Break political stalemate

When Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was giving her government's account of successes in the last three years, the people of Comilla city were thinking otherwise. The Awami League (AL)-backed mayoral candidate for Comilla City Corporation Afzal Khan lost to his opponent by a huge margin. If election is any yardstick to measure a government's popularity, then the mayoral polls for Comilla city are definitely the ones to gauge people's perception of the incumbent government's performance.
The defeat of the AL-backed candidate says a lot about how the voters of Comilla city evaluate the ruling party's three years in office. But the AL leaders would rather like to explain the polls-result away as having little political ramifications. And they are using the same arguments as they did in the past when they faced similar defeats in the of Chittagong City mayoral elections and recently in Narayanganj. The pet logic is the election result of Comilla city has nothing to reflect their party's, or for that matter, the government's diminishing popularity. That is to say that the Comilla polls or even the previous ones in Chittagong and Narayanganj were purely local phenomena and had nothing to do with the national political image of the party in power. Claiming that ruling AL had many successes in the last three years, AL's presidium member and former minister Tofail Ahmed negated the view that the outcomes of those three mayoral polls were a tell-tale sign of the ruling party's eroding popularity.
Taking a swipe at the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), he further said that the opposition BNP has no reason to revel in those results either, since none of those candidates belonged to their camp.
In the circumstances, would it not be wiser for the AL leadership to have an honest soul-searching as to why the voters have been doing an about-face at the polling booths three years into its office? Even though local issues dominated the voters' choice, does it not mean that the local AL leadership failed to gain the local electorates' confidence?
The ruling party should be ready to face facts, particularly after it has spent the better part of its tenure in power. Whether those winning mayoral candidates were from the opposition camp or not, the fact remains that the electorate gave a massive verdict against the ruling party-supported candidate in each case. And that says a lot about the incumbent government's performance in the last three years.
Regrettably, from the ruling party workers' and leaders' behaviour and utterances in the post-poll atmospherics show that they have not taken any lesson from those polls results.
There are even signs of disillusionment in the AL-led grand alliance. It has become clear that the alliance partners are getting increasingly restive and not willing to share AL's burden of failures in governance.
Notwithstanding all these signals, the ruling AL seems to be quite unperturbed. As it had happened with its precursor BNP, it is still hoodwinking itself into believing that the time has remained static since its late December 2008 parliamentary election's thumping victory against the present opposition-led alliance.
Not only that, it is getting increasingly intolerant of any criticism from any quarter, even from the well-meaning and the friendly ones. The intellectuals who have traditionally been sympathetic to AL for historical reasons have been forced to go into the defensive mode, if only because of the party's wrath against the leading newspaper columnists like Syed Abul Maksud who organised a sit-in programme on Eid day at the Central Shahid Minar pressing for a seven-point charter of demands to ensure road safety including resignation of the then communications minister Syed Abul Hossain.
The government not only condemned those intellectuals for that sit-in, it went so far as to mount police watch against them. That kind of a knee-jerk reaction from the government against the well-meaning members of the intelligentsia, the civil society and cultural workers only alienated the ruling AL from the section of the people who had supported the party and its government through thick and thin. The ruling party is not only insensitive to any criticism, but it has also become narcissistic.
The leaders of AL has on more than one occasion expressed their annoyance with the media, as it has been making objective reports on the various issues of governance failure. And to the government, any report that deals with corruption in the communication ministry or in any other department of the administration, violence in society, death of people in police custody or in consequence of police encounter or so-called "cross-fire," or forced disappearance of people, excesses committed by the police against protest demonstrators, high price hike and so on are instances of negative reporting.
On the political front, there is still no sign of light at the end of the tunnel. The government is stubbornly holding its ground about the manner of conducting next general elections. In a bipartisan dispensation, one party (the ruling party, in the present case) alone cannot and should not take the entire responsibility of saying the last word. All the political parties including the main opposition should be engaged in taking the decision on whether the caretaker system or any other form of interim government should be the arrangement under which the next general election will be held.
With two years left in office, the AL leadership can still bring a real change in politics by taking the lead in initiating the dialogue. Will the PM end the era of demagogy and show her statesmanship by taking the lead?

The writer is Editor, Science&Life, The Daily Star.