Ground Realities
Of school timings, guillotined trees and overall drift
A government ought to have better priorities than decreeing the time when children must go to school. For governance is something rather serious. Of course, part of that seriousness comes with being able to determine the nature of traffic on the roads and the way in which it will flow.
But to tell children one fine morning that they must henceforth wake up earlier and be out on the road and toward school only because the roads must be kept free for others to move on is utter carelessness at best and absolute outrage at worst.
Even more nauseating is the brisk reversal of a bad decision, for such reversals conveys the general, and perfectly credible, impression of government having dwindled into being a cavalier affair. Only two days into implementing the school timing directive, a bureaucracy goes back on its word and tells us all that the old timings are fine.
It is all a question of misplaced priorities. Weeks ago, with much fanfare, the traffic authorities informed citizens about a re-routing of buses as a way of easing traffic problems in the nation's capital. It worked, miraculously. For only a couple of days. And since that moment in the sun, no one has talked about it. Which is one way of informing ourselves that we are back where we used to be, in the midst of all-encompassing chaos. You watch all the goings-on on all those roads and you realise with something of trepidation that things will not get any worse before they get better.
They will keep getting worse, unless of course the government -- this one or the next -- stumbles on the idea that building more, and lengthened, flyovers could really be the answer to the horrendous numbers of people and vehicles crowding the streets.
It is amazing that no one on the perches of authority thinks about these possibilities or, having thought about them, quickly bins them as just another wasteful idea. But consider the long way Kolkata and Karachi, to name just a couple of cities in our neighbourhood, have come through their flyovers. Why must we be left behind?
Ah, yes! We have, you will quietly remind us, been left behind in many ways. Even Pakistan, a state not much noted for its devotion to democracy, has had elections. Its latest military ruler has been banished into silence; it has quite a working parliament; and, even if you do not have much affection for him, Asif Ali Zardari is the country's new president.
There will be an election in the United States. There has already been one in Canada. The Thais, despite their meddling military, have managed to hang on to democracy, however tenuous that democracy may be. And look at us. We have been preparing -- preparing!!! -- for general elections since October 2006. And even there we are not quite sure we will have elections on the scheduled day, if the worries of the politicians and various social groups are to be taken into account.
The state of emergency is still there; some unhappy political elements are pretty upset at the prospect of their losing the elections and could, therefore, do everything they can to foil the exercise. Sheikh Hasina is away and no one has any clear idea when she will be back home.
The drive against corruption has lost steam, despite what the Anti-Corruption Commission will tell you. The chief election commissioner cheerfully tells us that Begum Khaleda Zia can become a voter any day she wants to. That is most wonderful, but why then must all those people who have missed making it to the voters' list be told that nothing can be done about them, that they must wait till the elections are over?
There are the priorities that need handling. But when you wake up one beautiful October morning to the depressing spectacle of scores of trees having gone through the guillotine in the night, you wonder at the predatory nature of some men in the hallways of government. There is doublespeak all around you.
On the one hand, there is no end to exhortations on saving the environment; on the other, there is this gross insensitivity to nature. It simply does not fit. And then there is the blatantly sinister about it. Those men with murderous intent go about the job of killing trees in the nocturnal hours, when men and women sleep in one another's arms and babies dream of consorting with fairies in the Garden of Eden.
Go back to history, our history. Something has always been the matter with some of our rulers when it has come to the job of tackling trees. In the Zia years, all the graceful trees on Manik Mia avenue were struck down, because the president had seen wide, tree-less boulevards in China.
It was not years before another ruler, H.M. Ershad (give him credit for his sense of aesthetics), made a note of the resultant desolation and decreed the planting of fresh saplings on that road. Of course, the old beauty never came back. But it was a restoration, nevertheless.
This hacking away at trees is just one more of the wrong priorities you see around you. Small things come in where bigger issues should have been. It should have been for the police to deal with Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid under the terms of the law. They did not, for they could not find him. He was, said they to our disbelief, a fugitive. Was he? We thought we saw him at a meeting of the four-party alliance. And then, to our collective national horror, we found him shaking hands with none other than the head of the caretaker government.
Suddenly, the question was not why Mojahid was not being taken into custody. It was why the chief adviser, knowing full well what the commotion was all about, had allowed the alleged fugitive into his august presence. And then came the most piteous sight of all.
None of the four advisers present at the joint news briefing with the Jamaat leaders at the end of the dialogue gathered in themselves the courage to answer questions about Mujahid's presence at the dialogue and at the press briefing. That was a moment of unmitigated shame. You ask yourself: if the police could be swift and demonstrate the kind of dexterity that came with placing Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia under arrest, what prevented them from showing similar energy in handling the Jamaat leader?
But these are mere questions. Do not expect them, or at least a good number of them, to be answered to your satisfaction. A band of extremists, having appropriated for themselves the right to speak for their faith, demand that sculpture put up before the airport be removed.
The authorities, in unembarrassed genuflection, oblige them. And the moral here? Today it is the airport sculpture. Tomorrow it could well be the Aparajeyo Bangla at Dhaka University and then the Central Shaheed Minar. One dark morning, questions might be raised about the National Memorial at Savar.
When government is in retreat, it is morality that begins to shatter, piece by piece. When society, having been made lazy by the slow but sure infiltration of capitalism, begins to resemble a couch potato, you do not expect revolutionary change in your life. Contaminated milk? Prices of food? Medicare? You do not see government clamping its authority in these areas. Everyone is comfortable, lulled into complacence.
Drift is all. And drift happens when your sense of idealism goes missing.
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