Foreign Policy Blogs

BNP's Protest Program is a Long Time Coming

There is this variant of political programs that exist only in so far one can bandy it about, raging, fulminating as if the program itself were sufficient to move hearts and mind.  So it is, that the BNP has long launched the anti-government program that never seems to come about.   The date of the program seems to have gotten pushed back so that even the proposed date to discuss the nation-wide program, itself, takes up ink and copy.

This hand-wringing waiting game has just one cause: no leader within the BNP is ready to confront the argument that any mass protest is likely to result in strikes–hartals–with subsequent adverse economic consequences.   During a trying time, when Bangladesh’s economics is fragile, strangling her politics with a strong willed fist is likely to end up with perverse public results.

 

Author

Faheem Haider

Faheem Haider is a political analyst, writer and artist. He holds advanced research degrees in political economy, political theory and the political economy of development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and New York University. He also studied political psychology at Columbia University. During long stints away from his beloved Washington Square Park, he studied peace and conflict resolution and French history and European politics at the American University in Washington DC and the University of Paris, respectively.

Faheem has research expertise in democratic theory and the political economy of democracy in South Asia. In whatever time he has to spare, Faheem paints, writes, and edits his own blog on the photographic image and its relationship to the political narrative of fascist, liberal and progressivist art.

That work and associated writing can be found at the following link: http://blackandwhiteandthings.wordpress.com