Not just another election

Moment of truth for the nation. Photo: Raj Aniket/ Driknews

ON January 11, 2007 we embarked on a journey to nowhere and were beset with speculations and conjectures about where we were heading. Amid a good deal of drama and experimentations with regard to our reformed political process, we only half believed, if at all, an election to be held before the year 2008 was out.
Yet the oft-respected promise to that effect has at long last come true, vindicating the bona fides of what the authority promised. Even if it is after a roller coaster journey, we are finally going to exercise our voting rights today. Indeed, but for the difficulties created by an intransigent BNP with regard to the election schedule, the much awaited election could have been held even earlier.
Among the contestants in the election, the BNP in spite of its jerky and belated start is most visible in electioneering, where its tense, desperate, and aggressive chairperson excelled in making promises and dangling carrots before the public.
She has developed her mealy-mouthed mendacity into an art form, hoping that it would work in taking the simple folks for a ride again. By giving a damn to electoral code of conduct and defying the public craving for a change in our political ethos, she is in a mood to bandy calumny and innuendoes, thus vitiating the atmospherics at this sensitive time. Disregarding the grass-roots aspirations of the party, she has fielded most of the criminals of her immediate-past regime smeared with ignominy as her nominees for ninth parliament.
On the contrary, Awami League has uncharacteristically kept a low profile and made bare minimum appearance before the electorate. But it has struck a chord with the public mood for a change. It has proceeded with a positive outlook as an agent for that change and developed a congruence with the political reforms initiated by the caretaker dispensation.
In a welcome course changing, it has been able to sift essentials from the cliches and rhetoric, thus projecting a vision for the future. That's where much restrained Awami League of today enjoys an edge over others. It's jettisoning of the party hoodlums has also been appreciated.
Yet, the election has its own dynamics, and its own peculiar arithmetic can spring surprises unsought. That apart, the election 2008 is crucial in many senses. The events of the last few years have brought us to a crossroads, from where we have to choose which particular course would we adopt. The grab mentality and and "winner takes all" tendency introduced by the BNP in our politics along with an authoritarian impulse in successive governments have seriously jeopardised our democratic prospects.
The religious militancy spawned, and wave of bigotry and obscurantism nourished, by BNP-led alliance pose today an equally grave threat to our democratic values. Also, for the first time, the founding principles of our independence are under attack by the constituents of the alliance. If voted to power, these forces will constitute an even greater threat.
Unless utmost caution is exercised, and this remorseless lot who have neither compunction nor contrition for their past sins is kept from returning to power, it will spell disaster for the country and its value system.
The politicians of the genre of religious right and fundamentalists are making their bid to capture the citadel of power, desperately playing with fire by stirring up frenzy by questioning the patriotism of their liberal secular opponents.
Drunken and intoxicated with a heady brew of power politics, they will go to any extent to desecrate the soul of the nation. Therefore, the conscious people of the country have a sacred duty to stop them. In that sense the upcoming election is much more than just another election. Hinged to it are existential issues and that of our pristine and primordial culture.
The three million martyrs of our independence will never for give us if we yield to their power of the money they accumulated from the public coffers and are now spending for buying votes in various garbswhether it is so-called Islami relief of four kilograms of beef and two of rice.
We must not barter our principles for the scraps they are doling out. We cannot afford to be confounded with the fast talk being parroted by an "uncompromising" leader of doom. Let us say an emphatic no to her sophistry. It is a defining moment and we must be able to rise to the occasion.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.