time and judicial and organisational skills. The caretaker government would do well to encourage civil watch bodies to monitor the progress, including inviting critical reviews and suggestions on how best to expedite the process. The fourth area is the Public Service Commission, where replacing the erstwhile partisan commissioners with the seemingly non-partisan professionals has made the institution more credible in the eyes of the public. However, like the Election Commission, the independence of the Public Service Commission is yet to be ensured. It is only by changing the rules of business, particularly relating to the appointments of the commissioners and other recruitments, can it be expected to be functionally independent and become a state institution in reality. Finally, and a much talked about achievement in this category, is the Anti-Corruption Commission. Here too the replacement of partisan commissioners with more financially clean, non-partisan individuals with the full backing of the military, has made the institution more credible and has succeeded in at least making an impact in carrying out its institutional mandate. The impact, however, has largely remained limited to the task of bringing allegations of corruption against the “larger than life” politicians and businesspersons, and with few exceptions, without successfully prosecuting them in courts on the basis of judicially credible evidence. However, it must be pointed out that the Anti-Corruption Commission is confident of the evidence of corruption it has, but this is something that needs to be watched very closely. Some critics, however, question as to why the drive against corruption is so relentless and aggressive when other developed countries—including the USA or Singapore—had phases of corruption in their respective developmental history. One quick answer would be that in developed countries the corrupt reinvested their illgotten money in their own land, while in Bangladesh the corrupt spent mostly in foreign luxury goods or spurious activities or hoarded in banks beyond borders. The governmental drive against corruption, however, had a negative impact on the economy, the discussion of which follows later in the paper. The area in which the caretaker government has had the least success is the democratisation of political parties through internal reforms. The present government is partly to be blamed for it, due to some of its policies, ranging from the so-called minus-2 formula (i.e. removing Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina from active politics) to the non-withdrawal of the state of emergency or not making it more flexible. At times comments by some advisors have made the task even more difficult, although the caretaker government has recently rectified this by firing four advisors and quickly replacing them with new ones.3 What is required here is space in which the political parties could activate a form of collective leadership and replace the age-old structure of having an all-powerful leader with almost dictatorial power. The less the time given to collective leadership to start and settle down the greater is the risk of having the older structure survive and create a dent in the political agenda of the caretaker government. Keeping this issue in perspective, it is imperative that the state of emergency be either withdrawn or its rules made more flexible so that the political
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parties enjoy the required space to congregate, codify and practice internal democratic party reforms. Here both time and space are the essence of the matter. This brings up the second cluster of challenges which could be called economic. The governmental drive against corruption and the negative impact it had on the economy has already been mentioned. This was somewhat inevitable, although it now seems that the government did not foresee such a situation. Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) had consistently pointed out the extent of corruption and the unholy alliance between the big businesses and the politicians. The fact, however, remains that the government did not prepare itself for facing an economic stalemate; in certain areas there is indeed a decline in corruption resulting from the policy of incarcerating corrupt politicians and businesspersons or what could be referred to as the aggressive policing of the business-politician nexus. Three other challenges complicated the dismal state of economy even further. One is the global impact of the oil price hike to over USD100 per barrel, particularly in making the price of rice and other food items costlier. The second is the mid-level flood in the middle of the year followed by the devastating impact of the Sidr hurricane, which also saw the much-needed aman rice crop getting washed away completely. All these have contributed to a situation where the common people are finding their purchasing power drastically curtailed within weeks if not days and are increasingly losing trust in the caretaker government. Some reports indicate that only 6-8 importers control 60-80 percent of all imports.4 If this is the case, and in the backdrop of some big businesspersons getting incarcerated or pursued by the government, it is quite obvious that such people would be reluctant to initiate business ventures in such an atmosphere and would lend support to forces working for a quick end to the caretaker government. Since the big businesses have laundered money abroad, there is also reason to believe that they have a good number of international friends to help them out in their time of distress. Moreover, the hardship of the common masses could create grounds for a moral campaign against the caretaker government under the leadership of the so-called left or progressive forces; the forces comfortable with the emergency setting could now find convenient to join this campaign and transform it to its benefit. How to re-energise the economy then? Although somewhat late, the caretaker government has realised that the enemies within and abroad are formidable enough for not only stalling the economy but also derailing the process of democratisation and good governance, including the political roadmap of having parliamentary elections before the deadline of December 2008. The caretaker government could certainly gear up its efforts towards restoring confidence in the minds and activities of the entrepreneurs, both foreign and local, by undertaking the following tasks: One, emphasis ought to be given more to the task of changing the structure reproducing corruption than on the policing and incarceration of the individuals. Not that the latter is not required, only that without changing the structure the impact of
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