Perspectives
Is the Rubicon crossed?
There was hardly anything dissimilar in the dramas surrounding the apprehension and incarceration of the two top political leaders of the country, although the hiatus between the two episodes has roughly been one and a half months. The procedure followed and the drill adopted for the task as well as the sensation they created also were the same. But there were subtle differences in the way the two faced the ordeal.
For Sheikh Hasina, the miraculous survivor of August 15, 1975 and August 21, 2004, as well as many other undisclosed attempts on her life, it was almost a non-event. Resigned to fate, she courted the arrest more in a matter of fact manner and routinely hoped against hope for justice which too eluded her in the past.
On the contrary, Mrs. Khaled Zia was learnt to have been mildly defiant, but faced with reality she soon gave up. She, however, insisted on Koko, her younger son, accompanying her in the same transport. That too was rejected.
There was also a visible difference in the mood of the crowd that thronged along the way and in the court. There were outpourings of sympathy for Sheikh Hasina who never pretended either to be a Madam or a Begum and instead remained one of the common folk in her populist style of leadership, inherited from her illustrious father and perfected during her years of agitational politics in the street.
But there were curiosities galore for Begum Zia, because only months before she was undeclared queen of the country, held in awe by her hapless subjects across the country. Now she was hoist on her own petard and reaping the whirlwind.
She ruled the country with imperial hubris and turned her tenure into a reign of plunder and terror. It was during her rule that the country witnessed the horrors of August 21, which, in public perception, could not have been enacted without her government's connivance.
Many similar terror acts carried out by party goons against their political opponents were a routine feature of BNP-Jamaat dispensation led by her. She and her kith and kin along with their cronies and acolytes mercilessly looted the country to push it to the point of decrepitude, earning the ignominy of four consecutive years of being champions in corruption.
Surprisingly, she suffered no contrition for what she wrought on the country, and like a hardened sinner continued to defend her corrupt cohorts -- particularly her thoroughly spoiled sons -- during the course of her recent tele-conferences. The imperious rulers do posses a measure of narcissism and cannot easily reconcile to the reversal of their fate. It was therefore no wonder that Mrs. Zia embarrassed even the court by giving vent to her misconceived notion of her clan's honesty.
It is an irony that Sheikh Hasina was never afforded a level ground during her role as the leader of the opposition in the eighth parliament and not even immediately before her arrest on July 16 last. It is equally ironic that now she is equated with her arch-rival who has a far worse record of depravity.
However, by all appearance, those debates are now irrelevant because the Rubicon has already been crossed by the people holding the reins of power. With the arrests of the country's two most powerful political figures, the process that started on January 11 is quickly proceeding towards denouement by attempting to consign them both to oblivion -- at least for the time being.
Both Hasina and Khaleda while licking their wounds in the jail are instinctively trying to grab even at straws to keep afloat in a sea of miseries. With their well-wishers to fight legal battles on their behalf quickly vanishing, they have left few to curry favour from.
Given the enormity of the graft charges and past record of our judicial rectitude and uprightness, they have few chances of coming out of the complex web of indictments. There is nothing like compassion in the lexicon of power play. Unless there is a miracle, the Hasina-Khaleda chapter of our politics is over.
The caretaker set-up has promised us transition to a kind of democracy that will rid us from corruption, criminalisation of politics, and influence of black money and muscle-power in future elections. We are repeatedly told that the caretaker government is busy preparing the ramparts of such a democratic polity. These assurances are nothing new in our politics and we are familiar with them right from Pakistan days.
But what emerged from such transition in the past was the advent of a new set of power broker, manipulators, political hustlers, and their minions.
The political space vacated by the still popular political leaders and their giant political organisations can only be filled up if democracy's breeding ground is prepared by unfiltered political activism. Otherwise, are we not inadvertently encroaching the domain of the prerogative of the public? Ultimately, only the public, with its collective wisdom, is entitled to decide the fate of the politicians. But it is certainly not to deny the government of its prerogative to bring to book anyone who is found guilty of crimes against the public.
Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.
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