The return of the Pied Piper?

In our fairly long experimentation with democracy, power has always been the staple of politics, which couldn't but produce its strange dynamics shorn of idealism, conviction, and values. As a result, our politics suffered denigration and debasement to an extent that even a discredited crook has become indispensable for political expediency i.e. salvaging one's sinking ship.

No wonder the fallen autocrat of 1990 is today wooed by the same quarter from which power was usurped by him in early 1982.

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It is an irony and the nation's collective shame that the fetid character has at all returned to our political discourse even after a process of political catharsis and a good deal of democratic practices, pretensions and posturing.

We seem to be courting defeat before the forces of reaction and obscurantism, the mantra of BNP-Jamaat combine, now buttressed by Jatiya Party. The power in their vocabulary is the elixir of life and must be regained again and again by any means, fair or foul.

With this Machiavellian approach, the BNP leading the four-party ruling alliance has opted to co-opt the man who while in power earned the sobriquet of being the "richest president of the poorest country."

The BNP and its "uncompromising" leadership did not have any compunction in forging an unholy nexus with him because it also has learnt the dubious distinction of bringing the country the world championship for corruption for the fifth time.

What's then happening to us? Are we harking back to a sullied past that we buried a decade and half ago? Are we then retrogressing as a nation? Does a fallen dictator ever stage a comeback -- that too with the patronage of those who played a role in his ouster?

Haunted by these disturbing questions the nation is genuinely non-plussed at the developments where an "uncompromising" BNP supremo has turned to her once arch-enemy, who not only tormented, during his rule, the political activists of BNP, he also played havoc with the nascent party by luring away its leaders and a good number of workers to join his JP. What is, in the end, her compulsion?

The whole episode surrounding the old fossil has indeed laid bare the running sore the BNP is festered with. It has exposed the hollowness of its claims with regard to its "achievements" and revealed its inexorable slide toward public rejection and an incipient fear of losing the election.

Although it has done everything conceivable to ensure an election victory through compliant election commission, caretaker government and an administration politicised in its favour, the BNP does not rest assured. It is not prepared to leave anything to chance for there is an unpredictable element in the whole process: the people who constitute the electorate.

No one knows how would this huge body of electorate -- already alienated from the incumbent government, lashed by unprecedented inflation, price hike and terror-turned-militancy and disillusioned by BNP's broken promises -- would finally behave. They may create imponderables putting all prediction and calculation of electoral arithmetics haywire.

The country's political following is more or less evenly distributed between two opposing political forces. A small percentage of votes from any quarter to either of them will tilt the balance. Hence this desperate bid to co-opt the support even of a former dictator.

Even if Ershad has informally thrown in his lot with the four-party alliance, its political cost for the alliance will be rather exorbitant if Ershad's pipe dreams are to be fulfilled. Moreover, the entire deal with the man is fraught with risks for the BNP which may further alienate the public with the immoralities inherent in it.

Ershad is virtually asking for the moon i.e. 50 parliamentary seats, proportionate number of ministerial berths, the presidency, and, most ominously, the withdrawal of all criminal and corruption cases pending against him.

Can the BNP give all these without slurring its own face? The electorate will not see such an immoral deal in good light.

Therefore in the ultimate analysis, any party courting Ershad may lose more than it would gain. Ershad may turn out to be a liability for any political outfit trying to benefit from its alliance with him. It clearly involves the riddle: who gets how much from whom. It will be far from easy to solve the riddle while some people have unnecessarily given him the space he doesn't deserve in our national politics.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.