Everything falls, everything pales, everything palls

Iajuddin Ahmed's clear reluctance to go by all the provisions relating to the appointment of the chief advisor of the caretaker administration will certainly be interpreted, years hence, as a conscious, even premeditated assault on the constitution. And that is not all. When you hear Justice Mahfuzur Rahman tell you that the president of the republic has no authority to appoint an acting chief election commissioner (under whom the judge might have to work), your heart bleeds once more for the constitution. Should someone not be asking Justice Rahman about the precise constitutional provision upon which he appointed himself acting CEC once Justice MA Aziz was persuaded to go on leave?

Let us not talk about the sanctity of the constitution any more, for if we do, we run the risk of seeing our hearts break into a thousand pieces. When Khaleda Zia and her friends remind the country, day after day and well into the long winter night, about the national imperative of having everything operate within the parameters of the constitution, we are tempted to ask whether the many deaths in crossfire that occurred on the watch of the BNP-led government were symbolic of a strict adherence to the constitution. That is a question which, of course, every good, conscientious citizen is asking these days. Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan and all those others in his political tribe have so far made no response to that.

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But, yes, they have cheerfully made it clear that by calling in the army to aid the civil administration in maintaining law and order President Iajuddin Ahmed has done the right thing. You are then intrigued. Where was the disorder that normally precedes such action? All the siege programmes the Awami League and its allies have been observing of late have been admirable exercises in how to devise a peaceful way of bringing about political change. You can refer, in this context, to some of the soul-cheering revolutions that have taken place in other spots around the world.

In the old Czechoslovakia, in Ukraine, in Georgia, et al, tens of thousands of men and women had simply mounted a vigil against the depredations of bad men, and they had done the job in a civilized, tranquil manner. In Lebanon, the Hezbollah has been organizing some very well-attended rallies against the Fouad Siniora government. What has been happening in Bangladesh, despite all the calumny against such demonstrations of the popular will, has been our own version of People Power. How then do armoured personnel carriers come into the picture?

Quite clearly, President Iajuddin Ahmed has not been able to bring himself to appreciate the nature of the on-going movement for democracy. His late night address to the nation on Sunday was a very unambiguous reflection of his sentiments. For Bengalis who remember the tragedy that took hold of their lives back in 1971, Iajuddin's address sounded eerily reminiscent of the way General Yahya Khan berated us all in that darkest of seasons for this country.

When Bangabandhu and the Awami League publicly, and loudly, protested the postponement of the National Assembly session on March 1,1971, Yahya Khan was forced to take to the waves again, this time to suggest that a round table conference be convened. But before he did that, he spent a considerably large segment of his speech pinning the blame for the gathering crisis on the Awami League. He should have condemned Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the Pakistan People's Party for the palpable threat they were holding out against democracy.

On Sunday, so many long years after those disturbing remarks by Yahya Khan, Professor Iajuddin Ahmed seemed to be repeating history. His indignation against the siege programmes of the fourteen-party alliance was unequivocal. And yet he could have tried to be different, despite the political background on which his presidency is based. He could have made a serious attempt at statesmanship, through quietly and yet decisively guiding the country out of all the mess at the Election Commission, left behind in a heap, of course, by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its kindred spirits. Had he been able to do that, we as a people could well have spotted in the move something of an attempt on the part of the President to redeem himself in the public eye.

It seems that redemption is not on the cards, at least not yet. And what we have before us now is the spectacle of a severe earthquake in the making. How else can you describe the dramatic, and perfectly justified, resignation of four of the ten advisors in the caretaker government? One begins to wonder. Did the president have absolutely no idea, when he spoke to the country on Sunday night, that he was about to set in motion an entirely new train of problems for this long-suffering nation? Or did someone on his staff (there is no dearth of dubious advice being churned out at the presidential palace these days) convince him that it would not matter much if some of the advisors resigned, that he could always find replacements for them?

To be sure, no man or woman is indispensable. That being an article of faith in so very many spheres of life, Iajuddin Ahmed will not find it hard to choose a few new individuals to fill the vacancies that have just been created. But where can you get such morally upright people as Akbar Ali Khan, CM Shafi Sami, Sultana Kamal and Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury in a society rapidly being denuded of incorruptible people? They have, in these forty-plus days since they entered the corridors of power and then left them, done a good, even courageous job despite the hard circumstances around them. And beyond the morality factor there is the extremely political matter of how the resignations have given the Iajuddin administration a deservedly rude jolt.

Government is serious business. It is never a classroom where pupils stand and tremble in awe of the headmaster. By ignoring the advisors, by endlessly embarrassing them through taking decisions without taking them into confidence, by hacking away at the collegial spirit of the caretaker system, President Iajuddin Ahmed has created the grounds for the calamity the people of Bangladesh have now been pushed into. The headmaster has compelled his pupils, individuals for whom self-esteem is important, into deserting the classroom.

It is a terribly wrenching condition when the head of government lets his colleagues know, in so many ways, that they really do not matter. By undercutting the advisors on such issues as the package proposal for a reconstitution of the Election Commission, the president/chief advisor did not merely strike at their self-esteem and intelligence but also raised anew the nauseating feeling that government was once more dwindling into a clandestine affair. You have to go back to everything that has been happening since Begum Zia's team quit office in October. The whiff of partisanship that has glued itself to the president is something you cannot ignore.

He took his own time to convince MA Aziz that he had to step aside in the interest of a fair and transparent election. But then the good deed was swiftly supplanted by a bad one. The president placed Modabber Hussain Chowdhury at the Election Commission despite the all too public knowledge of the former police official's leanings toward the BNP. Presidential actions must match the stature of the presidential office. The Modabber story was a definite corrosion of the majesty of power at Bangabhaban. Additionally, for Iajuddin Ahmed to insist that men like SM Zakaria hang on to their jobs is actually to suggest that the interests of the country can sometimes be cast to the wolves.

Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. You do not need William Butler Yeats to throw such apocalyptic truths at you. Nor do you need to recall the nearly forgotten sadness which once issued forth from a Frenchman -- "everything falls, everything pales, everything palls" -- to put Bangladesh's current state of politics in perspective. It is all out there before you.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier