Photo: Dorling Kindersley

Not so long ago, two women lawmakers of the ruling party took intense delight in boring shamefully into the life of the leader of the opposition. It was a scene that was as bizarre as it was incredible. Here was the deputy speaker of the Jatiyo Sangsad not only not doing anything to discipline those foul-mouthed lawmakers, but seeming to be indulging them as they went on with their nonsense.
And only the other day, it was again a woman lawmaker, this one from the opposition, who threw decency to the winds when she pounced on the prime minister with all the uncouthness at her command. It happened again on Monday, with another woman legislator letting us know how vulgar she could be in her use of expletives, in her behaviour.
You could argue that all of this is something we ought not to be surprised by. There is no reason to feel scandalised at all, given that the leading political figures whom these women emulate have over the years given a dash of ugly refinement to crude behaviour. So what has been happening will happen again. Begum Khaleda Zia was observed applauding the obscene behaviour of her party legislator. For her part, Sheikh Hasina has had little reason to caution her own parliamentarians, meaning the two women who tried tearing the opposition leader apart in the Jatiyo Sangsad, on the need for good, impeccable behaviour on a lawmaker's part.
You feel sad. You wonder about the miserable depths to which politics has sunk in Bangladesh. And judging by the way things are shaping up or going down, as the case may be, there is hardly any reason to feel that we will bask in cultural and political enlightenment any time soon. And yet it was not always like this. Time was when politics was a respectable profession, when political leaders, for all their public disagreements over policies, took care not to heap humiliation on those who disagreed with them. If you go through the records of the Pakistan constituent assembly in the 1950s and then of the national assembly in the Ayub Khan era, you will run into politicians ready to engage themselves in a battle of wit even as they waged wars for a preservation of a distinctive turf. Respect was all.
And respect is often an underlying theme carried on the back of wit and humour. You think back on Benjamin Disraeli's explanation of the difference between "misfortune" and "calamity." To a parliamentarian's question about his use of the terms interchangeably, Disraeli responded thus: "See Mr. Gladstone on the opposition benches? If he fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if we picked him out of it, it would be a calamity."
The good bit about humour in politics is that it helps keeps nerves in check, helps make matters easier for the political classes. The Indian politician Piloo Mody, noted for his girth as well as his sense of humour, once showed his back to a fellow legislator in exasperation even as the latter spoke in the House. Obviously, the offended lawmaker drew the attention of the House to such behaviour, whereupon the speaker asked Mody for an explanation. Mody stood up and deadpanned: "Mr. Speaker, sir, I have no back, no front and no flanks. How then could I have shown the honourable MP my back?" He brought the house down.
And that is the sort of battle, resting on a rapier-like use of wit, which keeps injecting energy into politics. Bangabandhu, despite the serious approach he brought into his politics, was constantly engaging in intellectual battles in the provincial and national legislatures throughout the 1950s. In Ayub Khan's national assembly, men like Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury and Moulvi Farid Ahmed, to name only two politicians, were noted for the humour they brought into national politics. Even the wily Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sometimes engaged in a use of mordant wit, unwittingly of course. Informed by Aziz Ahmed, Pakistan's foreign secretary, in the middle of a cold Tashkent night in January 1966 that "the bastard is dead," Bhutto asked him: "Which one?" You see, Bhutto had no respect at all for either Lal Bahadur Shastri or Field Marshal Ayub Khan.
There was the inimitable Charles de Gaulle with his abundance of seriously articulated humour. He was exasperated at having to rule a nation which produced as many as two hundred and forty six kinds of cheese. Asked once what he thought of those who disagreed with him, he said in cryptic fashion: "I respect those who disagree with me, but I cannot tolerate them." Which reminds you of the acerbic wit Lyndon B. Johnson often resorted to in his assessments of people. Irritated by William Fulbright's endless criticism of his policies in Vietnam, he began referring to him as Senator Halfbright. On one occasion, asked why he had befriended a man who had never given him peace, he had a good, albeit a trifle vulgar, riposte: It was far better to have that man in the tent inside pissing out than to have him outside the tent pissing in. What do you say to that? While you think, here comes Edward Heath, who repeatedly said out loud the day Margaret Thatcher fell from power, "Rejoice, rejoice." Asked if he had actually said that, Heath, that naughty twinkle flashing in his eyes, told his interviewer: "Actually, I said it thrice: rejoice, rejoice, rejoice." Someone had this to say about Richard Nixon: "Richard Nixon promised to take crime off the streets. He did. He took it right into the White House."
Ah, if only wit were still a part of politics, in our part of the world, and beyond it! If only those women from the Awami League and the BNP realised how much more of a point they would make through reading up on the power of humour!

The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
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