The state, the law and the absurd

When a magistrate, lately hailed for the zealous manner in which he has pursued food related crime, suddenly expresses his readiness to be jailed or hanged, you are left mystified. And you ask yourself if everyone around you is losing control over his own sentiments. Or could it be that it is you who have been falling behind in all this demonstration of desperation, typified by those ready to reveal their readiness to sacrifice their lives on the altar of something that does not really mean anything?
Magistrate Rokonuddoulah did not stop at thoughts of his own hanging. He went on to ask his colleagues in the administration cadre to put the brakes on an entire country should anything happen to him. Now, that was certainly drama. But it was in poor taste.
And taste, if you have noticed, was clearly lacking in the way in which the administration cadre sought to defend its own narrow interests in light of the recent move to have the executive branch of government de-link itself from the judiciary at all levels. All sorts of bureaucrats were there to make known their intense displeasure at the separation of the judiciary from the executive.
You wish you had some way of looking at the complaints of these men with equanimity. You cannot, for what these men were doing, in clear defiance of the Constitution and in obvious contempt of the Supreme Court, was simply reinforcing our collective belief that much of the trouble we have had in statecraft has had to do with the bureaucracy.
When, months ago, a group of civil servants gathered at the business office of former energy adviser Mahmudur Rahman, we roundly and rightly condemned their behaviour as one that gave off the odour of things sinister. And we still wait for the government to inform us if and when those men, many of whom scurried away from Rahman's office once the media confronted them, will be tackled under the law of the land.
There are certain truths that you cannot ignore. If you are going with so much of zest and exuberance after politicians and businessmen, for all the right reasons in the world, you cannot tell the country that there are some other people who remain above the law, who, therefore, cannot be touched. These men who converged at the Bangladesh Institute of Administrative Management (Biam) on Sunday have left little doubt in the public mind that they are willing to challenge the court, and indeed the state, in a furtherance of their collective clannish interests.
They have drawn flak from every decent, law-abiding section of society. Kamal Hossain, Amirul Islam, Khondokar Mahbub Hossein and others have, like the rest of us, made it known that these bureaucrats have not only defied the state but have also thrown down the gauntlet before the country, in the expectation that the government and the Supreme Court will retreat on the judiciary separation issue.
It is defiance that must be met with the full force of the law. Law Adviser Mainul Hosein initially cheered us when he described the attitude of these administrative cadre elements as an act against the law. He ought to have held on to that position. He did not, when he agreed to talk to Abu M. Moniruzzaman Khan and his band of civil servants on Monday.
He gave out the clear impression that the government was willing to listen to those who violate the law and, indeed, may even be ready to pacify them. That would be a disastrous position to take, for it would be reflective of a government ready and willing to render itself weak under pressure. When government succumbs to pressure from those who by law are its employees and servants of the state, it is condemned to seeing a goodly portion of its moral basis being stripped away.
So what do we need to do now? It is a simple answer we have on offer: nothing, absolutely nothing, must come in the way of the programme for a separation of the judiciary from the executive. That again means taking a clear, unambiguous stand against the men who, at Biam, tried to hustle the government and the Supreme Court into a retreat over the issue.
There is more that the authorities should be doing here. And that ought to come by way of initiating administrative proceedings against those who organised the conference of these bureaucrats, those who took part in them and those who spewed fire and venom at the move for judicial independence. Let there be no leniency shown here, despite the presence of some well-known figures at the gathering. Abdul Muyeed Chowdhury did not make the country happy by being there.
Rokonuddoulah's threat to shut the country down, should anything happen to him, did not go down as a revolutionary call but as a defiance of the state. Abul Hossain's role in organising the meeting needs to be thoroughly investigated.
There is a clear and present danger in ignoring the damaging role the bureaucracy has played in subverting democracy and the rule of law since the Pakistan era. When Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman inaugurated Baksal in 1975 (opinion on that of course depends on how you look at it), a clear objective was a bringing of the civil service to heel through making it unquestionably subservient to political authority.
That, unfortunately, was the first and, so far, the last attempt to put the civil service in its place. Since the end of the Mujib government, bureaucrats have been coming back to the centre of things with increasingly warlike whoops. The Ziaur Rahman and Hussein Muhammad Ershad dictatorships, like any other dictatorship anywhere, were seasons in the sun for civil servants used to treating politics with contempt since men like Altaf Gauhar began to pay obeisance to shallow, arrogant men like Ayub Khan.
In the years of the last administration led by Khaleda Zia, callow, young bureaucrats left the system reeling from their endless exercise of opportunism. And now has been flung this brazen, unabashed challenge to the government by the administration cadre, an act which leaves the country wondering at the degree to which the republic has been turned into a plaything of the vested interests lurking in alleys and woods all across the country.
The outburst by the administrative cadre must not be treated lightly. These men, who have with impunity challenged the government they serve, should not be treated as little boys who have made a mistake and so can be forgiven. And the clear defiance of the Supreme Court move toward judicial independence that has come from them calls for a swift response.
Mainul Hosein has erred in talking to these men. Let there be no second error. Let the perception not take shape in the public mind that the government is, or soon will be, on the back foot over the judiciary issue only because some unruly civil servants have threatened to cause the heavens to collapse on our heads.
If the government can charge politicians with corruption and haul them off to jail, if it can punish crooked businessmen through locking them up, if it can detain academics on the charge that they have contributed to the making of a crisis on the campus, it might as well take action against government servants who forget the rules of service, forget the provisions of the Constitution and forget the sanctity of judicial decisions.
The state is not the theatre of the absurd. And government servants must not be there to provide comic relief to us as we go about trying to restore the moral balance in our collective life.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.