Pandemonium at BNP meeting disquieting
The foiling of the council session of the Chittagong city unit of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party amid bedlam in full public glare on Monday is extremely disquieting. No one who believes in democracy wishes to see such pandemonium get the better of an established political party. In the interest of healthy politics in Bangladesh, we expect the BNP to tide over its difficulties and truly emerge as a vibrant and cohesive organization. Its troubles, let us note, should not be a cause for satisfaction on the part of other parties because the pains the BNP is passing through have to do with the bad tradition of nurturing unruly elements and feuds within a party. Such a tendency is to be discerned in varying degrees among other political parties as well. All other parties may, therefore, desist from the temptation of feeling happy at the BNP's discomfiture and indeed hope that such disturbances are defused within the party before long.
The realities today are not hard to notice. While it is customary for the ruling party (whichever party it is at a given time) to hold itself together despite some incipient dissent in the ranks, it is by and large the opposition which finds itself in disarray. Loss of power has generally been a spur to chaos among the rank-and-file. And that is what became obvious once more at the BNP's abortive council meeting in Chittagong.
It all brings us to thoughts of the sane, transparent culture of debate and dissent which once defined political behaviour in the country. Where, we might as well ask, has the old politics of values, of winning hearts through the art of enlightened compromise, gone? In earlier times, dissent within a party was a given and yet this spirit of argument and counter-argument kept parties united and strong. The fact that such is not the case today is a very sad manifestation of the way in which a negative political culture of intolerance has been nurtured over the years.
But none of this would have happened in Chittagong had intra-party democracy been the norm in the party. Had the BNP (or for that matter any other political party) eschewed the opaque and gone for a natural growth of leadership through regular party councils and elections, it would today be an organization able to withstand all sorts of pressure, internal as well as external. An inherent balance and sense of cohesiveness would have underpinned the party, especially in its worst phases. But let this also be a note of caution for other parties --- that internal democracy, the creation of space to allow for dissent and debate, the ability to strike a harmony between different schools of thought are the foundations on which parties thrive and so help democracy to gain in strength.
The sooner our political parties comprehend these truths, the better served will we and our future generations be. In democratic politics, there is no alternative to transparency and a free expression of opinion. A synergy between differing points of view in political parties greatly aids the process of democracy.
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