When Lutfuzzaman Babar was spotted sitting lonely and forlorn in a prison van only days ago, it was this truth about the loss of power and the attendant humiliation that came alive once more.

Of course, men have lost power through the ages. And they have endured humiliation down the centuries, often posthumously. History, if you have cared to notice, is essentially a tale of the insignificance that those enjoying power without being worthy of it can all too easily be reduced to.

There is, therefore, little that surprises us these days. If you believe in justice taking its natural course, you will know that crime must necessarily be followed by requisite punishment. But then, it is not a just world that we are part of. The gods, in legend as also in faith, have demonstrated the many ways in which they can ignore the rules of justice and settle instead for an unabashed display of arbitrary power.

If now you are confronted with the question of the law plucking up enough courage to haul the once-upon-a-time powerful to the corridors of justice, you might reasonably ask if that courage will endure, if the law will truly see the entire process of justice through to the end.

There will be the doubts, for reasons not hard to fathom. In a country where men and women empowered to ensure justice have blatantly twisted the law to suit their own ends, doubt underlies even the best of motives.

But then comes the matter of poetic justice. What has been happening to the former minister of state for home, and to his friends, is simply a matter of comeuppance. That police vehicle in which Babar occupied a worn-out, decaying seat was, and will truly be, a symbolism for all the wrongs that men in their days in power inflicted on the citizens of this country.

It was Babar's police force that swooped on innocent citizens and hauled them away to prison, in what was outrageously described as "mass arrests." Now those same policemen have swooped on him, on the likes of him. And there you have poetic justice working for you.

Crime may go unpunished by the law. But when you sin, and sin relentlessly, there is that mysterious working of nature that strikes you down. When that happens, it is the sad plight of men who once played God that seizes your imagination. General Ershad's nine years in power were followed swiftly by much more that number in terms of penalty, once he was driven out of office. It was natural justice playing itself out.

Lift your gaze, to spot the beautiful country that Liberia was once. In 1980, a little known sergeant named Samuel Doe seized power and, in a long fit of bloodthirst, put the president, William Tolbert, to a gory death.

He followed that up with the shooting of a number of ministers on the beaches. He called that a revolution, and settled back to preside over the fortunes of a nation whose skies had gone bleak. Not many years later, Doe died a horrible death at the hands of his enemies. Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam put Emperor Haile Selassie to death. One day, he simply fled into exile.

Abuse of power carries with it the very grave chances of recrimination, even if that recrimination takes form and substance rather late in the day. In much the same manner, an illegal, bloody seizure of power carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed humiliated himself when he presided over the murder of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the four leaders of the Mujibnagar administration. His humiliation attained roundness of a kind when he was forced out of Bangabhaban barely three months into an ill-gotten job.

For a man who once was symbolic of a certain stream of thought in the Awami League, it is supreme irony that Moshtaque is today a forgotten man in Bangladesh. When he is remembered, if at all, it is through his being recalled as a man who stabbed his leader fatally in the back, and pushed a vibrant nation down the road to unmitigated disaster.

In India, Sanjay Gandhi may not have led his country to ruin. But had he not been checked through the elections of 1977, his increasingly sinister shadow would surely have created the conditions that undermine the political and social base of a nation.

The young Gandhi never expected the law to touch him, but it did. And that was a powerful sign of a nation's ability to regain its self-esteem through putting its bad men to shame.

From the historical point of view, therefore, the defeat of the Congress in 1977 was a necessary happening. It not only humiliated Indira Gandhi and her child, it also left her sufficiently humbled to be able to return to high political office.

When you speak of the many ways in which power can be misused, and is frequently mishandled, you recall the times of Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka. She could have done without the secret, nocturnal act of a fresh swearing-in as head of state, focusing instead on plans to leave office at the end of her prescribed term.

On a technicality, as she and her cohorts argued, she needed a year more in presidential office. The Supreme Court swiftly cut her down, telling her that the extra year was not hers to take. Out of office thus, Kumaratunga went though humiliation a second time when her inordinately large security detail was sliced down to suit her post-presidential requirements.

Pakistan's Yahya Khan thought he could carry on in office despite the surrender of his army in Bangladesh. His chief of staff was booed into silence by angry young army officers in Rawalpindi two days into the birth of Bangladesh; and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto lost little time in placing him under house arrest. He was never seen in public again.

Perhaps no picture of power giving way to the pathetic is more poignant than the spectacle of Reza Shah Pahlavi crisscrossing the globe in a search for a home in exile. Not even his friends in America would agree to give him a roof over his head.

Humiliation of a different kind was spotted in America in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson was forced to abandon his goal of seeking a fresh term as president. But that was minuscule compared to the ignominy that destroyed Richard Nixon in 1974. He imagined enemies all around, made lists of them and then had them wiretapped. He tripped on those very wires.

The rise and fall of men and women will forever remain a subject of fascinating study. Boris Yeltsin had a chance to be a good, if not great, president of Russia.

That prospect was, however, overshadowed by his persistent provincialism. In our own land of a thousand broken dreams, when yesterday's powerful politicians protest that they did not pilfer, that they did not give us pain in their days in power, they insult themselves and humiliate history.

There is only so much misery you can take. And misery is what that van taking some of our fallen gods off to prison typifies for us, indeed for anyone aware of the pitfalls of morality tipping over into a roadside ditch.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.