Ground Realities
The point, in the end, is politics
THERE are things that this government, seeing that it is provisional in duration and caretaker in nature, should not be doing. But, of course, there are a whole lot of areas it has in these past sixteen months stepped into, some of them full of landmines. Those steps ought not to have been taken in the broad interest of democracy.
But then again, there is the fact that one cannot undo what one has done so enthusiastically, sometimes so mistakenly. So we will let all that be, for now. What does bother the country intensely, though, is the thought that there are people within the caretaker administration, and outside it, freely and even disturbingly suggesting that the constitution be reviewed and that necessary changes in it be brought about before the elections come to pass.
That signals not just trouble but grave danger as well. We, who have been witness to some of the uglier manifestations of anti-politics in the post-1975 years, have not forgotten, and will likely not forget, the many and unsettling ways in which the constitution has often been tampered with.
The amendments which went into a mutilation of the constitution, especially where a legitimisation of military rule was the issue, have for a long time put up roadblocks on the road to a full realisation of the democratic potential of the people of this country. Additionally, those amendments have also been debilitating for us in that they yanked the country away from its political and moral moorings as they came to be effectively and constitutionally acknowledged in the aftermath of the War of Liberation in 1971.
In its own time, the four-party alliance government under Begum Khaleda Zia sought to undermine further the spirit of the constitution through its moves to cast aside historical truths in favour of an exaggerated notion of the role of the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in the war.
We could go on with this debate for hours on end, for days without respite. For now, though, we will be doing ourselves -- and by that we mean the nation at large -- a huge favour by asking the caretaker administration to step back from any plans it may have about reviewing the constitution. And we do that for two very obvious reasons.
The first is that the caretaker government is not empowered, being the non-elected administration it is and therefore holding no accountability to the nation, to undertake the task. There are the ramifications to think of should such a move of grave import be taken. You may think the constitution needs to be recast, even to be cast aside and replaced with another. But that is a job that can, should and must be done by the people, in the symbol of the representatives they elect to Parliament.
Anyone who disagrees with this principle is in effect placing the future of politics at peril. And that is the point from where the second objection to a constitutional review under the present dispensation follows. If the caretakers actually go through the process of reviewing the constitution and then present the nation with a fait accompli, they will be setting a dangerous precedent for the future.
Any future administration, elected or otherwise, will then find it easy to circumvent Parliament and go about playing around with the constitution to suit its immediate, parochial needs. And Parliament, of course, will stand embarrassingly emasculated.
It is the future of politics we speak of. In these many months since the imposition of a state of emergency, the nation's political classes have been at the receiving end of a whiplash that has left many of us unnerved. What ought to have been a purposeful crusade against corruption soon, and inexorably, turned into a campaign of vilification against politicians and political parties across the board. As if on cue, almost everyone in Bangladesh -- businessman, bureaucrat, academic and what have you -- went happily into the job of spearing politicians or running them into the ground.
The attitude was wrong. And it was wrong because it failed to take account of the corruption that loomed or lurked or worked in other areas of national life. Academics of questionable repute went off scot-free. Any politician willing to be a reformist remained outside the net, until much later when reforms did not appear to be going everywhere. Bad bureaucrats and corrupt policemen have not been booked for their misdeeds.
Businessmen with unsavoury reputations, except for a handful, have gone about their work with nary a thought to the welfare of the country. Meanwhile, prices have soared, fuel prices have gone up and crime has begun to rear its sinister head once again. The queues of the poor have lengthened before the rice shops. And then those shops have shut down, breaking hearts all around.
That is the objective reality. You may try to put a gloss on it. You may deny it. You may come forth with all those surveys that show up politicians in bad light. The truth is that you cannot transform a society and go forth into the future without politicians in charge. You do not deny that a class of politicians, or pseudo-politicians, have in recent years given us all a bad name and a red face. But politics has an ambience wider than the narrow parameters of self-interest the men and women of the last elected government worked in.
Politics gives people the capacity to dream, to build on dreams one after the other. When those dreams are made to run into a logjam, when politicians are treated as so many men and women with criminal records, it is horrifying nightmare that burrows its way into our alleys and lanes and homes. The Almighty knows, and so do we, of the nightmares we have already passed through, of repeated tests through fire we have been put through for no fault of ours.
Which is why we are in little mood to go through the test of a national government once the general elections we have been promised are behind us. Those who have floated the idea of such a government surely mean well. But then there is the larger matter of the principles upon which democracy, or parliamentary democracy, functions. There is always a point behind elections. It is to produce a government; it is to throw up an opposition, which will prepare to be the government someday. And unless the results of the voting are confusing or inconclusive, there is little point in advocating the idea that winners and losers all get under one umbrella and all get to exercise power.
You can have a shaky yet necessary coalition when elections produce no majority party; and you can forge a grand coalition when historical imperatives demand such a state of politics. To suggest, however, that, no matter what, all parties in Parliament must band together to form a government is to make light of politics. To ask for a national government now is, therefore, to push us all from wariness into a quagmire.
The point, in the end, is politics. Let it take its natural course. Let the will of the people, expressed through a transparent, unfettered exercise of the ballot, take precedence over all other thoughts running riot in our collective imagination. That the constitution is sacrosanct, that Parliament is supreme, that sovereignty rests in the people -- all of these truths must be reasserted in the weeks and months up ahead. There is no other way for us to reclaim our place in the global hall of respectable governance. Let no one pretend there is.
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