Ershad lost and found

And he did what he does best, putting up a great show again. He held his hands like they were tied and flung them apart as if a slave had just broken his chains. Then he asked for forgiveness for all his crimes. But the funniest part of his delivery was when he talked about going to jail and coming out dead. This is where he got muddled between being a coward or a hero. He said, in an outcry of defiance, that he was a soldier who was not afraid to die. Only hours ago he was hiding because something could happen to him.

Of course, matching words with action is not his strength. This man, a former soldier by profession, has always ducked under his words. If his words were any proof of his actions, one would like to wonder if he would drop his weapons and desert the battlefield if sent to a war. He expelled his brother from the party. He abandoned one of his wives. When he was president of the country, he changed his prime ministers like menageries in the showcase. Friends and foes, family and fortune, he has been eclectic in his approach to life.

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But the most devastating thing was to see him on the same stage with more respectable leaders. Yes, together they looked like a formidable force as the sea of supporters swung with slogans. Still, reasonable minds could not help asking what that man was doing out there. Flashback some 16 years, and he was an enemy of the people. The entire country was asking him to step down.

So I would say that his weight on the stage came to balance the scale. We don't know what will happen in the election. We don't even know whether, in the endless jousting between two political sides, the election can be at all held. But both sides have got one enemy of the people each, one from 1971 and another from 1990, and finally, no matter which side wins, we have got the equilibrium of evil. If not the candidates, the voters should be happy. They have got a level playing field to cast their votes in.

The fact remains that Ershad has been taken by one alliance for the same reason that Nizami has been taken by another. Both sides want to win the election, and they do not mind compromising standards to scrape a few extra votes. That is the sorry state of politics. All moral counts get lost in the count for votes.

Still, what happened last Sunday has a moral odium that floats above the usual muck. The 14-party alliance might win the election, but it has lost the politics. Maybe winning is more important than politics to the generation of ageing leaders. Most of them might not be around to run for another election.

Perhaps it is the age factor that also pushed Ershad onto that stage to confess his misdeeds. It is possible that this confession was genuine, since closer to death most people tend to have the fear of God in their hearts. So if there was any revelation in what Ershad said or did on that stage, it is that the fountain of youth has dried up. That, maybe at long last, the fear of death has changed his heart.

Between Ershad and Jamaat, perhaps there is this one difference, more or less. He has said sorry for the wrongs he did for nine years, whereas the others are not willing to renounce what they did for nine months. Then again, it is not easy to trust a man who has never told the truth. Maybe he will vanish again, and reappear on another stage at another time by another sleight of hand and say something completely different.

It has been wrong that one alliance has taken a fallen dictator under its fold for the same reason it would have been wrong if the other had done the same. Theodore Roosevelt once said about President Somoza of Nicaragua: "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." In a way it is pathetic that the once all-powerful Alldaddy should spend the last years of his life doing rotation in such expletives.

Honestly, the overthrown Big Boy has been bleeding his dignity in the arrogance to continue even after his shelf life had expired. Ershad should have left politics long ago, at least since he served the prison term. So should have some of the other leaders, people who have outlived their utility and overstayed the welcome. But then proprietary politics is like ancestral business. You do not retire until you are dead.

Ershad will be sorely missed if and when he is gone, because he epitomizes the absence of scruples that is the hallmark of our politics. He is a man of good taste who has lived in bad taste. His immaculate taste in clothes, shipshape appearance, and glad eye for women, all these were mired in contradictions as scandal after scandal dragged him down.

In Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis writes: "What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, radishes, and out of him come sighs, laughter and dreams." For as long as Ershad will keep vanishing and emerging, he will remain in the news, and for so long as he will remain in the news he will remain a riddle. It is amazing how, after living a privileged life, well fed, well clad, what came out of that machine is a hollow man.

Last Sunday when Ershad got up on the stage, that hollowness was dispersed in the crowd. If a hollow man was lost, a hollow man was also found. That spoke amply for our politics as well.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.