This natural yearning for elected government . . .

IF everything goes well, and nothing should go wrong, a new government should be in office in Bangladesh come January. Never before in the history of this country has this desire for elected government been as intense as it is today. For obvious reasons, of course. In these last eighteen months, much has happened, much has not happened, and some of what has happened has been rolled back; and all of that has only whipped up this wonderful, excitable political frenzy in us for a return to democratic governance.
You might ask if democracy in this country has ever been an unambiguously healthy affair, if it has not periodically been put through the twister and so rendered enervating. And that would be a perfectly good question to ask, for there have always been those moments and those men and women who have often, in the name of democracy, left us all reeling from the damage they have caused democracy. No, we do not presume to tell ourselves, to tell the world, that in the hands of the politicians pluralism has been a beautiful experience. They could have, after 1990, made this country a beacon of hope. They ended up snuffing out hope.
History remains our point of reference. You start off with the early 1970s, when Bangladesh sought to project a viable, vibrant democratic image for itself on the global stage. Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman spoke to us of this country aiming at being the Switzerland of the East. Tajuddin Ahmed reminded us of the values inherent in socialism, for the socialistic experiment was a guarantee that our people would eat well, sleep well and build layers of dreams for themselves and for their children. And then things went awry. We will not go into that. Neither will we recapitulate the old tales of constitutional government being undermined by ambitious men ready to push such government into the wayside ditch as they planned to seize the state by force.
We have seen it all happening in our lifetime. We who have consistently condemned the soldiers of the Pakistan army for repeatedly commandeering the state have, in moments of supreme irony, been witness to the Bangladesh state going under the sway of men whose brutality in the defence of ill-gotten power has threatened to undermine our belief in ourselves. Our struggles against our indigenous dictators and autocrats have gone on, for the simple reason that our faith in democracy has never wavered.
It is from such a perspective that we understand our yearning for an elected government to be in charge when this caretaker administration decides, as soon it must, to call it a day. But there are, for all our optimism, the worries that assail us. And those worries come wrapped in the emergency question. An adviser sought to remind the nation a few days ago about the imperative for a continuation of the emergency even when elections to Parliament are held later this year. You wonder if that is the right approach.
With a whole lot of individuals, the latest being the speaker of the Jatiyo Sangsad, already berating the caretakers over all the things they ought not to have done in these many months since the imposition of the emergency, you have a sense that new political complications are around the corner. The fact that we have ignored these complications or spent little time reflecting on them makes things even worse. And they do that because of the irritants that have already come in the way.
Jamiruddin Sircar and so many others have questioned the authority of the caretaker administration to hold local or municipal elections before national elections. They have a point. And they have a point, too, when they keep directing our gaze at the three-month tenure-related factor of a caretaker regime. And then comes this emergency which should go, but no one is quite sure how it will cease to be or when. There is then the huge question of what could happen were the government to do away with the emergency altogether. Fakhruddin Ahmed remains aware of the pitfalls associated with a withdrawal of the emergency. Which is why he thinks it cannot be done away with any time soon. Which is a pity!
The reality speaks for itself. It is the emergency that has kept this government together. And yet it is not the same thing as the martial regulations which provided a legal basis, of a kind, to military regimes in the past. General Yahya Khan organised elections on the basis of a Legal Framework Order. General Ziaur Rahman and General Hussein Muhammad Ershad kept martial law in operation until the day an elected Jatiyo Sangsad convened to inaugurate a transition, however questionable, to legally constituted government. Neither of those conditions is to be spotted in today's circumstances. The problems are more complex, given that the caretaker government, moving beyond its constitutionally-stipulated authority, has taken on its plate a lot more food than it can properly digest.
But, then, it did begin well. The drive against corruption was a defining moment. The emphasis on political party reforms, for all the reservations entertained about the move, was seen as reasonable across the country, by and large. Operations against bad businessmen were thought of as a sign of the country getting back in working shape. And then the centre began to crack, if it did not exactly fall apart. The swiftness employed in detaining major politicians minutes into an issuance of arrest warrants against them and carting them off to prison; a clear propensity toward promoting a so-called minus-two formula by pushing the president of the Awami League and the chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party out of politics and perhaps out of the country; and looking the other way when organisations such as the PDP and the Kalyan Party took shape despite the emergency, were to prove a damper on expectations. The Truth Commission has been a disappointing affair. And disappointing has been the reluctance of the political parties to go for change within themselves. And outrageous has been the growing tendency to place the blame for everything going wrong in the country on the political classes, to demonise them as it were.
We are at a fork in the road. We are at the crossroads. A clear sense of drift within the corridors of power is palpable. The determination and clear purpose that underscored the administration when it first took charge have gone missing. You see it in the tenuous, almost apologetic way the advisers speak to the country. You spot it in the men who manage the Election Commission, in their discomfiture over the return of men with criminal record, or intent, into the corporation and municipal electoral fray. You feel it in the certain listlessness that seems to have come into the Anti-Corruption Commission. And you see it writ large on the face of a government unable to whiplash bad traders into decency or convince citizens that they can buy food and eat it with nary a care in the world.
Which is a statement in defence of popularly sanctioned government. Which is an incontrovertible argument for government that is elected and so accountable to the country for all it does and everything it does not do. We wait at the bend of the river, for those elections that will take us to the democracy we thought we would build brick by brick when we went to war long ago in defence of our inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of collective happiness.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. Email: [email protected]