Just Bahraini: To politicize or not to politicize?

by: Hamad Al-Jufairi

Personally, there is much hope sought in the success of the Just Bahraini campaign as there is even more pride taken for supporting it. And so, a successful act ought to be rich in preparation and its implications ought to be continuously assessed in order to maintain it’s effect. This article explores a small entity of the issues surrounding the subjectivity of politicizing the Just Bahraini campaign.

Of course, if anyone wanted to defenestrate a political idea, they would have it handled by our Bahraini MPs. This is exactly, to my understanding, why it is of our admired novelist’s - Ali Al Saeed - ** contention that the Just Bahraini campaign has “nothing to do with politics [and that] It simply promotes the idea of a united nation, of a country with proud citizens”. Frankly, if politics was what most of our MPs were doing, then I wouldn’t want the Just Bahraini campaign to have anything to do with politics neither!!

Also, there could be greater public interest and support to the campaign if it was labeled as non-political, for that the majority of the Bahraini society has a tendency to sustain quite an incredibly silent and hollow reality which follows several failures of our incompetent parliament members. It would also gain the public’s interest and support because the public is politically detached and depressed anyway. A “politico-ectomy” of the Just Bahraini campaign would, perhaps, be the preference of many, as it provides aesthetic, subjective, and romantic dimensions to the campaign.

On the other hand, though, to politicize the campaign is to bring a unified team - a new political breed - into the Bahraini political arena, serving to tackle one of the most profound obstacles and challenging realities that are embedded, usually blindly and unconsciously, within the Bahraini societal structure. In Tariq Khonji’s article, Mahmood Alyousif - who initiated the Just Bahraini campaign - is said to be “drawing up a code of ethics that will be presented to parliament and municipal candidates to sign”, which is a crucially discerning step toward materialising a political protocol of the campaign.

This is a requirement for coherent and congruent communication as well as a constructive exchange of ideas. To politicize the Just Bahraini campaign is to induce clarity through definitions, and politics is all about definitions. In political theory, Harold Lasswell defines politics as “who gets what, when, where, and how”. To politicize the Just Bahraini campaign is to provide it with objective, rational, and mechanical dimensions.

So, we are faced with a need to de-politicize the campaign to win the hearts of the people and a need to politicize it to maintain its progress and efficiency. However it might seem a paradoxical situation, it needs not be a contradictory, nor a crossroadesque one. It is at its ideal, and yet realistic, nature a mutually interdependent situation. Just as we need poetry to prose, we need to create a hierarchy of ideas and protocols that map onto each other, from the stringently political to the commonly societal.

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