Of politics, criminals and cohorts
There is such a thing as conscience. There is such a thought as principles. And when many of us, or most of us, tend to think that an incarcerated politician should be freed, we do so out of the conviction that the charges of corruption or criminality that have been levelled at them may not be true.
And yet, if there are specific grounds to show that these politicians we hold in respect, perhaps even in reverence, may actually and eventually be proved to be guilty of wrongdoing under the terms of clear, transparent law, we will, of course, not argue with the verdict reached by the judiciary.
But for people to inform us, even as a case drags on, even before legal proceedings have drawn to a conclusion, that those accused in the case are guilty, that they should be treated as criminals, is to intimidate us into deserting the ideas we have always held dear -- that rule of law and democracy go together, that politics is the underlying principle of governance.
You deny politics and you have nothing to fall back on. Take politics out of life. Wholesale chaos will descend on you and on your neighbours.
Which is why we do not agree with Kamal Hossain when he takes it upon himself to inform us that those who today demand a freeing of the politicians accused of corruption are doing so because they are the cohorts of those detained individuals. That is a sweeping statement to make.
There are millions upon millions of men and women in Bangladesh who, despite everything, have never wavered in their support and love for Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. You cannot now go around telling us that these millions of Bengalis are equally guilty of the corruption that the two former prime ministers have been charged with.
Besides, there cannot be a single side, or a single aspect, to an argument. If there are all the people who have in the past many years indulged in corruption (and we are all aware of who these people are), there is also the truth that the manner in which such criminality should have been proceeded against has simply not been there.
Dr. Kamal Hossain would have done us all a whole lot of good if he had enlightened us on the Truth Commission, on the unhappiness that such a commission will cause in our lives if it really ends up freeing all those detained symbols of venality once they confess to their guilt and leave some of their ill-gotten wealth to the state.
The former law and foreign minister, being the significant cog in the wheel of national history he has been and remains, ought to have reflected on the manner in which the Election Commission has been operating where dealing with the two factions of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is concerned.
We would have felt happier if he had pointed the finger at the bad eggs of the last elected government that are still in the basket, in the form and shape of some of the men within the so-called reformist camp in the BNP.
He would have cheered us had he asked the caretaker government what it planned to do about academics doling out fifty two first classes in their university departments, about teachers diverging from their subjects and focusing on imparting lessons on the Islamic dress code before their pupils.
The country is at a crossroads. And, let us be courageous enough to admit, politics is in dire straits. In the one and a half years that have gone by since the arrival of the Fakhruddin Ahmed caretaker dispensation, politicians have remained out of the picture. That being so, it makes little sense to keep up the refrain that they are to be blamed for everything that is going bad and going wrong in our lives.
Prices in the market, the desperate rush for rice, the increase in transport fares -- all of these are issues for which you cannot pin the responsibility on the political classes. On a bigger scale, you cannot condemn the vocation of politics because of the misdeeds committed by a band of men and women masquerading as politicians in the last five or six years.
And you ought not to forget, despite the many reservations you may have about them, the immense contributions of the men and women who, between October 2006 and January 2007, put up a fierce, determined struggle to get the Iajuddin caretaker dispensation out of the way in the interest of free, fair and transparent elections.
As a nation born of a mighty struggle against a communal state and its genocidal army, we remain keen observers of history -- for our people have been keen and key players in the making of our history.
Back in the 1960s, we did not share the opinion of the Pakistani establishment that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his fellow accused in the Agartala affair were conspirators who needed to be penalised for their sedition.
In 1971, we laughed away the thought that the men who set up a Bengali government in Mujibnagar and waged war against the state of Pakistan were agents of foreign powers. And we did all that because of our conviction that politics mattered, that politicians were a pivotal force, which could lead us out of the woods. We yet hold fast to that belief.
We hold too the idea that when politics is infiltrated by the unscrupulous and by the villainous, it needs to be reformed. A purge conducted along the lines of logic and historical necessity then becomes an absolute necessity. When ministers and lawmakers grab an entire country and treat it as their fiefdom, or as so many fiefdoms, they need to be put through the legal grinder.
The men and women who in these past many years engaged in pilferage, in deriving pecuniary benefits from sales of CNG-driven scooters, in commandeering roads for their advertisement firms, in getting away with murder, must be dealt with in exemplary fashion. And that is the principle that should be applied to all, equally and without selectivity.
The drive against corruption must target the men who have purchased party nominations and then gone on to see their coffers fill with gems that were not theirs. It should be aimed at those who have filed tax returns that are patently false.
The imperative today is to retrieve politics from these elements, which have long held it captive to their depredations. It is not, and should never be, to neutralise the men and women who have symbolised Bangladesh's secular democratic culture and replace them with individuals to whom idealism and principles have not really mattered.
We do not disagree with Kamal Hossain when he avers that national unity can propel us out of our collective misery. And yet, national unity cannot be a generalised interpretation of conditions as they exist today. There must be some core points -- secularism, transparent, unfettered elections, the supremacy of Parliament, the primacy of elected civilian authority, the absolute independence of the judiciary, et al -- around which such unity can be forged.
There is a need today to resist the obscurantists who have come in the way of an enforcement of women's rights in the country. The demand that the war criminals of 1971 be made to face justice must not be sidetracked in all this gathering debate over the nature of existing conditions in the country.
There is a need today for all of us to emerge clear of the political vacuum we are in at this point of time. There is that urgency of politics, one that demands a return to constitutional, popularly sanctioned government through a general election, as it is meant to be in a system of democratic accountability.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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