State, Society, and Democratic Futures

Abstract

This chapter observes that while Bangladesh is embarked on the quest for democracy, structural features of political parties, various organs of the state and political cultures, create a tendency for political upheavals and sliding into authoritarian regimes. An important factor in this tendency is the polarization of political parties and the propensity of the incumbent government to use totalitarian modes of governance, and of the parties in opposition to use violence and hartals (work stoppage) in protest. This creates a space for the military to intervene in politics. This chapter says, ‘the civil military conflict in Bangladesh, indeed, since the time of the military intervention in 1975, is in many ways an extension of intra-civil conflict’.