Devil's advocate

Let's look at the first one first. Since October 28 the party has been split over the issue of whether to contest the elections or whether not to. On the boycott side you essentially had almost all the senior leadership and on the election side the party chief.

The fact that this was such a long-drawn-out and back-and-forth debate actually gives the lie to the conventional wisdom which says that Hasina makes all decisions without consultation.

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October 28 ended with Justice Hasan formally declining the chief advisership, but the AL immediately found itself presented with a three-pronged problem. One, the president was going to appoint himself chief adviser, two, the violence on the streets was reaching frightening heights, and, three, the threat that the army was lurking in the wings, waiting to come in.

October 29 might have been the time to stand its ground, but it didn't. Here the party made the mistake of saying that it would wait and see. In the end, it waited until December 24 to decide, by which time it was pretty late in the day, and had it gone for elections immediately, the party would have had two more months preparation.

What did it get from waiting? Not much, really. AL succeeded in getting rid of Aziz and Zakaria, but the returning officers hand-picked by the BNP remain in place and the voter list remains crooked. Certainly, had AL made this decision in October it would be in a much better position to contest than it is today.

But more than whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, the fact that there was a kind of zig-zag quality to the decision-making didn't help matters. One day it was elections, the next boycott.

On December 18 AL all but announced that it couldn't sit for elections on this schedule, less than a week later on the 24th, it threw its hat into the ring. Now, again, everything is up in the air due to the rejection of Ershad's nomination. No one knows where this comedy of errors will end.

This brings us neatly to the subject of political expedience. There can be little doubt that the unseemly jockeying for Ershad's favour has done neither party much good in the public eye. Certainly, it has made them both seem opportunistic and one wonders whether it makes that much sense for the AL now that the party has decided on elections, since its principal fear was that Ershad would be used to give cover to AL-boycotted elections.

The subject of political expedience, of course, brings us nicely to the recent agreement inked between AL and the Khelafat-e-Majlish that has caused an uproar among the progressive community who feel that the AL has abandoned its commitment to secularism and joined hands with the worst kind of reactionary elements in order to split the fundamentalist vote.

Let me point out one or two things here. First, criticism coming from disillusioned AL supporters or the segment of the population further to the left is legitimate and fully warranted. They have every reason to feel that the AL has badly let them down.

But the smugness on the part of BNP-voters who are relishing this latest turn-around on the part of the AL is surely less warranted. It ill-behooves those who have supported the BNP-Jamaat combine (for whatever reason) in the past to now complain when the AL begins to cozy up to the fundamentalists.

Make no mistake, regardless of what the electoral ramifications of these moves are, and right now it is hard to predict whether they will presage a net gain for the AL or not, this frantic last-minute putting together of a motley "grand alliance" is really making the AL look a little desperate.

We already knew that the BNP would do anything to stay in power, witness the party's machinations with regard to the Election Commission, the president's unconstitutional assumption of the chief advisership, the burning down the houses of those who jumped ship to the LDP, etc.

But now the AL has also shown that victory is more important than principle. Who knows: with an attitude like that, the party might even win.

This has not been an easy time for progressives and secularists who for the past few decades have made an uneasy home for themselves within the AL. No one is buying the AL general secretary's complaint that he has been misquoted and that the agreement has been misrepresented.

Jalil's second stab at soothing the ruffled progressive feathers, that there was nothing to worry about, the agreement would never be implemented, didn't go down much better. It is never a good thing when the best avenue for a political party is to claim that it isn't being sincere. For some reason, this causes people to doubt its sincerity.

That said, I am not sure that I am overly sympathetic to the "how can we believe anything you say?" line of argument that we are now hearing. The truth is that all political parties say lots of things, some true, many false, and the smart voter believes the ones that are believable and disbelieves the ones that are not.

The problem is not that one cannot believe anything the AL says. In point of fact, there is much that the AL says that is eminently believable, such as when it argues that it will not disband Rab. But the fact is that when it comes to its commitment to secularism, one simply can't be sure any more, these days.

But by way of -- not analogy exactly -- let me turn your attention to the 2004 US presidential elections. Not too many people thought that John Kerry was much good as a candidate or that he had strong convictions or that he stood for much. He seemed to be the consummate clueless politician, saying what he thought would win him favour, but at the same time making mistake after mistake.

He wasn't great on the Iraq war -- he had voted to authorize it and was not in favour of withdrawal. On other issues close to progressive voters' hearts, such as welfare and health care, he was careful not too promise too much or to say anything much at all.

When it came to the issue of religion, Kerry made much of his pious Catholicism and the fact that he went to church every Sunday and tried to portray himself as eminently sympathetic to the church-going and the religious, which, for all I understand, he may actually be.

In short, as far as anyone progressive or liberal was concerned, he was a pretty poor candidate. But the main point was that as bad as he was, he was better than Bush. Most people seemed to get the fact that to be elected president in America that there are certain noises one has to make, and that there was a world of difference between Kerry and Bush.

Most also seemed to get the fact that he didn't really have a great deal of choice in terms of his vote for the war and that even if he wasn't able to come out and say openly that he wanted out of the war, that there was a huge difference between him and George Bush.

You see, they had learned their lesson from 2000 when the conventional wisdom on the left had been that Al Gore was a chump and that there wasn't much difference between him and Bush. They might have been right about the first, but they were dead wrong about the second.

The darling of the left in 2000 was Ralph Nader who ran as an independent. In the end, the election was so close that it was possible to say that it was Nader voters who gave Bush the margin of his victory. The rest is history.

So what is a secularist who has supported the AL and believed in its commitment to secularism to do. Should one now vote for the BNP-led 4-party alliance or should one still give the AL-led grand alliance the benefit of the doubt or should one simply stay home and vote for no one at all. These are the questions that they are asking themselves right now. I guess it all depends on which one thinks is worse -- to be a sincere and genuine opponent of secularism or to just play one on television and have no sincerity at all.

Let me conclude by pointing out the obvious. Even though progressives mostly gave Kerry the benefit of the doubt, and voted for him, the right-wing weren't fooled in the slightest. Regardless of his efforts, they had him pegged as a bleeding heart, soft on defence, tax and spend Massachusetts liberal, and so he still lost.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.