When politics is upended

Fake politics has been upsetting the global social order in these unsettling times. Fake politics has always been there, especially since the decade of the 1960s.

In the United States, where a political arriviste named Donald Trump has been peddling this falsehood of an idea he calls fake news, the truth is that these rich men who are the government in Washington these days are guilty of practising fake politics. We can look at it in either of two ways.

In the first place, fake politics is politics of pretence, practised by men and women who understand little of the higher calling of politics. In the second, fake politics is politics when it passes into the hands of the ignorant or the arrogant or both, people who do not understand the way the world operates and have precious little idea of the workings of the universe.

Fake politics was at work in Bangladesh in the 1970s when determined efforts at both local and global levels were made to undermine the government of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.  Fake news-cum-politics was the story of the reporter whose lies led to the death of the four leaders of the Mujibnagar government in prison in November 1975. Nearer home in Bangladesh, in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has been busy in her own practice of fake politics.

She has had nothing to say on the plight of the Rohingyas. She holds power without responsibility and actually has come to believe that looking away from reality is good politics and things will work themselves out in good time. Real politics is about breaking down walls. Fake politics puts up walls and barbed wires between states.