The showdowns put people down

Historia Augusta is a collection of biographies of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues and usurpers of the period 117 to 284. According to its account, the Syrian boy emperor Elagabulus once asked his slaves to collect spider webs so that he could weigh them to do an assessment of the size and age of Rome. Last week, we saw a similar exercise repeated twice when two political parties gathered their workers in the nation's capital. Each tried to outnumber the other in a purported showdown to do an assessment of their political strength.
Once more, the people of this country paid the price for the delusions of their politicians. At least for a couple of days ahead of the BNP showdown, they lived in the fear of a gathering storm that threatened to lay a political wasteland in its wake. Buses stopped running. Launches stopped plying. Roads were empty, shops were closed and prices soared.
People traveled on foot between work and home, looking like exodus scenes from Biblical movies. Mass arrests appeared like scenes from Alex Haley's Roots, slaves walking in single files with ropes tied around their waists. The ruling party men sat in chairs arranged in semi-circular formation and doubled up as neighbourhood vigilantes as if they had fallen off a vintage photograph of a posse in the Wild American West.
The Awami League showdown was next, fueled by the lust for a bigger gathering. Once again roads were congested, people suffered in the traffic nightmare and the city life was largely disrupted. But this time people weren't harassed at checkpoints set up by police and party enthusiasts. Those who came to attend the grand rally could freely travel. Buses were running. Launches were plying. They didn't have to worry about rival groups lying in wait to swoop on them.
All said and done, what was missing from all that political commotion was political emotion itself. Instead, these showdowns looked like two medieval armies mobilising troops for a fight to finish. In a twist of irony, both political parties vied for headcounts as if their rallies were improvised polls.
One can always ask if these showdowns were necessary. BNP could have announced its deadline for re-instatement of the caretaker system in a press conference. It would have cost the party lot less and saved it so much hassle. But nay, its leaders knew how power worked. Words mean nothing unless backed by strength.
One could say the same thing about Awami League. It had done so much to put up obstacles in land, air (disruption of three TV channels) and water to prevent its opposition from gathering a large crowd. The ruling party could have responded to BNP's ultimatum through a press conference. Instead, it chose to counter by another showdown, vowing to have a bigger turnout than March 12.
The law of large numbers is a theorem in probability theory, which states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and it gets even closer as more trials are performed. In the last forty years we have had countless movements, rallies, demonstrations and public gatherings, yet our experiment with democracy only moved further away from its expected value. Last week's showdowns, if anything, deepened confrontation and diluted compromise. Like many times before, people proved more as the means of our politics than its end.
Only thing good that came out of last week's political conundrum is the oblique fact that our politicians still need their people. They still need people not so much for their souls as their bodies, more precisely their arms and legs to march for them and mouths to shout their slogans. This is a republic of truncated people; their limbs are more useful than the rest of their bodies.
This is where our politics resembles organ trade. The politicians use certain body parts, and they aren't interested in the whole people. It is alleged that political parties often hire people to swell the ranks of their rallies. Like organ trade, there is also a black market in national politics.
One political hack confided in me that there is an arrangement akin to carrying contract in goods delivery. Middlemen handle this people moving business and they supply people to politicians for rallies like decorators do tables and chairs for weddings. It is hard to judge the popularity of a political party in a populous country for the same reason one mustn't take credit for bringing coals to a colliery.
Perhaps a democracy faces setback in an overpopulated country in the manner oversupply depresses the price of a commodity. A government of the people, by the people and for the people doesn't work unless people pick their government, not the other way around.

The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: [email protected]