Ground Realities
This long, patient wait for democratic revival
IT is time we got serious about elections. With the rest of the world going about life, going through it in the way everyone should, it is surely not right that we should be falling behind. In these long months since the end of the BNP-Jamaat government in this country, elections have thrown out governments and brought in new administrations around the world.
The Thais have had their election, with Thaksin Shinawatra's friends coming into office. The Pakistanis have had some sort of a government take over after an election campaign that claimed the life of Benazir Bhutto. In the United States, a good number of people expect Barack Obama to be the man to beat John McCain in November. Gordon Brown has been losing those local elections, prompting questions about when he will leave office or when he might call elections. India came dangerously close to a snap election last week and was saved only by a miracle in the Lok Sabha
So there we are. The world has moved on, like everything else in life. Only we, perpetually preparing for credible elections, are yet in the dark about our future. Oh, yes, of course, we will have elections one of these days. But what does disturb our sensibilities is this nagging query of what kind of elections we will have. More pointedly, the whole question revolves around the credibility as well as acceptability of the elections that will be upon us. Add to that this irritating bit about the voters' list. Not every eligible voter has been accommodated on the list. And of those that have, there are many who complain that their images on their voter IDs do not match the way they look. If you find it hard to agree with them, you simply have to judge for yourself. And once you do that, you will spot the problem. Perfectly normal faces appear flat or bloated or oblong on many of those photographs.
What happens when the man or woman with the face on the ID and with another on his or her shoulder makes it to the polling station, only to be told that the face and the image are strangers to each other? It may well be that the voter with the two faces will come away without casting his or her vote. So much for human patience. Having waited so expectantly to exercise your right to vote in choosing a good, decent, moral government since the last elected, not so morality-driven administration made its way out of power, you could stumble into the discovery that you cannot vote after all because of good technology getting to be sloppily applied.
And that is not the only hurdle before you. With a state of emergency in force, the instrument which at present serves as the sole legal basis for this caretaker government, you are not quite sure in what manner, legal as well as political, the general elections you so look forward to will be conducted. To be sure, there are people who will point to the Legal Framework Order that Pakistan's Yahya Khan put in place as he prepared the country for elections back in 1970. But that obviously cannot serve as a precedent here, for Bangladesh is not under martial law. That is a good thing, for martial law has always been far from our thoughts (even if there have been the worrying episodes of military rule taking hold of our lives in the mid-1970s and early 1980s).
But what we have at this point is neither political government nor, in the strictest sense of the meaning, a constitutionally-ordained caretaker administration (the latter point becomes significant if you remember that the caretaker arrangement is expected not to go beyond a prescribed 90-day limit). Now, therefore, when you hear all those politicians raising the demand for a withdrawal of the emergency before the elections, you certainly tend to agree with them; or at least most of you do. But consider this: assuming the emergency is withdrawn, fully and absolutely, before you trek down to the polling station, what basis in law will this administration have as it presides over the elections?
That is an impediment, as sure as it is disturbing. But, then again, how do you expect the political parties to campaign openly and effectively with the emergency in place, even if certain of its provisions are set aside or suspended? An emergency is an extraordinary situation that does not allow a free expression of views or a free movement of people. And politics being the natural preoccupation of liberally inclined or politically conscious people, it is but natural to imagine that it needs to find space for itself, that it requires an atmosphere that allows it to breathe freely without anything breathing down its neck.
That freedom is not what a restrictive measure like the emergency has room for, despite anything that apologists for such systems might come up with. And so you are, we all are, on the horns of a dilemma. Excuse the use of the cliché, but in conditions that nearly brim over with clichés --- caretaker government, need for transparency, crusade against corruption, good governance, et al --- you cannot really expect ingenuity to sharpen your understanding of the ambience you are part of.
Your worries do not end there. Even as you mull over the elections, over the probable results, over the deals that have been made and even now may be in the process of being made, you note with what alacrity a number of politicians have been or are being freed. Only months ago, we were made to believe that none of those put away by the government could expect to step out of incarceration on bail any time soon. Nizami, Mannan Bhuiyan and Saifur Rahman (the last mentioned went away to Singapore and is now back), along with a host of others, now breathe in freedom. Sheikh Hasina is away, out of the country, while Khaleda Zia, her "uncompromising leadership" intact, to herself and her followers, waits for her elder son to be freed before she is willing to contemplate the possibility of her own liberty. The younger child is away in Bangkok. His brother could just be sniffing freedom round the corner.
There is the Truth Commission out there, a big question mark looming over all this campaign against corruption in the country. If all those businessmen detained on charges of corruption can step out into the sunshine after confessing to their sins and promising to behave in future, what happens to rule of law and good governance? And if businessmen can be free, should politicians not be given a similar opportunity to reinvent themselves? That said, there is that contortion in your stomach, that queasiness in it, which happens to be there because of your feeling that all the bad men you had thought would not come back into your life end up doing precisely that -- come back to wreak new havoc in your life and mine. And then, you ask, what will have been the point of all this sound and fury about getting the country moving again?
But, wait a while. Consider the corporation and municipal elections. They have turned out well. Is that a sign of something even better up ahead, at the promised general elections? Or is it a hint of the people of this land being inseparably linked to democratic politics, even if democracy has always taken a battering at the hands of bad men and women? We wait, with fingers crossed, to arrive at the answers. And we wait too for a bigger goal to be attained -- a restoration of secular democracy and everything that it symbolises.
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