Chaos in the court

To recount that story is not to remember what had happened on that fateful day but to grapple with the shock by piecing together its abominable horror. Insofar as our national life is inured with political violence, one more vehicle torched or two more offices ransacked shouldn't make any difference. But the horror is about crossing the line, the violation of yet another inviolable institution, perhaps one of the few things that still should raise concern or cause disdain in our self-respecting minds.

And minds are like muscles, where the loss of ability to feel the pain could be a sign of degeneration. Last October, we saw the skirmishing doctors in a hospital, as one group chased another, again smashing and setting ablaze a few offices while the frantic mob looted a medicine store. If anybody cares, there is a common thread running through the chain of events. People are growing uniform in their political outrage across professional uniforms, the white coat of the doctors and the black coat of the lawyers blurred in the gray dementia of a terrible arrogance.

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In short, what happened last week was the contempt of a contemptible court. Come to think of it, a court is a place where a lawyer can be found in contempt if he appears before a judge without his gown. By that standard, how do we calculate the level of contempt when the decision of the Chief Justice was outright rejected, his office attacked and his resignation demanded by hordes of lawyers? Long after the dust is settled, long after this nation finds an end to its political crisis, it will still struggle to calculate what was lost in the madness of a single afternoon.

It all started God knows where, blame it on the politicians, blame it on the bureaucrats, on the Chief Justice, Hawa Bhaban or Sudha Shadan. Prima facie, it started in the cerebral cortex of those who are deluded between decency and obscenity, people who cannot tell the difference if they are naked or clothed, their minds confiscated in a vegetating state. If the Chief Justice was clumsy in his meddling, his opponents were callous in their muddling. One side may have been unlawful, but the other has been lawless. The shame is that the showdown in the house of law was a criminal business.

The wigs, the black coats, the robes and the bands make the attires of learned lawyers and judges, which, besides their legal knowledge, are set to distinguish them from the rest of us. But what these features make of those folks is an institution that upholds the law, which is a set of rules that controls the behaviors of citizens supported by the power of government.

So when the government was weak, sorting out its existence and authority, when the citizens were fighting over their own differences, it was a rare chance for us to see if that institution could function on its own. Instead it proved fickle and fractious, incompetent and inconsequential, impulsive and compulsive in its adaptation of the mob psychology. The people, whose duty is to defend the law, defiled it all the way.

It doesn't matter who did it and for what reason they did it, whether they belonged to one party or another, in collectivity, in totality, these people, who looked like lawyers and talked like lawyers, didn't act like lawyers. Rather it was a very odd scene, the left hand of the law clutching at its right in a bizarre act of deformity.

In Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist Mr. Brownlow says that the law assumes Mr. Bumble's wife acts under his direction. Mr. Bumble replies that if the law supposes that, then the law is an ass, an idiot! On that day when the highest court of the country looked like a vanquished land, flames, smoke, wreckage of doors and windows forming the background of clashing mobs, it was clear that the lawyers and judges had acted under the direction of anything but law. The law looked like a consummate ass in the confines of its own house.

That moots the point. How could these professionals in whose hands rests the fine balance of jurisprudence, play up to their raw instincts? How could they, and for that matter, any professionals lower the standards of their own professions by playing second fiddle to the politicians? If the doctors don't mind their patients, the police doesn't enforce law, the army doesn't defend the country, the engineers don't fix and build, the teachers don't teach, and the lawyers and judges don't uphold law, then what we have is a relentless chaos in a jumbled state of confusion.

It is chaos within confusion that has been the outcome of what happened last week in the Supreme Court. The black coats in the melee posed a visual shock as much as a mental block, because their rogue behaviors made us wonder if the same people who broke the law on that day will be of sound minds to keep it again. Henceforth, every man who will be sent to jail, everyman who will be sent to death, will have the right to ask whether the same people who could insult the law were fit to interpret it for others.

For the first time in our history, lawyers and judges will find it difficult to look the man standing in the dock in his eyes.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.