Labour power and bossing: Local leadership formation and the party-state in ‘middle’ Bangladesh.
Abstract
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on how public order and authority is produced in ‘middle Bangladesh’ by investigating the political emergence and political persona of a bus labour federation (BLF) leader in Rajshahi city. The BLF is an important source for ‘muscle’ and ‘money’ power and is commonly denoted as ‘labour mafia’. Its leaders, often referred to as mastan (gangster, enforcer) or neta (leader, career politician), hold considerable power, especially where buses are the most important mode of transport. Having the capacity to bring the city to a standstill makes leaders conspicuous actors in the political power structure across the country. I examine how such leaders manoeuvre in a political system referred to as a ‘party-state’. Unlike most other labour unions, the BLF is not an organisational wing of political parties or the state, but an
‘autonomous’ and rather capricious power base that is nonetheless inextricably linked with local politics, crime, and ‘the state’.
Keywords: bus transport; labour union; party politics; party-state; Bangladesh;
public authority; public order I. Introduction
Nurul1 is a short man in his late 50s with a neat moustache, thinning salt-and-pepper hair, and a pot belly. Besides serving as a ward councillor of his neighbourhood, he 1 In order to protect the privacy of respondents all names and places are
anonymised, unless they were absolutely relevant for the argument.
is known as the general secretary (GS) of the Rajshahi branch of the ‘Bangladesh Road Transportation Workers’ Federation’,2 an organisation commonly referred to as
‘Rajshahi Motor-Sramik Union’ or simply bus labour federation (BLF), widely known for its rough and ‘mafia-like’ activities. He simultaneously held the position of labour secretary in the metropolitan branch of the ruling Awami League (AL). This position and the concomitant control over significant ‘muscle’ and ‘money’ power made him one of the most powerful and feared leaders in popular imagination in the provincial city of Rajshahi. His piercing glance, seemingly impenetrable mien, complacent and expansive gestures, confident gait, and booming voice embody the stereotypical demeanour of a South Asian ‘gangster politician’ as portrayed in popular cinema, incarnating what Michelutti et al. (2018) coined the ‘figure of the boss’.
Nurul reminded me of the film Aynabaji, a 2016 Bangladeshi political thriller depicting a struggling actor who impersonates these ‘gangster politicians’ and goes to prison in their place. The movie stereotyped Bangladeshi politicians, widely perceived as being corrupt, morally bankrupt crooks, devoid of ideological commitment. The film also spoke to a certain fascination with these characters of rough, plebeian, self-determined, self-made strongmen and violent entrepreneurs, preventing us from reducing the phenomenon to mere patronage politics when looking at (local) leadership formation in South Asia. Scholars have already pointed to the ‘wily, loveable gangster in Bollywood films’ (Sanchez 2010: 179) from which aspiring local leaders ‘drew their archetypes of success, daring, charisma, and an undeniable aesthetic sensibility’ (Osella and Osella 2004: 224). More recently, Michelutti et al. (2018: 12) have declared the ‘gangster politician’ a ‘cultural persona’
based on a powerful cross-cultural archetype referred to as goonda, mastan,
2 Originally: Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation.
dabang, badmash, ‘don’, or ‘godfather’ (different connotation depending on region and context).
For the Bangladeshi context, the term mastan is most relevant. In the cultural consciousness of contemporary Bangladesh, the archetypal mastan is described as a working-class upstart with a taste for opulence and a ‘burning desire to generate wealth’ (Michelutti et al. 2018: 12.). He is a ‘young, urban, armed and testosterone- charged’ leader of a locality who defies appointed authorities and respected elders,
‘rules through fear, sometimes avenging wrongs but more often committing them himself’ (van Schendel 2009: 252). ‘He represents the frustrations of young people in a dysfunctional state, taking the law into his own hands, championing an amoral ideology of selfhood’ (Michelutti et al. 2018: 55).
When I casually visited Nurul in his office, he invited me and my ‘local’
research collaborator for lunch. We drove to a Chinese restaurant, one of the more upscale, air-conditioned eateries in Rajshahi. Eager to impress, Nurul ordered us a lavish feast, much more than we could eat. Upon receiving the bill, Nurul casually remarked: ‘not even 3,000 BDT [≈30 USD]’, suggesting that this amount was
‘peanuts’ to him. He paid the bill, tipped all the waiters and announced loudly, ‘if your boss were here, he would give me a discount of 500 BDT’. He then took a pen and changed the amount on the bill from 3,000 to 2,500 BDT, effectively granting himself a discount of 500 BDT [≈5 USD] and instructed the staff, ‘tell him Nurul was here, and share the discount amongst yourselves’. The waiters thanked him for his generosity and escorted him to the exit. The performance was powerful and effective and even Imran, my ‘local’ research collaborator, lauded: ‘That was a badass move, he acts and talks like someone determined, someone aware of his power’.
Michellutti et al. (2018: 55) have conceptualised this as the ‘art of bossing’:
the ‘performance of personal sovereignty’ which as I argue goes beyond the simple and lopsided label of the mastan. Bossing means the act of power or ‘doing power’.
These ‘historically situated figures’ that engage in bossing are involved in
‘commandeering notions of force, governance, justice, and control of black economies’, upsetting ‘the neat boundaries between the legal and the illegal, state actor and non-state actor, democratic and undemocratic, formal and informal economies, and legitimate and illegitimate violence’ (Ibid.: 11). Their characterisation provides a unique roadmap to study how ‘the state’ or stateness is imagined and expresses itself in the specific ethnographic location where authority is permanently contested (see Hansen and Stepputat 2001).
Apart from exploring Nurul’s individual art of bossing in the context of the BLF, this paper situates the (de)construction of his personal sovereignty in a wider structural political context – commonly abstracted as ‘party-state’ (Suykens 2017) – and the implied hegemonic role of political parties in Bangladesh. The party-state model in Bangladesh assumes a ‘winner takes all mentality’ in which the ruling party captures state institutions, especially the bureaucracy and the police, in a machinian manner to the extent that ‘the distinction between the party and the government becomes confused’ (Suykens 2017: 2). In this narrative, party loyalists fill important positions in the police and bureaucracy while impeding the career paths of those opposed. The party-state then uses the police and judiciary to oppress or harass the opposition, who can then only resort to (violent) street politics such as hartal (strike).
Party-states typically use ‘party organs or wings (including youth, student, and labour organisations) with the aim to control and regulate particular sectors’ (Ibid.), making access to them contingent on party affiliation. So-called mastans are commonly
considered the tools politicians or bureaucrats use to enforce this control (Van Schendel 2009: 253). With mastans themselves increasingly turning into politicians, this professed rise of mastan control over society was coined ‘Mastanocracy’ – gangster rule (Ahmed 2004; Schendel 2009). While both models, ‘party-state’ and
‘Mastanocracy’, tend to be ideal-type frames of ‘the state’ – similar to Weber’s model of the state – using the lens of Nurul provides some empiric evidence of the facets and perhaps limits of the mastan label as an analytical category as well as of the ambiguities, contradictions, and murkiness in which the purported ‘party-state’
functions in everyday contemporary Bangladesh.
While much literature on Bangladesh has highlighted mastan politics (e.g., Jackman 2018; Ruud 2014), violent entrepreneurship in student politics (e.g., Andersen 2013; Kuttig 2019; Ruud 2010; Suykens 2018), and political (hartal) violence (Suykens and Islam 2013), the role of labour unions and its ‘blurred’
relations with ‘the state’, especially in the transport sector, has been absent, despite unions’ prominent role in party politics, corruption, crime, and violence.
Moreover, much of the existing literature explains the politicisation of violence and crime through systemic mechanisms such as ‘patronage as politics’ (Piliavsky 2014), where violence or rioting are conceptualised as a performance to establish or maintain patronage relations to gain access to state resources (Berenschot 2009;
Suykens 2018; Suykens and Islam 2013). Klem and Suykens (2018: 759) suggest that patronage and performance are two practices crucial ‘to the generation of authority in the public sphere in South Asia’, drawing on Hansen’s (2005: 136) assertion that, ‘It is the performance of a certain style of public authority – generous but also with a capacity for ruthless violence – that determines who can define and represent “the community”, defend neighbourhoods, punish and discipline’. As
Berenschot (2011: 257) argues, these ‘gangster bosses’ are often ‘seen locally as role models’ in which ‘political leadership and an aggressive assertiveness are closely tied together’.
Against this backdrop, I portray ‘the operator’ Nurul as a distinct type of boss, or an exponent of the specific art of bossing that exists in the form of transport labour leaders in many provincial towns in Bangladesh. He is situated at the intersection between the BLF, political party, and state institution in ‘middle’ Bangladesh. ‘Middle’
refers to a territorial and social location, which Ruud (in this issue) positions as a specific politico-economic landscape, distinct from the national level. Collective auto- mobility through bus companies reflects the ‘middle’ by bridging urban and rural spaces, providing transportation for the middle class and rural peasantry. As a labour union, the BLF seems to be located in the ‘middle’ between civil and political society.
As its leader, Nurul commands labour ‘muscle’ and can operate above the law and state institutions but, as I will show, is constrained by the disciplining powers of the party machine. In a way, his authority is located in the ‘middle’. He is not a young aspiring student or youth leader but also not the all-powerful (supreme) leader of Rajshahi; rather, he is an influential semi-autonomous boss of the political machine’s seemingly ‘chaotic’ underbelly. Nurul thus offers a yet unexplored entry point to understand how these political players navigate their multiple personae and at times conflicting authorities, build their legitimacy, ‘reify their constituencies, and forge connections between their subjects and the state – that is, the institutions, resources, and discourses that carry the state’s insigne’ (Klem and Suykens 2018: 779).
The article is based on ethnographic material collected during intermittent but long-term field visits over a period of three years (2015–18). The next section outlines the historical trajectory of Nurul’s rise as a boss figure and the
characteristics of his ‘art of bossing’. The third section explores the organisation of the bus sector at the national level and in Rajshahi, in light of the ‘party-state’
framework. In the last section, I show how Nurul navigates the edges of the political system and how the party-state system delimits his manoeuvring space by enforcing disciplining boundaries.
II. Becoming a labour leader: The ‘operator’ in party politics in Bangladesh
Nurul comes from a family located somewhere in the ‘middle’ of Rajshahi’s socio- economic fabric. He grew up with six brothers and four sisters. His mother was a housewife and his father a clerk in the chemistry department of Rajshahi University who worked additionally as a day labourer, with Nurul joining him from a young age.
Growing up, Nurul and his brothers were known as local thugs who tried to dominate the area. After completing High School, Nurul became a bus driver and joined the BLF. He married a friend’s sister from a ‘well-to-do’ family and, nine months later, moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to work as a truck driver for the next nine years.
Neighbourhood rumours suggest Nurul left the country to avoid legal consequences after he and his brothers killed another boy in an inter-family feud.
Nurul returned from Saudi Arabia in 1992 and continued to work as a driver but also got involved in various other ‘small business activities’. In 1996, he was elected committee member of the BLF, which coincided with the AL taking power from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). In 2009, just after an AL mayor was elected for the first time since Rajshahi was granted city status in 1991, Nurul became joint secretary and, a few years later, (acting) GS of the BLF. In 2013, he was officially elected GS of the BLF and became elected ward councillor for his area in that same year’s city corporation elections. For some city AL leaders, especially
those holding ‘cultural capital’, Nurul is not a ‘proper’ AL neta (leader) but rather an opportunistic mastan who tarnishes the party’s image. The simultaneity of Nurul’s political success in the BLF and the political triumph of AL was not coincidental.
After starting out as a local thug, Nurul emerged as a powerful boss only after affiliating himself with AL politics, affirming earlier arguments that the classical mastan or ‘master-godfather’ has long disappeared in the course of larger socio- political transformations and the increasing politicisation of the socio-economic order along party lines. Instead, activities like extortion, illegal business, and mediating access to (state) services and resources are controlled by the ‘political bully’, who is either closely associated with or a member of one of the ruling political party's wings or the police (Jackman 2018; Ruud 2014) and thus the ‘party-state’. The ‘underbelly’
of this framework, however, is more intricate, multifaceted, and contradictory than its ideal-type definition posits. For example, apart from his party affiliation, another milestone in Nurul’s career was his ability to accumulate wealth in Riyadh. Ashraf Hoque (in this issue) uses the concept of the ‘transnational village’ to refer to the
‘Londoni’ transnational connections that have been shaping the socio-political order in Sylhet for decades, even centuries. Like in Nurul’s case, these links produce authority, significantly influencing the process of leadership formation and ultimately calling into question whether politics, leaders, or bosses can ever legitimately be rendered as ‘local’.
III. Buses and labour power in contemporary Bangladesh
The Bangladesh Jatiya Sramik League3 (BJSL) is the umbrella labour organisation of the ruling AL and includes blue- and white-collar workers. The equivalent of the main opposition, the BNP, is the Bangladesh Jatiyatabadi Sramik Dal (BJSD). The labour 3 Bangladesh National Worker’s League.
wings are organised around economic sectors like the water development sector, textile industry, etc. Their main objective, according to a senior Rajshahi BJSL leader, is to expand and establish committees in as many sectors as possible as a form of ruling-party capture. The members of the ruling party’s labour wing enjoy preferential treatment (e.g., promotions, facilities) and in return expand the party’s mobilisation capacity. Similar to the dynamics in, for example, student politics, the ruling party’s labour wing prevents the opposition wing from engaging in any (public) political activities. These ruling-party labour wings become essentially an extension of ‘the state’, encroaching on various economic sectors to prevent contentious interest formation as part of a ‘party-state corporatism’. By corporatism I refer to a system in which interest associations are ‘large, singular, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered [and] sectorally compartmentalized’, exercising
‘representational monopolies’ in a given sector (Schmitter 1974: 100). ‘State corporatism’ is a distinct form of deliberate state policy, including inducements and constraints that produce these aforementioned characteristics (Collier and Collier 1979; Schmitter 1974). Party-state corporatism is the capture of state institutions by the ruling political party, using state powers and its party organisation to engage in a corporatist-style capture of social, cultural, and economic sectors.
The (bus) transport sector, however, comprises a range of competing organisations, exposing a certain plurality and autonomy of sovereign entities that point to a more decentralised party-state corporatism. This complex network of stakeholders competing for political influence and economic gains makes the bus sector a site of political competition, violence, and crime in which the role of ‘the state’, the ruling party, and other interests like business and labour affairs become
‘blurred’.
A 2009 World Bank report pointed to overlapping mandates of bodies regulating bus operations (Hassan and Hossain 2009). ‘The state’, in the form of the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC), operates only a fraction of bus services. Most buses are privately owned and operated. The Bangladesh Road Transport Association (BRTA) is the formal regulatory government body ensuring discipline and safety in the road transport sector. It issues driving licences, blue books, registration numbers, and fitness certificates and appoints the Regional Transport Committee (RTC) to award route permits for buses. The police enforces the BRTA regulations. The bus owner association (BOA), the BLF, politicians, and local institutions are additional stakeholders. The World Bank report also finds that the bus transport sector has poor service and creates severe pollution. It attributes most fatal pedestrian accidents to reckless driving and poor bus maintenance as the leading cause of weak governance, high levels of corruption, and political patronage networks.
The scourge of the bus sector has always been central in popular discourse.
In 2018, a bus killed two teenagers in Dhaka while racing another bus for passengers. Thousands of students took to the streets demanding the government to end the rampant misgovernment in the bus sector and ensure road safety (see Schulz and Kuttig in this issue).
Suspending the bus sector’s ‘special status’, however, would upset the political order in many provincial towns and district capitals. As I will show, the bus sector is regulated informally, mainly by district-level BOAs in collaboration with the respective district BLFs. While also centrally organised, the different district organisations compete with each other for lucrative routes and passengers. Neither the BOA nor the BLF are direct party organisations. In recent decades, ruling parties
have attempted to control the sector for economic accumulation, ensuring interest formation along party lines and political mobilisation by installing party loyalists or even members of the government in leadership positions in these organisations.
The most prominent national example is AL MP Shajahan Khan, the (former) Minister of Shipping (2009–19), central Executive President of the Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation (BRTWF), and vice-president of the BJSL. As president of the BRTWF, he represents the interests and is de facto the patron of the labourers and thus responsible for – and benefits from – the ‘illegal’ activities and tolls collected by the ‘transport mafia’. As minister he was responsible for regulating the transport sector and preventing these ‘illegal’ activities, but as a member of the BJSL, he directly partakes in the party capture of economic sectors. His authority over tens of thousands of labourers working in the road transport and shipping sectors as well as his government position made him arguably one of the most influential AL politicians. A big national newspaper referred to him as the ‘all-in-one minister’.4 In his work on interest group politics in Uganda’s ‘transport mafia’, Tom Goodfellow (2017: 1) asserts that organisations such as trade unions and pressure groups are generally perceived
as part of the effort to build the social foundations for democracy. Yet such organisations can also come to fulfil the opposite function, creating new structures of authoritarianism and elite collusion while also undermining autonomous organisational capacity in the sectors of society they are supposed to represent.
4 ‘The all-in-one minister’, Prothom Alo, 10 August 2014.
https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/news/51792/The-all-in-one-minister.
Accessed on 30 September 2019.
Goodfellow conceptualises the government infiltration of the informal transport sector and the subsequent influence of transport on ‘the state’ itself as ‘double capture’.
Against this backdrop, I refer to the case of Shajahan as an ‘all-in-one capture’ in the context of an encroaching ‘party-state corporatism’. However, these seemingly clear- cut party-state corporatist-style practices at the national level appear more complex, decentralised, and ‘blurred’ in Rajshahi’s bus sector and in the relationship between BLF leader Nurul and the urban political machine (see also Kuttig 2019).5
Labour power and the bus transport sector in Rajshahi
In Rajshahi, the inter-Upazila and inter-District (private) bus sector is regulated by a complex interplay between the BOA, BLF, BRTA, city administration, local politicians, and police. Contradicting the World Bank report, other stakeholders grant a prominent role to the BLF, as a senior BJSL leader in Rajshahi explains,
they [the BLF] can paralyse the whole city and stop all transportation if they want to and they are an important vote bank and political force with almost 3,000 permanent and another 3,000 non-permanent members in Rajshahi alone.
5 The concept of the urban political machine goes back to the understanding of US urban politics in the early 20th century (Erie 1990). In their most basic characteristics, political machines are defined by Erie (1993: 719) as ‘one-party systems in formally democratic states. They feature a political boss who employs grass-root party
organization to dispense patronage jobs, social services, and other divisible benefits to voters […]. Non-ideological in nature, machines serve as an alternative
distributional network to the market, dispensing material benefits to the party’s supporters’.
The Rajshahi BOA president, himself an AL leader, purports that ‘the labour federation is more powerful; they have more manpower and without them we can’t run our buses’. Indeed, transport strikes have been a tested method to negotiate labour interests vis-à-vis owner associations and local/national politicians/policy as well as between labour/owner associations across districts, but also to further labour leaders’ personal interests.6
Given the bus labourers’ prominent influence in local power structures, the party in power – and particularly the urban political machine – attempts to capture the transport sector by installing party loyalists in leadership positions to prevent interest formation that might hamper transportation. Since buses are the most important and affordable means of transportation, allowing a large part of the population to participate in modern modes of transit, any disruption fuels discontent with the ruling party. Even though the BLF is not a direct organisation of the AL, a senior BJSL leader stated that they should be subordinated to the BJSL according to the ruling parties’ vision. However,
the bus labour federation, seek proximity to the labour wing of the ruling party if it suits them politically; at other times they follow their own cause.
6 See for example: ‘Commuters suffer in Rajshahi transport trike’, The Daily Star, 15 November 2015. https://www.thedailystar.net/country/commuters-suffer-rajshahi- transport-strike-172735. Accessed on 30 September 2019; ‘Indefinite bus strike isolates Rajshahi’, The Daily Star, 26 July 2016.
https://www.thedailystar.net/country/indefinite-bus-strike-isolates-rajshahi-1259677.
Accessed on 30 September 2019.
To ensure loyalty and the organisation’s political relevance, Nurul received the position of Labour Secretary in the Rajshahi city AL committee, de facto outranking the Rajshahi BJSL leadership in the party hierarchy. Capturing the BLF is also important for sabotaging the mobilisation efforts of the opposition. In 2018, for example, the BOA and BLF called for a politically motivated 48-hour strike ahead of a BNP (Jatiya Oikyafront) rally, cancelling bookings and refusing to rent buses to rally-goers in the region, thus making it difficult for them to reach the venue.7 In turn, buses and trucks are the logistical backbone for the ruling party in organising successful rallies and events. Bus owners then get to prove their loyalty and usefulness to a specific politician and the party in general by providing (free) transportation for activists.
The party-state is interested in capturing the transport sector, but the sector itself also seeks proximity to the party-state. The BOA in Rajshahi has around 330 members who operate 565 buses. Most bus owners run only a handful of buses and are thus dependent on the BOA to effectively present their interests towards government institutions and politicians. The association is usually led by ruling-party- affiliated bus owners, helping owners run their business smoothly, especially regarding ‘cooperation’ with state institutions like the BRTA and the police and their willingness to loosen the enforcement of rules and regulations. In return, it enables the distribution of lucrative routes as inducements to loyal party bus owners.
Furthermore, the BOA offers employment opportunities as inducements for loyal
7 ‘People suffer as no buses ply in Rajshahi’, The Daily Star, 9 November 2018.
https://www.thedailystar.net/city/news/people-suffer-transport-strike-continues- rajshahi-1658272. Accessed on 30 September 2019.
party men (e.g., staff for ticket counters and timekeeping checkpoints), serving the urban political machine.
Members of the BLF also work at bus stands as ‘caller men’ or ‘gatemen’, collecting fees for their porter services from passengers and buses. On main bus stands, BLF members collect a ‘welfare fund’ fee from each bus, negotiated between the several district BOAs and BLFs. One collector expressed the labourers’
bargaining power as follows: ‘We control this area, we pay the police, they have nothing to say here’, and a bus owner explained the myriad fees with the example of one of his Rajshahi–Rangpur routes, citing fees for the welfare fund, owner association, labour federation, accident fund, the counter master, and various other fees that amounted to 3,200 BDT for a return trip between Rajshahi and Rangpur.
This complicated web of fees demonstrates a complex and continuously renegotiated equilibrium between the various stakeholders consisting of BOAs and BLFs across districts, government institutions, and (local) politicians. As I show next, the labourers especially play a significant role in these negotiations, but also in their regulation and enforcement.
Everyday bossing: Negotiating the bus transport sector
Once, a member of the Rajshahi BOA barged into Nurul’s office. Clearly upset, he argued that he paid the Sirajganj BOA 40,000 BDT to introduce a new bus service from Rajshahi to Sirajganj. After his buses arrived, however, labourers – at the directive of the Sirajganj BOA – prevented them from returning to Rajshahi with passengers. He complained that, in the absence of a route limit, the Sirajganj BOA ran already ‘way more’ buses on this route. In response to the blockage, the Rajshahi BOA prevented all Sirajganj-based buses from leaving Rajshahi. Nurul
calmed him down and called the BOA in Sirajganj and the Deputy Commissioner (DC) of Rajshahi to inform him about the situation. The DC promised to solve the issue, but only next month. Until then, they agreed the bus service should not be interrupted any further, considering the upcoming AL council and admission examination at the two Rajshahi-based universities that draw thousands of candidates to the city annually. For Nurul, ‘it’s high season for making money; I always want the buses to run as much as possible because this means more money for me and my workers’. After the decision was made, Nurul rushed to the main bus terminal to oversee the release of the Sirajganj buses. When he arrived, however, the Sirajganj owners had decided to run their buses back only the next morning.
Nurul gave a speech to the Sirajganj labourers evoking labour unity and pledging his loyalty ‘to all bus labourers’. He promised to provide them with food and accommodation for the night until they could leave in the morning.
After appeasing the labourers, Nurul called the DC, reporting the issue as solved, and complained that this was not the first time the Rajshahi BOA took action without consulting him, but that in the end it is always him solving their issues. He concluded the phone call with, ‘If anyone [BOA] tries to hinder the buses’ departure, I will break their arms and fingers’. He then called the DGFI (Directorate General of Forces Intelligence) to clarify that this whole ‘issue was not my fault, but in the end, it is always me solving the problems – that should be recognised’. He later explained,
‘they should know about my part in the story; we [the BLF] are always blamed for everything’. This was not unwarranted; many citizens and even local AL politicians regularly referred to the group as ‘labour mafia’ and complained about the poor bus service, the rough treatment of passengers, and the suspension of service in the interests of labourers or the personal enrichment of the federation’s leaders.
As this story shows, Nurul’s negotiation power is structural as well as agency- specific and largely based on his mobilisation capability and his (theoretical) ability to enforce a city/district-wide transport strike. While Nurul derives most of his power from his leadership of the BLF and his ability to enforce, not all enforcements are mastan practices or henchman work for political leaders. The various power relations involved are more complex and make a decision to threaten or enforce a strike the result of meticulous (re)calculation of positioning, alignment, and opportunities.
On the one hand, Nurul owes his rise to power to the party and (as we will see below) needs to maintain favourable relations with the local/national party leadership and bureaucracy. On the other hand, he needs to represent the labourers’ interests beyond party lines and safeguard the well-being of the majority to ensure his re- election as BLF GS. His structural location in the ‘middle’, between senior party leadership and ‘simple’ labourers, and his ability to perform this ‘middle’ identity are key elements of his successful ‘art of bossing’.
Also, the movement implied in the (inter-District) bus service challenges the territorialisation of power, making it more difficult for party bosses to monopolise it.
Buses run through territories controlled by different (and at times rival) party bosses (although from the same party) or nodes of sovereignty (cf. Ruud in this issue). This allows ‘middle’ bosses like Nurul and their organisations to operate more autonomously and navigate these decentralised nodes of power. The city bosses grant a certain autonomy or sovereignty to operators like Nurul, also to prevent rival party bosses from monopolising the sector.8
In private conversations, Nurul would criticise the increasing influence of the ruling party on the BLF in particular and the bus sector in general, despite his official 8 I thank Bert Suykens for this argument.
party membership. Interestingly, he was one of the few leaders I met who would never speak about the party or its ideology but would dwell on what he had accomplished for himself and his labourers. Publicly, of course, he pledged allegiance to the city AL leadership, but privately, he maintained relationships across party lines. A photo circulating on Facebook showing him posing in a familiar manner with the then BNP mayor prior to the city corporation elections in 2018 created some irritation within the city AL, calling his true allegiance into question.
The attempts to subjugate the BLF by integrating its leadership into the urban party machine show undoubtedly corporatist tendencies, but Nurul’s ambiguous relationship to the party-state eschews a clear-cut corporatist-style structure, while also failing to make the case for an independent, pluralistic organisation that solely represents labourers’ interests. Instead of a fixed structure, the party-state appears in the everyday as an inconsistent process of building, maintaining, (re)negotiating, and (re)calibrating relations that are continuously influx.
IV. Navigating the margins of the party-state: The rise, fall and resurrection of a boss
Nurul was elected ward councillor in 2013. His neighbourhood had traditionally been a BNP stronghold, but he used his manpower, wealth, and political backing to succeed. Among the three polling stations in the ward, the one located by a large bosti (slum) along the riverside makes up about 42 per cent of the ward’s electorate, while the other two polling booths, located in (lower) middle-class areas constitute 30 and 28 per cent respectively. The bosti area is thus key to winning the ward elections. Former BNP-backed ward councillor and Nurul’s election opponent in 2013 explains,
Nurul used a lot of money, power, and his position as a bus labour leader during his campaign. A lot of bus labourers are living in the ward, especially on the riverside. He threatened them: ‘If you don't vote for me, I will take away your membership cards’, which ensures their employment, health, and life insurance. […] He also scared people by getting them arrested and then helping their families to get them back out. Now, however, he is considered a hero by the people.
Another reason for Nurul’s fame is his management of ‘muscle’ power to remove an infamous drug syndicate from the riverside bosti. He even received an award from the city for his successful intervention. He also provided families involved in the drug business with money to start another business. One day, he warned a man in his office, ‘we know that you are smuggling, selling and using drugs. I have offered you to come to me for help. If we catch you red-handed, you will see what happens’. He enjoyed widespread popularity in both his neighbourhood and the riverside area, although he intervened in a lucrative business there. A former bangla (local liqueur) den owner in the bosti recounted:
After the counsellor [Nurul] started to raid, I immediately stopped this business.
He was beating up everyone involved with this and sending them to jail. Luckily, I never got beaten up and never had a police case against me. […] Nurul offered me 5,000 BDT to quit and start another business, but I refused. Now that he is running for counsellor again, I asked him to give me […] a job. […]
Nurul also does good things. Those who begged to him for help, received help.
But you have to keep asking for it. […] As a counsellor, he is supposed to look after everybody […] in his area.
Her position towards Nurul seemed ambivalent. On the one hand, she could somewhat empathise with his drive against the drug business on a moral level and even campaigned for him during his re-election bid to maintain good relations, in the hope to be awarded with a permanent job as a street cleaner. On the other hand, however, she stressed that she would vote for another candidate, not based on party affiliation but his clean reputation.
Another inhabitant of the riverside bosti reflected on Nurul’s activities as ward councillor in the days before the 2018 city corporation elections:
Nurul is very popular in this area. […] Whenever anyone needed help, he provided. He says he will help people with all the money he gets as councillor.
[…] We know that he has also struggled; we can relate to his lifestyle. He did rough things but […] he was only rough because he wanted justice. If you want something to be done in your area and you inform the city corporation, they don’t respond. That is when Nurul gets angry and behaves roughly. […]. He made everyone realise that if they want their work to be done, Nurul is the best choice. […] People want a strong leader who will be able to fight for their rights and development.
The BLF is Nurul’s main source of power. Being a labour leader enabled him to effectively curb the drug business in his area, de facto enforcing justice. He used his manpower to beat up drug dealers and his political influence to force the police (who also profited from the drug business) to support him. This is what Michelutti et al.
(2018) refer to as jugad (the ‘art of making do’), which in this case ‘transmogrifies’
into the art of bossing. The use of (legitimate) violence and calculated acts of benevolence, the perpetual projection of strength and masculinity, and an unruliness
towards upper echelons of city administration and the party were central to Nurul’s political persona and success as a leader in his neighbourhood.
To reinforce his image as a self-made man from a humble background, he renounced the custom of having a chauffeur, driving his black SUV himself. Rumours suggest a businessman gifted him the car in return for a successful bid for a Dhaka- Rajshahi bus route permit. Complementing his robust driving style and unruly image, he used an amplifier to play various siren sounds normally used to identify cars of high officials, police, or ambulances, and a loudspeaker to yell orders or insults at other road users. Michelutti et al. (2018: 19) posit, ‘it is this power of the self-made entrepreneurial boss with all his capacity to excite, politicise, and even entertain that provides charisma to these figures’. To further stratify his persona, Nurul patronised a local hijra (transgender, third gender) lobby organisation advocating for social recognition of the community: He hosts and finances public cultural events for the community and supports them during problems with the police.
Bosses’ access to the police is key for their ability to boss and produce effective authority. In Nurul’s case, he has established networks with the police through the BLF. People from all over the city would approach him for help with police-related issues. Ironically, Nurul perceived himself – and the role of political leaders in general – as an antidote to the ‘criminal and corrupt practices of the police’.
He extended this self-perception to his attitude towards the use of violence by nourishing a form of vigilante justice, which was perceived as legitimate by many people, as a reaction to the wide-ranging mistrust of the police and their capacity to enforce the law impartially. This was most prominently illustrated in Nurul’s anti-drug drive, but also in how he maintained discipline and order among his followers. When
one of his men, a young husband from his neighbourhood, was accused of using drugs and beating his wife, Nurul’s right-hand man beat him severely as punishment.
He ordered the man not to return to his family for one month but also offered him residence in his house during this time.
Interestingly, people acknowledge Nurul’s propensity for a certain kind of violence but seem to be willing to brush it aside or at least accept it as something necessary to ensure discipline and further the interests of some in the community vis-à-vis the seemingly all-powerful ruling-party politicians, bureaucrats, and the police. People located at the wrong end of the spectrum incurring Nurul’s wrath might feign their loyalty to him by participating in his campaign rallies to maintain good relations but shift their loyalty in the voting booth, as the bangla den owner showed. Others, such as the family who was involved in a long-term feud with Nurul’s family and whose son Nurul and his brothers were accused of killing, moved to another ward after Nurul’s election in 2013.
Despite his perhaps already advanced age, Nurul’s practices and performances are reminiscent of the mastan figure in popular cinema. This caricature, however, clearly falls short of capturing the complex and stratified persona of a boss like Nurul as well as the variety of different power relations and dynamics at play that go beyond simple mechanisms of party capture and the ideal- type model of a party-state. In general, party ideology and affiliation seemed to play a subordinate role. People in the bosti were more interested in how they could relate to the leader on a personal level, how they would be treated, and whether he would be able to ‘get things done’.
Deprivation of boss sovereignty: Trespassing the boundaries of the party-state
Nurul’s electoral success completed his ‘all-in-one capture’ and significantly increased his influence in the city. With his propensity for vigilante justice, labour mafia image, murky loyalties, and unruly behaviour, however, he eventually trespassed the boundaries drawn by the party-state in the spatio-temporal political context; or, conversely, Nurul miscalculated/misread the boundaries of his manoeuvring space during a period of one-party-state consolidation.
In the 2016 BLF election, Nurul was accused of ordering his followers to vote against the city’s AL-backed presidential candidate and instead vote for a BNP candidate whose influence would be marginal under an AL government, in an attempt to consolidate his own power over the federation. The federation would have become a ‘one-man show’ (city AL leader). The city AL leadership monitored the election process and, upon realising their candidate’s defeat, they mobilised their party cadres and forced their way into the polling station, vandalising the election ground and snatching and burning the ballots. They postponed the elections indefinitely, installed a 21-member convener committee led by the unsuccessful AL- backed candidate, and expelled Nurul from the party. Overnight, Nurul lost his two main sources of power: his ruling-party affiliation and his hold over the BLF. One high-level city AL leader explained the situation as follows:
Nurul was really out of line. He was going after money, and the party members got angry. […] He has this attitude when he thinks that he is the only man with power. Nurul was secretly supporting an opposition candidate, and he could not be controlled.
Desperate to hold on to power, Nurul had to secure his re-election in the 2018 city corporation election to increase his chances of reintegrating into the city AL machine.
Interestingly, the people re-elected Nurul, against the will of the city AL leadership and without the explicit support of the BLF. Of course, Nurul spent a significant amount of money to win the elections. Many (bus) labourers, however, still supported him, and he was re-elected not (only) for the money but for his past performance and his unruly, relatable personality, even though his ability of getting things done (jugad) might be significantly impaired without the support of the city AL leadership and his position as BLF leader.
Only a few days post-election, however, Nurul mobilised as many people as possible from the riverside bosti and transported them to the grave of A.H.M.
Kamaruzzaman, father of city AL president and mayor A.H.M. Khairuzzaman Liton and one of four national leaders who were killed during the so-called jail-killing day in 1975. Nurul brought a flower bouquet, an Imam led a prayer, and a photographer documented the symbolic act. After the ceremony, he met a city AL leader close to Liton in a field by the graveyard, and the leader congratulated him on his electoral victory and urged him ‘to keep working harder to make things better for the people.’
Nurul replied:
You know me. I will keep on doing the good work. And please tell Liton that I came here today and paid respect to his father. I wanted to bring around 3,000–4,000 people […], but Liton only asked me to do this today. So, I had to arrange everything on very short notice. […] With Liton’s support, I promise I will do great things for my area.
The city AL leader promised to support Nurul’s political resurrection and to convey his plea for remission to Liton, considering the strong support from his ward and his capacity to mobilise large numbers of people. In the following months, Liton’s wife attended Nurul’s programmes in the ward to initiate a rapprochement. At the time of writing, rumours among journalists suggest that the convener committee of the BLF was in the process of scheduling new elections. Nurul’s sources of money and muscle power and his ability to fix things were still curtailed, but due to the popularity in his ward during elections and after being ‘taught a lesson’, the local AL machine seemed willing to resurrect him as a labour leader.
V. Conclusion
Nurul is one of many bosses navigating the edges of the party-state in ‘middle’
Bangladesh. He is central in one of many nodes of sovereignty that are always tentative and unstable and manoeuvres in a contentious, semi-autonomous space delimited only by the disciplining forces of an encroaching party-state corporatism.
These boundaries, however, are continuously in flux and (re)negotiated either with the city party machine or the national party-state (i.e. the DGFI).
Nurul’s stratified political persona and his art of bossing are an expression of the complexities in leadership formation in Bangladesh and the precarity of unequivocal categorisations of supposedly clearly defined leadership types, such as the mastan. To be analytically useful, this residual category should be attributed to certain practices as part of the ‘art of bossing’ rather than be a label for a person or leadership type. Mastan performances and practices are widespread in the everyday political landscape in Bangladesh. Labelling most politicians/bureaucrats simply as
mastans or as ‘Mastanacracy’ limits our understanding of the complex power relations that mark public order and stateness in Bangladesh.
Bosses like Nurul constitute the locus where the party-state is effectively negotiated and the ‘state effect’ produced. They embody a complex party-state- society entanglement that becomes visible when they navigate the intricate, ambiguous, and sometimes unruly underbelly that contrasts with the generalising notions of a rigid and hierarchical political order commonly associated with a party- state structure.
Nurul exemplifies the rowdy margins of the party-state, where not everything and everybody is integrated. Bosses like Nurul seem to navigate fairly autonomously within a space that places them above the law and state institutions, as long as their
‘art of bossing’ does not tarnish the ruling parties’ image or directly opposes the party’s interests. Perhaps Nurul’s attempt to go against the party can be perceived as resistance to the party-state system from within, but his failure to do so also shows the limits of this type of resistance. The edges of this operational space seem unstable, continuously in flux, and subject to everyday (re)negotiations, but are central to understanding changing ‘cultures of authority’ (Michelutti et al. 2018: 9) and ‘blurriness’ in which ‘the state’ appears.
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