Sheikh Hasina's call to Khaleda Zia
PRIME Minister Sheikh Hasina on Saturday urged Leader of the Opposition Khaleda Zia, through Jatiya Sangsad Speaker Abdul Hamid, to return to parliament with her party. We wish, and so does the country, that Khaleda Zia had reassured the nation through an emphatic yes. But that was too much to expect from a single gesture of goodwill; yet, the big question is: why should the Bangladesh Nationalist Party have boycotted the JS for such an inordinately long time, doing neither any good to the party nor to the country?
We think that boycott of parliament is never justified and it is even much less so at the moment, given the mounting nature of challenges facing the nation. This newspaper has been asserting for years on end that the JS is the supreme repository of popular expectations and aspirations and therefore does not belong exclusively to the ruling party or the opposition. Indeed, it is the House of the people, and home to both the opposition and ruling party since between themselves they speak for the entire nation.
Our exhortations, it is obvious, have fallen on deaf ears as political parties (and they have always been in the opposition) have repeatedly boycotted parliament -- in the seventh, eighth and now the ninth Jatiya Sangsad. We will not rake up the past today. But we must say that the on-going boycott of the JS by the opposition BNP cannot be justified, even remotely, because of the fact that no serious or earth-shaking issues are there to compel it to stay away from the House. The long-drawn wrangle that the BNP has been engaged in with the ruling party on a flimsy matter like seating arrangements not only makes a mockery of politics but also sends out a very wrong message to its constituents across the country. The party has clearly chosen to ignore the fact that it has a responsibility to its voters, that it must speak for them in parliament.
We think the time is here and now for Begum Zia and her party to rethink their position and go back to the Jatiya Sangsad. A boycott on flimsy pretexts undermines not only the public image of a party but also threatens the future of democracy. There are established parliamentary conventions and procedures that allow parties and members ample scope to raise any and all manner of issues on the floor of the House. If the BNP is concerned about the time it is allotted in the House as also other issues, it can easily put the Speaker to the test by seeing whether he lives up to his reassurances to it in the JS.
A relentless boycott of parliament, a spectacle we have been witnessing since the revival of democracy in 1991, is not only a waste of time for the country but also puts the nation in a state of fatigue. Every party, be it in power or in opposition, must remember that public aspirations are all and always focused on the JS. We therefore once again urge the BNP to return to parliament, for that is the only surefire way in which the JS can be strengthened and for democracy to strike deeper roots in Bangladesh.
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