Ground Realities
Of politics and wit, of tragedy and calamity
THERE are times when humour is in huge need, even in societies where realities outstrip the capacity for people to give expression to joviality. If you have cared to notice, it is in politics that you often come across some of the incidents that often lift a weight off your shoulders, the weight being all this unending worry about the state of the world.
Sometimes you must shake yourself free of the world; or the world must slip quietly away from you if you have to remember what life is all about and what your place happens to be in the universal scheme of things.
And when you remember, you know once again just how large a dose of humour can be injected into life per courtesy of politics. There are all the examples of positive humour before you. In the course of the 1980 campaign for the American presidency, Ronald Reagan lifted spirits by flailing away at an increasingly hapless Jimmy Carter. "A recession," said Reagan, "is when your neighbour loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job." And then came that punchline: "Recovery is when Carter loses his job."
It was humour that, in a way, revitalised American politics, in much the same way that it had carried politics to strangely charming heights in the times of Winston Churchill. He believed he was a glow-worm among so many ordinary worms. And Benjamin Disraeli? He defined the difference between tragedy and calamity thus: "Observe Mr. Gladstone over there.
Now, if he fell into the Thames, it would be a tragedy. But if we tried to pick him out of it, it would be a calamity." We need not reflect overmuch on the raucous laughter that in consequence reverberated through Westminster.
Now, coming back to our own Bangladesh, we were informed the other day that the Awami League had finally been permitted by the caretaker government to observe a token hunger strike on May 5. Well, there may not have been anything of the bizarre about it, but there is surely an element of the queer here.
Here is a political party whose members and followers are in the mood to go hungry for sometime. That is perfectly all right. But you need official permission to do that?
If the situation had been different, if a body of people had threatened to march out on to the streets threatening to cause commotion and perhaps even mayhem (as Fazlul Huq Amini has just done), we would not be surprised in the government's taking an interest in things. But, then again, the rules of politics seem to be changing, even mutating, in this country.
Think of the reformists in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. These days even Saifur Rahman raises the precondition of a release of Begum Khaleda Zia in order for meaningful general elections to be held later this year. You might say there is hardly anything wrong there. Ah, but there is. If the reformist group now truly wishes the Begum to be out of incarceration, it can simply renounce its claim to be the symbol of the BNP and go back to being led by the Khondokar Delwar-led faction of the party.
But that is the serious side of the issue. Where do you spot the comedy here? It is in that contradiction (the naughtier ones among us call it hypocrisy) among the reformists. To have come thus far in rejecting Begum Zia's pre-arrest decisions and openly throwing down the gauntlet at her, only to tell us now that they remain loyal to the lady is somewhat too loaded for us to take in.
There have been comical situations earlier as well. Sher-e-Bangla AK Fazlul Huq was denounced as a traitor and his ministry in East Bengal was dismissed rudely in 1954. And yet it was the "traitor" who went on to serve as Pakistan's interior minister before playing a twilight role as governor of East Pakistan. Politics is fun, you might add.
When Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy went visiting the United States as Pakistan's prime minister in the latter part of the 1950s, it was ambassador Mohammad Ali Bogra who went around ensuring that the head of his country's government did not lack for anything. Only a few years earlier, Suhrawardy had been law minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra. General Ayub Khan served in the Bogra cabinet too. In 1963, Bogra died in harness, as foreign minister in the regime of President Ayub Khan.
Politics does make strange bedfellows. It also throws up some improbable permutations and combinations. Ataur Rahman Khan, chief minister of pre-Ayub East Pakistan, years later became a toothless prime minister in the regime of Hussein Muhammad Ershad. He then told us why he did not like the word maangsho (meat) and preferred to use the term gosht.
Why such semantics should have concerned him is anyone's guess. But he did leave us all mystified somewhat when he eventually quit the Ershad regime and then produced a book listing all the disappointments he had encountered in government. Look deep; and you will spot some humour there.
And, by the way, few among us have forgotten the copious manner in which Kazi Zafar Ahmed wept at the funeral of Ershad's mother. More than a decade earlier, the burial of Bangabandhu's father had led to a huge explosion of tears in Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed.
The father of the nation stared at Moshtaque, perhaps wondering why his emotions had got so roiled. That was comedy. It turned into unmitigated tragedy only months later when Moshtaque presided over the wholesale murder of Bangabandhu's family. His eyes, at that point, were absolutely dry, most Caligula-like.
There was a brazenly powerful comedian in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. His followers told people in 1970 how bullets had rained down on him in a place called Sanghar. Amazingly, not one touched him or so much as graze him. He leapt from the jeep he was in, bared his chest in a manner typical of sub-continental movie action, and dared his "enemies" to shoot him.
In 1971, at the UN Security Council, he led many into thinking he was tearing up a copy of a resolution the body had been recommending over Pakistan's crisis in Bangladesh. Truth be told, Bhutto was only tearing up a piece of paper he had on him.
Be that as it may, there has, of late, been an appalling absence of wit and repartee in South Asian politics, with, of course, the rare exceptions of men whose remarks have often enlivened exchanges with their rivals.
India's Piloo Mody was once accused of having shown his back to a parliamentary colleague, whereupon the speaker asked Mody to explain himself. Mody, a corpulent man, stood up and deadpanned: "Mr. Speaker, if you look at me you will see that I have no front, no back, no flanks. Indeed, I am round all over. How then could I have shown my back to the honourable member?" It brought the house down.
And that was self-deprecating humour at work. Not many among us -- in politics, in business, in journalism, indeed anywhere -- possess that courage to laugh at ourselves. Why are so many among us turning into so many humbugs? Why must men and women in high places always project a grim demeanour to the outside world?
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