Let's seek a common ground

The founding fathers of the American Constitution were not free of the fear that even legislative bodies can be tyrannical and felt the need to enact a law superior to the legislature itself and put restraint on it from becoming despotic and absolutist. President James Madison in the Federalist Paper laid great importance to guard the society against the oppression of the rulers and also to guard one part of the society against the injustices of the other. Edmund Burke was acutely aware of the possibility of the cruelest oppression which the majority can inflict upon the minority. In the case of Bangladesh the ruling party (not the four-party coalition) received marginally more percentage of popular votes than the main opposition party in the last general election. Can one then morally support the cabalistic efforts of the numerical majority to impose on the nation their vision of propriety through amending a document universally regarded as sacred? Is it of great consequence to a poverty stricken nation whose photographs should be hung in government offices or how quickly the elected members of Parliament should be sworn in? Equally, why was it necessary to draw the curtain upon a yet unresolved debate over how women members are to be elected?

Constitutional amendments by definition are of great importance to any nation. That is why amendment procedures are made so difficult. Clearly a Constitution is created to facilitate formation of a government which would serve and not rule the people because there may be time when the government does not represent the people and its interests and those of the people are not the same. In such cases as Henry David Thoreau advocated in the 19th century for the people to publicly disobey the laws of an unjust government which in turn would encourage and bring other people to oppose the government. It is, therefore, of utmost necessity that the government of the day should not use its executive powers to serve only parochial interests by giving legal coverage to such acts on the strength of brute majority. It has been said that a state's raison d'etre does not lie in the protection of equal individual rights but in the guarantee of an inclusive process of opinion and will formation in which free and equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in the equal interest of all (The Political- David Ingram 2002).

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Hence the concept of popular sovereignty which though stemmed from efforts to dissociate from absolutist regimes and central to the present discourse, argues that popular sovereignty cannot be totally delegated and that a framework of unbroken accountability of the government has to be maintained to guard against Lord Acton's proverbial warning about corruption of power. This strand of argument is also supported by Thoreau's reluctance to "resign his conscience to the legislator since every man has a conscience… I think we should be men first and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right". The idea is not to rebel against a lawfully elected government but to communicate one's dissent as forcefully as possible, to be essentially communitarian in the creation of a solidaristic whole so that the government is impelled to respond to, implement and embody the vision of this collective solidarity and to create conditions to nurture its growth.

Inevitably conflict would arise among communitarians resulting in fractious groups in which the government has to take the side of one group or the other. Clearly then an ethical question would arise as perceived by Italian political scientist Luigi Bonante while discussing the difference between the individual and the state. He argues that while the state has sufficient tools to defend its rights and reject its duties, or the individual as recipient it is much harder to elude his duties than to achieve his freedom. This asymmetry provides strong argument for the protection of human rights. Unfortunately the confrontational politics in Bangladesh dose not help create an environment for respect for human rights.

US State Department's 2003 Human Rights Report has termed Bangladesh government's human rights record as "poor" with violence being a pervasive feature of politics. The report accused the security forces of committing "a number of politically motivated and extra-judicial killings" and of using "unwarranted lethal force". Nearly all abuses went unpunished, the report added, and the resulting climate of impunity remained a serious obstacle to ending abuse and killings. The report further alleged that the government arrested and detained persons arbitrarily under draconian laws. As if Berlin based Transparency International's labeling of Bangladesh as the most corrupt country in the world was not enough, the people had to hear from the Executive Director of The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that Bangladesh ranked number one in Asia in terms of violence against journalists. She deplored the recent attack on Dr. Humyun Azad and several journalists at the Dhaka University campus and killing of journalist Manik Saha. CPJ Executive Director urged the Bangladesh government to vigorously investigate and prosecute all those who murdered, assaulted or threatened Bangladeshi journalists.

What is truly surprising is that repressive rulers fail to realise that Bangladeshis of different generations were baptised in fire. If the forties generation and their predecessors decided voluntarily to walk into the "land of the believers", the sixties generation and their predecessors fought to walk out of that mythical world. When Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah declared at Dhaka that only Urdu would be the state language in Pakistan the students rebelled culminating in the 1952 language movement which proved to be the irreparable fracture in the foundation of the newly formed Muslim country. 1n 1954 the Bengalees threw out Muslim League from power only to be shackled by the martial law regime of General Ayub Khan. Then came the glorious War of Liberation. This very brief walk through history is to emphasise the utter uselessness of repression against Bangladeshis attempted at intervals by both foreigners as well as aberrant compatriots only to fail again and again.

Ordinarily one would have thought that almost all of the 130 million Bangladeshis speaking the same language, belonging to the same race, and for most part practising the same religion should have a coherent, cogent and non-dissonant society free from the risk of the contagion of chaos. But the opposite appears to be the case. Intolerant of opposing views, sclerosis of thought, mono-centric locus of power, rapacity of the rich and the powerful are present afflictions of Bangladesh society presaging its eventual disintegration. Drunk with the overwhelming moral power of the "majority rule" added with the ability to ostracise and enforce conformity or exclusion of the non-conformists' warnings against such authoritarian acts could find resonance in De Tocqueville's observation that "the moral authority of the majority is partly based on the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than a single individual and that the number of legislators is more important than their quality".

The Orwellian tyranny of the majority is further compounded by increasing activism of Islamists who

wish to recreate a truly Islamic society not simply by imposing the sharia but by establishing an Islamic state where religious edicts will be integrated into all aspects of society. US State Department's Religious Freedom Report of 2002 recognised the disadvantages faced by the minority community in access to jobs in government, in the military and in political office. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report of July last year observed that the Bangladesh government was not doing enough to prevent the country from becoming a haven for Islamic terrorists. Washington based Centre for Strategic and International Studies in its Transnational Threat Update of July last year stated: "The current security climate in Bangladesh may allow terrorist groups to organise attacks using a radiological dispersal device. Concerns over this possibility are

plausible given that radio substance have proven accessible to terror groups within the country"

( http:www.csis.org/tnt4)

Though critical of human rights abuses the western powers have not yet labeled Bangladesh as having been corrupted by religious extremism. But disquieting factors like almost total collapse of law and order in the country, enduring character of violence by the authorities against opposition parties, deteriorating living standard of the people, decay in the infrastructure of daily life, overwhelming greed of the rulers, existence of patronage based system of extraction from ordinary people, inability to deliver political goods like education, health, economic opportunities etc. point towards failure of governance. One must remember that state collapse is a long term degenerative disease and an extreme case of governance problem. It is also to be recognised that regimes unable to raise the quality of life of the people run the risk of popularly based challenges.

If we accept David Held's (of London School of Economics) assertion that we no longer live in a world of discrete national communities but in a world, in David Held's words, " overlapping communities of fate", then the Muslims in Bangladesh are a majority in their own country but are surrounded by Hindu majority India and Buddhist majority Myanmar and in the vicinity by non-Muslim South East and Far East Asian countries. It would, therefore, be prudent not to go for an excessive display of Islamic exuberance, and more so as the Muslim diaspora in the West has been experiencing "spiraling progressive alienation" and is forced to continually negotiate the parameters of minority citizenship.

Under these conditions the interests of the government would be best served not by increasing repression on dissent but seeking common ground keeping in mind that five-year term is not divinely ordained nor elections before the term end unknown in Bangladesh or elsewhere in the world. It is imperative to realise before it is too late that country is always more important than political parties or individuals.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.