Of the BNP, picnics and other things
THE Bangladesh Nationalist Party is pretty unhappy about the Tipaimukh affair. That is quite understandable. But what surely gets to be upsetting, even a trifle irritating, is its characterisation of the planned trip to the site of the proposed dam by a group of parliamentarians as a picnic.
Of course, the BNP's Major Hafizuddin has since making that picnic-related remark commended the Awami League's Abdur Razzak over the latter's move to go into the entire Tipaimukh affair. Hafizuddin believes that Razzak's act demonstrates seriousness on the part of the ruling party over the issue. And, incidentally, it is a belief we share with the BNP politician. Government is, or should be, and always, serious business.
But if Hafizuddin has had cause to change his opinion on the matter of the Tipaimukh visit, Khondokar Delwar Hossain has not. He too has called the visit (which has, meanwhile, been aborted because of the rains) a picnic. Meanwhile, on a bigger and much more ominous scale, the chairperson of the BNP has warned of a movement on the issue if the government fails to uphold the interests of the country. Naturally, if any government in any country is perceived to be going against the national interest, it is in the fitness of things that the people of the country will rise in revolt and force a change in conditions. That is a given. But what comes across here is the matter of why Begum Zia and her party have constantly, often consistently, sharpened their antennae every time anything to do with India has been coming in. You think of Farakka and now you think of Tipaimukh. Of course, the rest of us have thought long and hard over these issues as well. But at the same time the rest of us have not ignored thoughts of all the other problems that have assailed us over the years.
You think here of the assets and liabilities we ought to be sharing with Pakistan. You dwell on the question of all those Biharis who opted to be citizens of Pakistan after December 16, 1971. And, most important, you wonder why the "Bangladeshi nationalists" have not been making it clear to the Pakistanis, in the way the rest of us have, that they need to express public contrition over what their soldiers did to our people in the tortuous course of our War of Liberation all those years ago.
And if recent history is anything to go by, you are left feeling absolutely horrified by all the nightmarish tales springing out of the ten-truck arms episode in the days the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its friends in the Jamaat-e-Islami exercised political authority over the state. The point we make is simple: if the BNP spots a lot of things wrong in the way the Indians have been behaving toward us, it should also be morally and ethically strong enough to go for introspection where its position on the facts we have been speaking about is concerned. A political party which goes into a selective process of analysing the issues, and those it feels will give it mileage among the electorate, gets into the act of diminishing itself.
Let the facts speak for themselves. And those are facts Begum Zia and her acolytes need to take into cognisance if their party is to return to popular respectability. Of the facts we speak of, there is the decision to withdraw an army brigade from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, an act that promises to go a long way in restoring the confidence of the indigenous population in the state. The BNP does not see it that way, which is a pity. It has gone on believing that keeping the soldiers there is a surefire way of ensuring the territorial sovereignty of the state. And it has said not a word about all the sufferings the Chakmas and other tribal people have been put through over a period of years because of the illiberality of the state we caused to be born in 1971. The truth is that the tribals have paid a price, for little fault of their own. The truth is also that we have expended a huge degree of resources, in terms of men and materiel, in the CHT for reasons that ought not to have been there in the first place.The Begum and her people have stayed silent on these points of historical reality. They have not explained why they have put this nation through intense psychological discomfort by their repeated attempts to distort national history -- in their public pronouncements, in school textbooks, indeed everywhere. The damage that has thus been caused to Bangladesh has been colossal.
And yet the Bangladesh Nationalist Party can, even at this late hour, go for damage control. Political parties, once old and worn out policies threaten to send them into oblivion, often reassert themselves through simple but necessary reinvention. That process can begin through its return to the Jatiyo Sangsad. It has a moral duty to be there.
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