Ouster is a bad word . . . in these times
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party has said it loud and clear. The Awami League-led government, it informs the country, must be ousted in order to protect the country. And how do you observe that statement? For starters, you could tell the opposition that you can only agree with it halfway. And that is to inform it that the country is always in need of protection, always requiring the highest degree of security in order to carry on. And that ouster idea? That is a fine term, ouster, and we have over the past five decades or so been witness to the many spells of ouster governments have been subjected to by ambitious military officers across the globe. And then think of this lovely land of ours. Every ouster of a government has brought with it an end to the lives of the great and the good. By extension, each ouster has seen a newer, swifter decline in values. But oust an elected government? That very thought is in bad taste. It reveals two things. The first is an absence of pluralistic sentiment in those who simply do not know the ramifications of the term. The second is that a call for the ouster of a government voted to power by the majority of people in a country is akin to undermining the sovereign right of a society to make informed political choices for itself.
But, yes, the country must be protected from any and all sorts of risks that just might try to strike it down. And Bangladesh's protection is what we went for in 1971, when a ferocious military machine not averse to employing medieval crudity in its zeal to defend its questionable beliefs descended on us. We triumphed and the result was simple: liberty could not but be ours. In more recent times, the ten truckloads of weapons which almost led the country to volatility of an unimaginable kind were a clear means of destabilising the state. Some heads should have rolled by now. They did not because there were people around in the government of the time, or so it appears, who happened to be more interested in protecting a horde of shady individuals than in ensuring the security of the state. Any decent government would have gone into furious action. The law enforcers and security forces would be picking up everyone even remotely linked to those trucks. But then, nothing happened. What did happen was revealing: the state of Bangladesh was fast turning into a rickety affair, partly because of the old ouster occurrences of the past, partly because of the suspicious silence of the elected government on whose watch those truckloads of arms sneaked into the country.
And now you have all the right in the world to ask: if a government falters in its job of securing the lives of citizens, indeed may have been complicit in the commissioning of a clear crime, must it not be brought to account? That accounting was surely done in late 2008, when the electorate went for change. Of course the change did not happen, at least not in the way we thought it would, not in the manner in which the new people in office promised us it would. Even so, some fundamental and therefore necessary things were done. And all of those moves went into ensuring protection for the state.
Bangabandhu's assassins, some of them, walked to the gallows despite the belief in them and in their friends that the law could not catch up with them. In these past three years -- despite your indignation at all the things going wrong with this government -- religious militancy has been pushed to the wall, if not exactly snuffed out. A thorough, credible inquiry has gone into the August 21 explosions, a tragedy from which we as a people have not fully recovered. And the ten truckloads of arms? The beans are being spilled every day. One day the truth must emerge.
You do not oust a government which is engaged in a battle to restore history. You do not, for all the decades that may have gone by since the War of Liberation, simply shrug off the idea of a trial of those Bengalis who helped the Pakistan occupation army murder, rape and maim their fellow Bengalis in their defence of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The collaborators of the Nazis have never been rehabilitated. In France, the Vichy regime remains noted for its genuflective notoriety, the genuflection before the German occupying power, the notoriety in its refusal to understand history. And so the Vichy government and with it all other quislings of the Nazis paid a price. Not one of them came back to government in a reordered Europe after 1945. In Bangladesh, it was the state that was rendered weak with the return of the 1971 collaborators to public life after 1975. The enervation worsened with some of these men, none of whom has ever come to terms with the reality of a secular Bengali state, walking into the corridors of ministerial authority over a period of time.
But now comes the time to roll back this humiliation. Should one then talk of an overthrow of the government, of protection for the state? Hypocrisy has never been able to graduate to truth, not in this country, not anywhere else. Why should one now try to change the rules of the game?
We needed to oust Ayub Khan. We did it. We ousted Yahya Khan and whatever remained of Pakistan in 1971. We ousted Khondokar Moshtaque and his criminal gang in November 1975. We ousted the Ershad regime in December 1990. All of that was necessary.
We do not oust an elected government through setting emotions on fire in the streets. We change governments through making our choices on election day. And, do not forget, ouster is a term which certainly does not become men and women who have systematically played truant with the truth, with objectivity, with the broad canvas of our history.
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