The necessary question: Will you resign?

That would be sound advice were it not for the fact that the judge is hardly in a position to sermonise today. If he is upset at the same question being thrown at him day after day, if he is looking for a different question, or a different kind of questioning, he ought to know that it can come only after he has provided a good, satisfactory and convincing answer to the first.

And that of course relates to the nationally significant matter of whether he plans to resign any time soon as a way of making it easier for the country to go seriously into the business of arranging a free and fair election early next year.

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The reality, though, is that Aziz has shown precious little inclination towards resignation. The more the campaign against him has gathered speed, to say nothing of the fury accompanying it, the bigger his stubbornness has grown about "staying the course," a phrase a particular American in distant Washington is so fond of munching on these days.

The chief election commissioner has, so far, stayed the course. That is a creditable thing to do. But when you begin to weigh that pattern of behaviour in terms of loss and gain, you will stumble on the painful realisation that every single day the CEC and his three commissioners stay in their jobs is a day that could have been spent in a better and moral way. But, to be sure, Justice Aziz will not agree with us. He has every right not to. The problem crops up, though, when he comes forth with gratuitous advice on what newsmen must do before hurling that old question at him. His job is not to proselytise or to be didactic. It is simply to answer the question.

It is the professional responsibility of a newsperson to frame and ask questions on matters that affect the future of a country, of a society and even of an individual. If there are men like Dan Rather poking, figuratively, powerful people like George Herbert Walker Bush at their underbellies and eliciting from them angry responses that demonstrate their vulnerability, it is a hint of good journalism at work. In the Watergate days, Bob Woodward and company kept asking the question: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" It transpired that President Nixon had known about things pretty early on. He therefore had to go in order to preserve the sanctity of the office he held. The recently dead Oriana Fallaci ruffled a lot of powerful feathers the world over and yet kept on asking the same question over and over again. The Shah glared at her, Ayatollah Khomeini was positively scandalized, but they answered her questions all the same.

When you deliberate on journalism in terms of the Bangladesh reality, you cannot pretend that the nature and quality of the profession have not changed since the early 1990s. The change is out there for all of us to see, though we do realise that the level of boldness a journalist needs in order to put some more meat on his professionalism remains to be attained to its fullest extent.

When Justice Aziz brazenly told those journalists, most of whom are young and naturally irreverential of authority, that they should be learning journalism first and then proceed with their questions, he ought to have been given, in turn, some more questions to handle. It is never a journalist's job to be intimidated or shamed by one holding a position of public trust. If politicians in Britain are terrified of the possibility of being grilled by Jeremy Paxman, there is hardly any reason why the powerful men and women in our own Bengali society should not be subjected to a similar situation.

The task here, for anyone who calls himself/herself a journalist, is to leave sentiment and social mores aside and simply wade into the cesspool with his/her questions. Which is what the journalists who asked the CEC whether or not he would quit office should have gone on doing. When Aziz asked them: "Why are you throwing wild questions at me regularly?" they should have gone "wild" all over again.

A good journalist is one who turns out to be a purposeful questioner. He is one who is not willing to allow powerful men and women get away with their obfuscations and evasions and their arrogance. He looks them in the eye, and will not blink until he has the answer. There is something called constructive meanness; and it is geared to the public good. A journalist who cannot buttonhole a powerful individual and then slowly push him or her up against a wall is not being nice to their job.

At this point in time, the question for Justice Aziz and his commissioners will remain one, and only one: "When will you go?" That question has nothing of the personal about it, but everything of the public good ingrained in it. In the months before he died of a cardiac arrest, Colonel Akbar Hossain was asked by the media if he planned to quit the government over the many charges of corruption leveled at him and his ministry.

He heard the question loud and clear, did not pretend it was not there, and then said in distinct manner that he intended to stay on. So what is the difference between the deceased minister and our CEC? It is simply in the fact that where the minister answered the question, the judge not only refuses to come forth with a response but also comes up with the attitude that he can teach the media all they need to know about journalism. A few months ago, he astonished the country with his offer to teach the law to our men and women of law. A good thing it was that no one took him up on the offer.

Be that as it may, the chief election commissioner has done us all in the journalistic profession a favour. He has simply rekindled in us the thought of the many gaps that yet need to be bridged in our pursuit of right journalism in this country. You can spot these gaps as you surf across the many Bengali television channels and zero in on some of the ubiquitous talk shows that never seem to fizzle out. It is the same participants, along with the same comperes. And it is the same old line of questioning -- too polite and even ingratiating, too friendly, too incomplete and too lacking in aggressiveness to be of any value.

The image should have been the reverse. It should have been the participants quaking in their boots in apprehension of the questions coming their way. And it ought to have been for the comperes to exercise control over their programs, a performance they have not quite mastered. The tendency remains one of trying not to wound the feelings of the powerful men or women seated by them with their "disrespectful" questioning. That mars the show and you then tell yourself that if you have watched one you have watched them all.

The idea that a public forum such as television is out there for certain truths to be exposed goes missing, and it does not matter whether or not you think you are emulating some of the determined journalistic minds in the West by copying their titles and mannerisms. If on your local version of Hard Talk you spot the presenter (who incidentally has never been part of the media world) failing to grill General Ershad over his political legacy and so failing to satisfy our collective curiosity, you know how journalism shoots itself in the foot.

But journalism must pulsate with life, with intellectual ardour. It should be raw and yet be a hard-boiled affair. Now and in the days ahead, here in Bangladesh, media-persons must catch men and women in high places doing all the wrong things and then ask them, persistently: "Will you resign?"

One day, tired and bored and finally embarrassed, those mighty ones will resign.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.