This or That

My comments on the www.drishtipat.org blog about Dr Yunus joining politics. [press headlines of this post to take you to the main arguement]

Some of the arguments here seem to stem from the “either-or” school of logic. We need either to be in Bangladesh or be a part of the diaspora. We should be either praising Doc Y in DS or writing in NYT. We should either be in awe of Grameen Bank or we need to call it a “loan shark / Kubliwala”. Either Doc Y joins politics or runs GB.

I never understood the idiom “have ones cake and eat it to”. I always (wrongly) thought that I need to have the cake to eat it!

Why am I rambling? Well I think we need to do both.

Naeem is absolutely right we need to focus our efforts internationally to bring “Bangladesh” to a more positive light in international media. But at the same time we need to reinforce the “greatness” of the Nobel Prize win to the local audience.

While it is true that we need to reverse the brain drain from Bangladesh. Our citizens (hyphenated or not) have a pivotal part to play in the nation’s development from where they are now. NY, London, LA, Dubai, KL, Moscow – wherever! You can be across the world and help the nation so don’t give into the “etho jodi dorod, thahole Bangladesh eshe kaaj koro” logic. It is by people who are so intellectually poor that they just can’t fathom the fact that our progress is a joint-global-every-person-everywhere-for-the-nation role! You guys who are out of Dhaka are doing a swell job!

To come to the point – Doc Y’s role in politics I think should not to be limited to CTG. The responsibility is not his alone. Moreover constitutionally he is not allowed to head the CTG. I don’t believe that we should take decisions based on one person. It sets a bad precedence.

The role that I see for Doc Y is to lead a “people’s movement” and head an National Coalition Government comprised of civil society, bureaucrats, armed force, NGOs, business, political representatives and the youth. The mandate of this NCG will be to “clean-up” the current system of government and put in the basic road map for growth (aka CDP’s Citizen’s Charter). After 18-24 months they will hand over power to a democratically elected parliament.

After that Doc Y can take a role of a political “ombudsman”. Or as Kawser suggested, form a political think tank / institution to help promote the virtues of clean politics.

(BTW Naeem – how about doing a comic character with the hero as Doc Y the fighter of evil? Aimed at educating Bangladesh’s population about democracy, government and their role in it).

Let us have our pitha and eat it too!