus on a representative sample of them. That is how an image of the reality or probable reality emerges.
In the case of the TIB poll, must we seriously believe that the organisation should have spoken to all 160 million people of Bangladesh before it released its findings? A senior police officer only added to the ire of the minister and the inspector general of police when he asked for an apology from TIB. Where contrition and introspection on the part of those cited in the poll should have been forthcoming, there is ill-disguised umbrage at full play.
That is not the way a public organisation should be responding to a report. Any organisation whose fundamental reason for being is to provide unadulterated and transparent service to the nation must seriously reflect on any and all negative reports that come to light on the way it functions, or does not function, for that matter.
If the government wishes to make the nation believe that the TIB indictment of the police is a pack of lies, it must base its response on a credible presentation of facts. And then there are all the questions it must answer where public assessments of police performance are concerned. In the nearly twenty years since the return of elected government in the country, how much of a role have the police played in curbing crime?
That said, how does the government respond to all the grievances of citizens, those which specifically speak of police refusal to record statements or accept cases from people harassed by criminal elements in one form or another? There are innumerable instances of mid-ranking police officers owning apartments and vehicles in the transport sector. How did all this happen? And, yes, for our politicians, there is that old question: why have they made it hard for the police to function effectively through injecting their politics into a body that constitutionally must serve the state and not political parties in power?
In Bangladesh, the truth about life, about its systematic undermining or dehumanisation, is always there. There are the obvious realities, only some of which have formally been made public by Transparency International Bangladesh. The corruption, across the board, which has over the years prevented the country from moving on, the incompetence which has generally characterised the nation's political leadership and which in turn has put a brake on any thoughts of dramatic progress in our dealings with ourselves and with the rest of the world are images that you do not wait for to emerge through surveys. These are images you live with, day after day. The police know that. The home minister knows that. We the people know that.
In the larger public interest, in light of its commitment to a promotion of the public weal, the government needs to respect those who come forth with unpalatable truths. A camouflaging of reality is, in broad measure, an unwillingness to govern in the interest of the governed. The point is not what TIB has done. It is one of what this government should be doing about correcting the lapses in the public service bodies TIB points to.
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