Whatever may be the truth, the bigger reality is one of Iajuddin Ahmed's rapidly turning into a target for those who have waited for him to act and then have made the uncomfortable discovery that he is either not willing or not capable of acting in presidential manner.

Building on such a line of reasoning, you could well argue that the dynamism and reassurance the country expected from the president once he took upon himself, much to our consternation, the onerous charge of chief advisor of the caretaker government have simply not been forthcoming.

That assessment quickly leads to another, which is that by taking over the additional responsibility of chief advisor and through modalities that remain questionable, Iajuddin Ahmed may have dug a hole not only for himself but for the country as well. In these past weeks, with mounting evidence of the head of state remaining silent and inactive, the hole has been getting wider and deeper.

Which is why it becomes the very great moral responsibility of citizens to wonder whether the President should not now be persuaded to shed the raiment of chief advisor that he has had on him since late last month. Indeed, with the Awami League and the Liberal Democratic Party now clearly calling for Iajuddin Ahmed's departure from the office of chief advisor, the problem for the head of state as well as the country takes a new dimension, and none too comfortable for us at that. The clear and unadulterated perception today is that Iajuddin Ahmed has not done what had been expected of him.

But then, no one really expected him to take over as chief advisor either. That job ought to have gone to Justice Mahmudul Amin Chowdhury or Justice Hamidul Haq. It should have been for the president's advisors and well-wishers to inform him that the move on his part to head the caretaker administration was fraught with risks. There were all the predictable dangers associated with the move, given especially the sustained struggle for the removal of Justice KM Hasan from contention as chief of the caretaker apparatus and for the departure of Justice MA Aziz from the Election Commission. No one saw the dangers, or acknowledged them -- not the president, not the men around him, not the party that elected him to high office. Those dangers have today taken a turn where it is the constitutional future of the republic that is now at risk of being gravely damaged.

There are mistakes that President Iajuddin Ahmed has made since taking over as chief advisor. He ought to have taken a leaf out of Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed's book. Between December 1990 and February 1991, Shahabuddin proved to be a decisive interim leader and rare was the moment when he ran into partisan criticism over his handling of affairs of state. Iajuddin Ahmed, for all his dependence on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party to be elected to Bangabhaban, should have emulated Shahabuddin and thereby inform the country that it was in good hands.

When you go over the record he has set in these few weeks, you can only conclude, with a sad shaking of the head, that Bangladesh is not in good hands. When the Council of Advisors must spend days trying to schedule a meeting with the president/chief advisor, you tend to ask the very upsetting question of whether or not government in this interim phase is turning out to be a lackadaisical affair, even a pointless one. President Iajuddin Ahmed, in the manner of earlier chief advisors of earlier caretaker administrations, should have devised a system that would have permitted his advisors to meet him every day, and more than once.

Consider the enormity of the problems Iajuddin Ahmed faces. They are far more complicated and loaded than those which confronted previous caretaker governments. On the one hand, there is the terrible legacy of corruption that the BNP-Jamaat government has left behind. On the other, the careful process of political engineering that went on in the civil administration during the era of the alliance government was a huge boulder the president should have started chipping away at. And then, to be sure, there is the vexing issue of what the people of Bangladesh can or must do about the stubbornness of the chief election commissioner.

These are issues that call for decisive handling. That in essence requires the presence of hard-nosed, non-partisan and above-the-fray leadership. President Iajuddin Ahmed is obviously not the man to come forth with such leadership. His failure to condemn the police brutalities that took the life of an Awami League man last week has proved to be not only a sign of weak leadership but of an insensitive one as well. He holds charge of the home ministry but he has seen little reason, in a manner reminiscent of those who manned the department in the BNP-Jamaat era, to dump the bad eggs in the police basket.

When the state takes the life of a citizen in unnatural circumstances, it becomes the moral responsibility of the man or woman at the top to say sorry. President Iajuddin Ahmed has not said sorry. We are all sorry that he has not. And we are sorry as well that he has taken upon himself all those ministries which he clearly cannot preside over or do justice to.

Those ministries are today in a somnambulistic state. The fault for the mess is not in our stars, but in our president. It should have been his job to lead us out of the woods; and we would have overlooked the way in which he took over the machinery of state if he had convinced us that he could rise to the occasion. Instead, we have been treated to a spectacle of a government muddling through. The president baffled us with his taunt that those on his staff should not be disturbed. He seemed to have forgotten the distinction between domestic help and servants of the republic. And he went ahead to promote his controversial press secretary to the position of an advisor. It was a case of misplaced priorities. Observe the alacrity with which the president called the CEC and his colleagues to Bangabhaban to discuss, of all things, the election schedule. Priorities got skewed again.

The mysteries, in the plural manner of speaking, have been arising steadily and deepening thick and fast. President Iajuddin Ahmed meets the Council of Advisors for as long as two hours, without he or the leading bureaucrat manning the home ministry letting the advisors in on the information that letters have gone out to the district headquarters about a deployment of the army in the job of maintaining law and order. It then becomes embarrassing for the presidency to be compelled to withdraw the letter, as it became embarrassing only days earlier when Iajuddin Ahmed thought a presidential form of government had taken over.

Of course there was a clarification, pointing to the role the media had played in the dissemination of the news. The accusatory finger, as always, was directed at newsmen. No mention was made of the words and terms the president had actually used. For good measure, the television channels went on playing them over and over again. All of this leads you to one overwhelming question: Why did the president, remaining fully cognizant of the constitution, momentarily not remember that the country happened to function along the tracks of parliamentary politics?

Let the answer be. We will, at this point, rekindle our hope that Iajuddin Ahmed, despite his political beliefs and loyalties, despite the questionable manner in which he decided to be chief advisor, despite all the time he has lost in indecision since the caretaker administration took charge of the country, will still stumble upon a miracle and tell us that we can after all afford to give him our support.

If he does not or cannot, we will be honest and fair to him and inform him that in the larger interest of this People's Republic, he should begin thinking in terms of letting slip his hold on the caretaker administration. There is yet time to invite one of the two judges, earlier passed over, to be chief advisor. And time is still there for the occupant of Bangabhaban to look and act presidential.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.