Ground Realities
These are not momentous times . . .
WE are living through some rather interesting times. These are not momentous times and we are surely not making history that could leave an enormous impact on our future. But, yes, these are interesting times, and just as well, and they are because of everything that is happening and, conversely, for everything that is not happening. A former prime minister has flown out of prison and out of the country. Another insists that she will stay in it, but that should be no reason for her incarcerated children not to make it abroad for medical treatment.
Every evening, therefore, there are all the images on television to tell us all of the uncertainties we as a people are going through. There are the whispers of people hauled up for wrongdoing over these past months already planning new futures for themselves once they are out of gaol.
Those whispers, for men like Kamal Hossain and for so many others, have begun to look like worries. And naturally too, for if after all these months of a sustained drive against corruption and sundry other crimes, conditions come to a pass where men who have played havoc with the politics and economy of the country are allowed to walk free, you cannot but be deeply concerned about the future.
But set aside your concerns for a while and focus on some of the bizarre that has lately been coming into politics. In these past few weeks, Begum Khaleda Zia has missed no opportunity to harangue the country in court on the thousand and one afflictions, in her view, the caretaker government suffers from. And that is not all. The former prime minister, having presided over an administration that has clearly left every other administration this country has ever had way behind in the corruption league, informs the media and through them the country that her last stint in power was a golden era for Bangladesh. No contrition is there. Not a bit of humility comes in those expressions of sentiment.
But more surprising, and galling too, is the reality that the powers that be have looked the other way while the Begum made those incendiary political statements. Of course, she is a politician, but even politicians are barred from speaking to others when they are on trial before a court.
Sheikh Hasina, in the months between her arrest in July last year and her release recently, did not or was not allowed to speak to newsmen. That was understandable. Neither has anyone else now in custody found any opportunity to play to the gallery through the media. That is the truth. And if it is, there comes the legitimate query: why is Begum Zia being given the liberty to engage in political theatrics when the law should be handling the charges against her?
You go back to history. Bangabandhu did not and could not make political pronouncements in the course of all the time he spent in jail, and that was, altogether, more than thirteen years. In 1968 and early 1969, not even the impetuous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came by any chance of disseminating his wisdom before the media. There are always rules about everything we do in life. When you do not follow them, or when a government chooses to keep them in suspension for reasons that are either not there or are mysterious or spurious, it is a society that tends to lose its equanimity.
While you mull that over, move on to something pretty troubling. The young Tarique Rahman, it is being put about by his party and his lawyers, is seriously ailing in prison. Allegations are rife about the bad way he has been treated in custody. Now, in a civilised, modern dispensation, every prisoner is entitled to all the security the state is supposed to provide him with. When that does not happen, when a prisoner falls ill or is unable to walk because of something that may have been done to his spinal cord, it is that security which comes into question.
Sergeant Zahurul Huq was murdered in the course of the Agartala conspiracy trial when the state should have ensured his well-being. And because it did not, it earned a bad name for itself. Our collective sorrow has continued all these years after November 1975, when it was the administration, no matter how odious it was under Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed, that took the lives of four of our pre-eminent men of history. Prison is always a galling affair and yet it is one place where security of life and continuity of good health become the responsibility of the state.
Which is why these fears about Tarique Rahman's health in police custody become deeply unsettling. The question here is not one that relates to the charges of corruption against him. We recall the long, dark shadow he cast on our lives through conducting a virtual parallel government in the country beside the theoretically real one administered by his mother. But we do believe -- and no one should be surprised -- that as a citizen and as a prisoner he must enjoy all the privileges the law allows him in his present state. Let there be no ambiguity in meaning here.
And speaking of ambiguity, there are other matters that have of late exercised citizens' minds. The move by the Election Commission to go ahead with elections to the city corporations and municipalities may not exactly be beyond the parameters of the law or the constitution, but it certainly is something over which a caretaker government may not assert authority. In a ninety-day framework, such an administration is empowered only to organise general elections, see the results come in, hand over power to a new government and walk away into the twilight.
But that is precisely where all this question of interesting times comes in. This caretaker government has, in seventeen months, moved from taking tentative care of us to making long-term decisions for us. Well, the circumstances have been extraordinary. And extraordinary has been the way the government has functioned, under the umbrella of a state of emergency.
So you cannot really argue, seeing that the Election Commission, Public Service Commission, Anti-Corruption Commission, the trials of corrupt elements, the adoption of a Right to Information ordinance, et al, have all been initiated by this government (and generally to our satisfaction), that it ought not to go beyond presiding over elections to a new parliament. It can organise other elections. Even so, in the fraught conditions through which the country happens to be passing, wiser counsel could have convinced the Election Commission that the corporation and municipality elections could wait until a new legislative body came in.
But then, power is a most persuasive weapon, to those who wield it. The world, in that deeply figurative way of speaking, is the hands of the individual or group that has come by it. There are, of course, all those limits to power, but you do not see them, you do not acknowledge them, because present exercise of it does not permit your peering into a future absence of it.
And so you can afford the luxury of seeing more interesting happenings up at the crossroads ahead. Happy watching! And waiting!
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