In 1995 when Awami League and Jamaat demanded the "Caretaker government", I found that hypocritical because - you're saying that you don't trust the political government to undertake the national election and then once you get the winner of the election, you hand over the power to the same "not-so-trustful" political parties. It's like - "I can't trust you for the 3 months to take limited decisions only related to election but I can hand you over my full trust for the next 5 years when you can take decisions that start from changing the constitution or going for a full fledged war". To me that's hypocrisy. And the hypocrisy reaches to it's epic point when I see Sheikh Hasina is singing the same song that Khaleda Zia sang during the 1995 Non Cooperation Movement ("অসহযোগ আন্দোলন"). Anyway, for at least in this stand, I'm still a gentleman (ভদ্র লোকের এক কথা) - "The concept of Caretaker Government is a hypocritical and shameful for any country"
Now let's take a look into the bigger picture of our political system. I believe "Democracy" has reached to it's point where we can safely label it as obsolete. The reason of this isn't that the democracy is no longer relevant now, which is nothing close to true, but mainly because of the reason that it's systemic process has reached to its limit. Consider the process of electing a government - we vote once in 5 years and then the elected government is on its own way, just like in past when one sails a ship on a voyage and then waiting at the port for it to come back in months or years. For voyage, we don't do it anymore because the technology has changed and enabled us to tag GPS navigation, Sattelite phone etc. to track the ship at it's every points by the precision of inches. Now the question is, why we let our government to set sail for 5 years on its own way and wait for 5 years to see if it has reached its destination (i.e. fulfilling it's commitment and agendas).
Now with the invention of the digital technologies we have the technologies and knowledge to change this outdated election process entirely. We can use digital technologies (mobile phone, web, social networking, wireless technologies etc.) with which we can vote in near realtime fashion for any seemingly decisive matters, like - should we go to World Bank for Padma bridge, should government provide transit to India, should government sign TIFA with the USA, Should we ban Jamaat, Should the Constitution be changed, should Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir stay as State Minister and what not. Essentially I'm talking about getting referendum on every major decisions. We didn't do it before because that wasn't feasible, expensive and not cost effective but now it's not the case, or at least it won't be the case in 10/15 years.
To get a sense of how this referendum would look like, just look into the "অ ন লা ই ন ভো ট" on http://www.prothom-alo.com/ or the way White House use voting on petitions on https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/. There'll be some major technological and social challenges along this way like how every eligible citizen would be connected securely so that their identify isn't compromised. If you had asked me whether this is possible 10 years ago, I would answer as straight no but look at how we had successfully implemented the National ID project for the entire country which seems extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve for a developing country like Bangladesh. It may read like science fiction but who dared to think 20 years ago that almost everyone in Bangladesh would be connected using a device that you can hold on your palm.
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