Words, phrases and our political lexicon

There is a lot you hear about something called indoor politics these days. And you begin to wonder what it all means. Politics, after all, is just that -- politics. It is either there or it isn't. Again, if you speak of indoor politics, it naturally follows that there is another phenomenon known as outdoor politics.
But that, as you will discover to your intense amazement, is not what you will chance upon in the real world. Wherever there is democracy, there is politics, at once transparent and unfettered. It is just that in our own context we have lately been overwhelmed by this idea of indoor politics.
Before you get down to the business of observing how our political lexicon has been getting transformed over time, only remember that indoor politics is a term, if not a concept, we first ran into during the days of General Yahya Khan in 1969. Close to four decades later, we still seem to be unable to get free of it.
But that is not too unnatural a happenstance, is it now? Bengalis being historically fond of delving deep into politics and often getting bruised and brutalised in the process, it is quite understandable that they will invent new political terms and then turn them into household words.
Law Adviser Mainul Hosein may speak of the present administration being a national government. That is his opinion, one that was swiftly put aside by a clarification from the chief of staff of the army. The general says the government is caretaker in form and substance. We agree with him. But that is hardly the point.
Of relevance here is the very term "caretaker government." We are perhaps the only nation in this wide world to have provided constitutional legitimacy to this concept, largely because of the absence of trust among our political classes. To what extent, and for how long, we will be burdened with such a load can only be imagined. But let us be blunt here: the sooner we can manage a good, democratic political system, the faster we can jettison this caretaker factor.
We will simply have to wait and see how things turn out. Meanwhile, think of all the other entries that have come into the lexicon. Martial law is of course an old term, one that we spot in early twentieth-century Latin America. But when General Ayub Khan commandeered the state of Pakistan in October 1958, he gave a new dimension to the term.
We were all left intrigued, sometimes even impressed, by what it meant. Come 1962, and Ayub replaced martial law with his own version of democracy (which was called Basic Democracy and which really was antithetical to democracy).
We thought martial law was gone from our lives. But, lo and behold! It came roaring back in March 1969. In the years after that, it reared its head at fairly regular intervals in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Today, as we turn the pages of the lexicon, we spot the term scattered all over them.
Perhaps there will come a time when the phrase "martial law" will be history, in the way that "revolutionary command councils" (in places like Iraq and Syria) have become history. And then comes the matter of an extreme measure called the state of emergency. Indira Gandhi used it to extend her rule by a couple of years in India. When she lifted it, in 1977, and called fresh elections, the electorate threw her out.
General Pervez Musharraf, raring to go for an emergency, saw his hand stayed by a simple call from Condoleezza Rice. He certainly does not relish his present discomfiture, what with the humiliation the Supreme Court is heaping on him and the plain disrespect that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are throwing his way. A state of emergency could have helped him avoid all that bother. Now he simply does not know what his future will be.
Politics, as many of us will have noted, has taken a regular battering in Bangladesh. You can really count on your fingers the meagre number of years when politicians have governed this nation. And then you recapitulate all the old stories of coups and counter-coups that have often come in the way of democracy.
More importantly, it is the sheer hold that such a word as "coup" has on the popular psyche that you cannot ignore. There are individuals who may not understand English or French (and they inhabit the villages of this country), but they know full well what a coup signifies. And that is how "coup d'etat" has carved a particular niche for itself in our political dictionary.
It is something that people in the world's democracies are not really aware of. They have, after all, not lived through the kind of exciting times we have. Back in the old Ayub era (the man keeps coming back despite all our efforts to keep him at arm's length), there was a curious law called the Elective Bodies Disqualification Ordinance, or EBDO.
It was a bad law, as it was aimed at keeping politicians out of politics while allowing Ayub Khan and his fellow soldiers to run wild all over the place. EBDO was one sure way of curbing dissent.
EBDO is no more out there, but it does have its place in the dictionary of archaic political terms. There are other phrases, closer to our times, that are not exactly archaic and indeed once were regarded, before the term was invented, as being politically correct.
Think here of the Legal Framework Order decreed by Yahya Khan as a prelude to Pakistan's first-ever general elections in December 1970. The LFO was meant to serve as a set of guidelines for the country's politicians. In real terms, all politicians ignored it; and what happened subsequently is a story we are all too familiar with.
Exercise your mind a little more. If you do, it is likely that you will recall a measure that was once used with abandon to intimidate anyone who challenged the government of the day. We speak here of the Defence of Pakistan Rules. In its time, the DPR was a ubiquity because of the random way in which it was applied to bring politicians to heel.
In Bangladesh, there is the bitter legacy of the Special Powers Act. Every government post-1975 condemned the earlier Awami League administration for enacting this bad law, and yet all of them made convenient use of it, especially when it came to harassing political opponents. Be that as it may, the SPA was for years a term we were repeatedly made familiar with. Today, every time someone talks about it, we know that it has eventually made its way into our political vocabulary.
There are interesting, perhaps even intriguing, occurrences that we cannot quite possibly ignore. Take this matter of the "minus two" formula that some people have been trying to inject into the nation's political system. You, thus, note a sudden mathematical approach, as it were, to national politics.
Basically aimed at Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, there are good reasons to think that minus two, unless it is neutralised as an idea soon, could one day lead to minus three or minus four or even higher.
Move on, and keep moving, until you stumble on something we have been told is the "nomination business" indulged in by the major political parties. It is really something quite simple: you give a party a hefty amount of money and in return the party will give you a nomination for a parliamentary constituency of your choice. And once you are elected to parliament, you can recoup all that money and march on to add loads more to it, through contracts and tenders and the like.
And so it goes on, all this enrichment of the political vocabulary. General Ershad once called himself pollibondhu. If there could be Bangabandhu, so the reasoning must have gone, there might as well be a friend of the villages.
Sheikh Hasina's followers cheerfully refer to her as jononetri, which is when the fans of Begum Zia are not quite willing to be left behind. They honour their leader with the honourofic of deshonetri. And, by the way, we remain aware of at least two men who are both known as bangabir.
Ah, well! It all began, as the cynic will tell you, back in the British colonial era. Think of the potency that has come into such a term as partition. You think of India and Pakistan, and your mind conjures up images of a division that left lives ruined and futures in a limbo.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.