One circle, two centres

But it is there in our politics. The true centre of power in any democracy should be the people, and the circle is supposed to be drawn around them. Instead we see two centers like two yolks of an egg, while people float around like distant boundary of a blown out circle.

All signs tell us that we live in a country where most things work like freaks of nature. Nothing works normal here, if you think about it. Your telephone, electric line, water supply, gas connection, friendship, love, social interactions, police, traffic and name all the portals of decent society. You must continuously pay up for everything, only other option being powerful connections, preferably relatives.

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In the pre-historic days life was short, nasty and brutish as Thomas Hobbes described it in the Leviathan, because people fought continuously amongst each other and they were under attack from rival tribes. How is life different today? We are continuously under attack from many groups. The Titas Gas man pops in your house in the middle of the day and demands receipt of payment for past bills when you are not there to show him anything. He would bully your servants and then cut your connection to restore it in no time on payment of baksheesh. Try lodging a complaint to his authority, and you would realise you are up against a tribe of hostile people.

The story is exactly the same for rest of the utility services that you would like to enjoy as member of a civilized society. Last year, to speak of the traffic, I paid fine for a violation, which was dated one year before the purchase of my car. Then comes income tax, and the harassment there is inversely proportionate to your earnings. If you are a businessman and know the ways of the world, you pay much less in taxes than a salaried man who makes in a year only a tiny fraction of what a businessman earns in a month. One must pay for simple things like submission of one's tax return and then to get the tax clearance certificate. Average citizen works hard to earn his money, and he works even harder to keep it.

Now after you have gone through so much hassle, your phone, which works because you pay the line man on a periodic basis, rings one day when a husky voice with a deadly tone reminds that your life is at his mercy. He demands ransom for holding you hostage in your own anxiety. You don't feel safe in your house, on the street, in your office, and then worry about your wife and children. The caller has told you that he knew all their whereabouts. You have government in this country, you have the opposition, bureaucrats, educated people, police, army and holy men, yet you would have the uncanny sense of being lost in an infested jungle.

Two centers in one circle create that disturbing feeling, because government is all about creating balance of power so that the strong will not bully the weak. And that balance has transformed in time from physical to political to economic power. Democracy is all about that balance, when the weakest man and the strongest man are on equal footing to choose their government. Communism tried to bring that balance through economic power by transferring from each according to his means to each according to his need. Capitalism put means above need, putting greed in the driving seat.

The idea of democracy is to have circles within circles, the centre of all circles being the people. The circle closest to the centre is the government, next to it is the opposition, and the boundaries go farther from the centre for each interest group. The government is closest to the centre, because the people have chosen it to protect their life and property.

Look at the order of circles in this country, and you basically find two centres and one circle. The circle comprises of the people and the centers are made of rival power groups, contesting each other. The businessmen, the musclemen, the politicians and the name-all people who have special interests are lumped together in each centre. The people are the boundary, which is farthest from these centres.

It may not work in your mind, it may not make sense in geometry, but that is how it works in this country. It's a freak of nature with two centres in one circle, like a ring of crowd in the old days, which stood around a fight between two cocks, or a snake and a mongoose. Think about it, and it will come to your mind. The fighting centres reverberate through the layers of interest groups and the people get shook up for nothing.

I know a good number of people, who are getting shook up right now because they have received threats either to pay or perish. These are connected people with relatives in high places, people who can get protection from police or afford to keep bodyguards. But I can see their seething anxieties, the fears that swing their minds in the bouts of blind furies. They don't understand what they have done to deserve it.

I feel tempted to tell them what they have done. They have put greed on the hot seat, which has wrecked the car down the spirals, lowering themselves into the layers of hell where vices are stacked like goods in convenient stores. Some of them have done it directly, others indirectly but everybody either participated or condoned in the carnival of crimes, because each thought nothing was wrong so long as he was safe.

Nothing is safe for nobody today. And the twist of irony has come full circle, when it's not the common men but the privileged ones who are being oppressed. You can express it in many ways. People are having a taste of their own medicine. People are getting paid in their own coins. What goes around also comes around. People are reaping what they sowed.

But the upshot of the story doesn't change. Society is like your health, which deteriorates if neglected, starting with the organ, which is abused most. The rich and the powerful once turned to vices, and now vices have turned to them. The oppression of the oppressors by other oppressors has a ring of the dog-eat-dog world, when survival has turned into a fierce struggle.

The two centres are now threatening and abducting each other in that fierce struggle, while the circle stands still, occasionally reeling under its impact. The ordinary folks need not worry because their lives are not worth a ransom. The centres must decide between them, whether to yield place to the people or let nature take its own course.

The nature often creates its freaks to prove that it can be ruthless, if need be.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.