The dog and pony show

So, what is cooking? A cornered Chief Election Commissioner stayed home until the government came to his rescue. The two election commissioners under him took divergent views and wanted to obey the court ruling. The lonely Chief felt like a general who was deserted by his soldiers. You could get a backache if you were under excessive pressure. It takes lots of spine to stand up and do what is right!

The government appointed two more commissioners so that the Chief Election Commissioner could find his feet on the ground. Never mind that it was downright cheating. It was like giving two easy questions to a candidate when he struggled to pass a difficult test. But what is wrong with the first two commissioners? If the court ruling is right, then why are they wrong? If the court ruling is wrong, then why are they pressing for it?

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Perhaps there are more to it than meets the eyes. The court ruling has been prompted by a writ petition filed by the opposition challenging the authenticity of the voter list. In so much as we bring politics into everything, the two commissioners might be politically motivated in their stance to push a particular agenda. This is where the buck stops. It has the smack of a political crisis within the Election Commission.

That crisis was obvious when the Chief Election Commissioner disappeared for eleven days until the government gave him the back rub to heal his pain. It became more obvious when the newly appointed commissioners quickly closed ranks with their boss to lend him the weight and influence he needed against their dissident colleagues. But how good is that victory? How long can it hold off or ignore the court ruling?

The crux of the matter is whether or not anybody is tampering with the voter list. If that is happening, why not collect all or some of the names, which are being excluded and publish the smoking guns in the newspapers or post them on the walls of the Election Commission? That being what it may, we also need to know something else. Why should the Election Commission stand divided on this issue? It must do what is legal and legitimate. To be or not be definitely is not the choice.

The question is whether those who have hard time making that decision are the right choice for the Election Commission? Is our election process in good hands with them? Are we sure that they will be able to enforce a fair election over and above the integrity of the voter list? Who can tell if the backache will not return when the heat turns up again?

Now it is an irony that the priests should desecrate the temple! Let us not be surprised if the government is looking for an Election Commission which will be the ventriloquist's dummy. But the events of the last week have made it worse. The Election Commission proved it was dumber than the dummy, thereby creating sufficient ground for us to raise questions about its independence, not to speak of the integrity of the voter list. And look what has happened already! There has been violence on the street and a day-long strike last Sunday, which could lead to more complications in the coming days! International negotiators are already descending to tell us how to handle it.

This is such a pity! The situation already looks precarious because the opposition wants to boycott the election unless some modifications were made in the caretaker concept. The Election Commission fiasco has rubbed salt on that wound and we might see troubled times in the run up to the election, if the election happens at all!

There must be lots of people in the government who are confident. They were confident once before, and they proved wrong in less than six weeks! Of course, I am talking about the election when the ruling party had a short-lived stint, forming the government after the elections, which was boycotted by the opposition parties. The government had to step down because it couldn't pull it through.

The beauty of democracy is that, like a baby, it needs two parents to be conceived, one parent being the ruling party, another the opposition. It has a lot in common with conjugal life, which has moments of domestic squabbles and romantic bubbles. But ours is an unhappy house where the parents are fighting like alley cats.

Meanwhile the country is heading for chaos as nothing seems to work anymore. The caretaker government, the Election Commission, nationalism, patriotism, the Liberation War, the binding forces of history, anthropological homogeneity, common language, everything and anything that once gave us the burning zeal to fight and die for a nation state look irrelevant.

This is where I disagree with most people. Creating institutions will change nothing unless people who make those institutions change as well. We hear about a scholarly man who entered politics and then suffered a stroke because a large sum of money was withdrawn from his account by someone who forged his signature. In as much as we would like to know who that swindler was, we would also like to know how so much money had gone into that account.

Last week, we saw on TV the sleeping face of a politician who was injured in the police attack during Sunday's strike. If you rewind your memory, the same face had once appeared in the newspapers, circled in black, along with gun-toting men who shot fires into a procession killing a number of demonstrators. The problem lies in the heart of this delusion. Yesterday's predators become today's preys, yesterday's hyenas become today's heroes. This is where we fail. Again and again, we lose sight of the circus in our excitement for the sideshows.

It reminds of the dog-and-pony show that came to be popular in the USA in the 19th century. By the late 1920s it was being used dismissively of any small-scale or mom-and-pop operation in the same way dog and pony shows were considered to be cut-down versions of "proper" circuses. Sometimes it was the name of one part of a larger circus, perhaps designed as a sideshow for the children, who were allowed to ride the ponies and pet the dogs.

What happened at the Election Commission last week was an absorbing sideshow. It was one part of the larger circus called election, which will, one by one, bring out the dogs, ponies, jugglers, tightrope walkers, acrobats and lots of clowns. But the most amusing of all acts is the illusion, which has been created to mislead the country. If the court wants the Election Commission to stop working on the voter list, why should the commissioners want to fight amongst themselves?

I bite my tongue. The Chief Election Commissioner is in hospital again. This time it's diabetes and blood pressure, and only the two newly appointed commissioners seem to know more about it than their other two colleagues. Plenty of sideshows this time, not enough circus though. Shame, shame, shame, I rest my case.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.