Straight Talk
Please hold
PERHAPS the inimitable M.J. Akbar put it best in his piece "Who killed 2007?" syndicated in these pages last November 20: "The remaining weeks between mid-November and early January have been put on hold in both India and Pakistan," wrote Mr. Akbar, before adding, parenthetically but incisively, "Bangladesh is in an exceptional situation; the whole nation has been put on hold till further notice."
This is, I think, more than the state of emergency, more than the unresolved issue of whether and when elections will be held and who will contest in them, more than the on-going drama of who will be picked up in the anti-crime and anti-corruption drive -- the fundamental reality of the through-the-looking-glass world we have all resided in since January 11, 2007.
In the early days post-1/11, every day brought us a new sensational arrest. Today, every day brings us a new verdict of some one-time prominent politician or businessman being sentenced to years behind bars. Every day we hear news of the trials against either Sheikh Hasina or Khaleda Zia inching along, or not, as the case may be. Every day there is news of some new dimension in the on-again, off-again saga of the split within the BNP.
Indeed, after the chief adviser's most recent speech, we are back again to our traditional pastime of speculating as to what it all signifies: whether we will have elections after all, whether the elections will be participated in by all the big parties or not, and what this all might mean for the future of the commonweal.
The op-ed pages of the newspapers and the comfortable arm-chairs of the television talk shows are filled with tea-leaf reader and soothsayers, who, cautiously and tentatively, of course, so as not to give offence or say the wrong thing, are attempting to make sense of it all. Nor can anyone doubt that when (if not whether) we hold elections, and the acceptability of any such elections held, is the most pressing, indeed, the singular, issue of the day.
But lost in this will they-won't they, will she-won't she debate of the past sixteen months has been any real discussion of fundamental issues. The political discussion, such as there has been, has been a meta-discussion about politics. There has been no real discussion of economic policy, foreign policy, social policy, education policy, any policy, really. To the extent that there has been any policy discussion at all, it has revolved around the legitimacy of the current government to make policy, not so much the policies per se.
Now, in truth, this is not a whole lot different from the sixteen months prior to the declaration of emergency. The political discussion then, such as it was, revolved around the issue of the then up-coming elections and whether they would be free and fair or not. There was a lot of discussion as to the rules of the game and who would head the EC and the care-taker government, but almost entirely absent was any discussion of the policy issues at stake in the elections.
But it is also true that in the months leading up to 1/11 that at the level of the political grass-roots and among the citizenry at large that there was much discussion and debate about reform. This was not discussion about economic reform or even economic policy, but, in addressing the issue of reform within the political parties and within the political system, it was nevertheless serious and substantive.
But there has been no further substantive talk of internal political party reform over the past sixteen months, except in the very generalised terms that everyone agrees that it would be a good thing. Right now the political parties are too concerned with the fate of their leaders and the intricacies of keeping themselves in one piece to be able to give much thought to issues of internal reform.
Substantive discussion of policy -- be it economic policy, energy policy, you name it -- has also stopped dead in its tracks. I seem to remember that not so very long ago, we had national discussions on what to do with our coal and natural gas reserves. Not particularly edifying discussions, perhaps, but discussions nonetheless.
But for the last sixteen months, everything has been subsumed into the talk of whether or when we will have elections and the wrongs and the rights of the anti-crime and anti-corruption campaigns, specifically with respect to the fates of the two ex-prime ministers.
Part of the problem, obviously, is that until this week the political parties were banned from doing politics and it was unclear what level of organisational activity on their part would have been permissible (though something tells me that discussing policy issues will not be high on their agenda, even now).
The second leg of the problem lies in the ambiguous mandate of the current government to make any kind of major policy decision, and its well-founded apprehension that there would be limited public tolerance for sweeping policy changes made by a non-elected government.
The final part of the problem is that no one else is really willing to enter into any kind of policy dialogue with the current government due to the fact that, however supportive they may be of its goals in private, no one really wants to be too closely associated with it publicly.
But the upshot of all of this is that, as a nation, we have been treading water for the past sixteen months. Certainly, one can argue that we first need to settle the outstanding issues of political and institutional dysfunction, and only then can we address our minds to matters of policy.
However, I am not sure that, as a practical matter, it is possible for a country to put the latter on hold while it muddles its way towards the former. Nor does it seem, to be perfectly frank, that we have made a great deal of headway towards resolving the former issues in any kind of sustainable way during the past sixteen months, either.
It is for this reason, more than any other, that it is imperative that elections be held as announced. So long as we have a non-elected government, we will not be able to have the national discussion that is so long overdue on so many issues, and we will continue to live in a twilight state of suspended animation.
Of course, the problem is that there is little guarantee that we will ever have these kinds of discussions even after an election. It is true that we didn't really have the kind of national conversations that we needed on issues of policy and identity before, either. But while elections alone are not a sufficient condition for addressing the issues of where we are going in the 21st century, they are most certainly a necessary one. The country has surely been on hold long enough.
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