Cross Talk
Foreign diplomat as parliament speaker!
ONCE upon a time, Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin was overcome by his overactive imagination and wanted to create super-soldiers by crossbreeding humans with apes. The task was assigned to Ilya Ivanov, Russia's top animal-breeding scientist, who abandoned the experiment after it was found that two species couldn't procreate unless they had identical numbers of chromosomes. What took the Russians six years to learn, we have learned in two. So, please don't look for the super-candidates in the next election, I mean, as and when it takes place.
For those who might wish to know, apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes while humans have 23. The way it works, to use a computer analogy, is that you can't copy a six-column table and paste it onto a five-column thing. It's a structural problem, a format issue, which is pretty difficult, like fitting a square peg into a round hole. Apart from that, there is a remarkable genetic similarity between humans and apes, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 98 - 99%.
If anything, I would say the caretaker government has failed to understand the genetic mapping of our politicians. So what has happened is the logical outcome of what was happening. When it tried to take control over the politicians, it made itself vulnerable to them. To cut the long story short, the politicians have beaten this government at its game.
Over the last two years, the game has also changed. It started as a poker game and the government was riding on popularity. It could shuffle the cards and start afresh, make mistakes but quickly regain ground because people were ready to forgive and forget.
The government could stitch in time and save nine, but it missed that opportunity. Soon people got antsy over repeated bungling and economic hardship. The game started to shift.
The poker turned into chess, an endgame that forced the government to take certain decisions in the last one year to deliver a credible election. This is where it made further mistakes, maneuvering between self-assurance and negligence, at once showing confidence and diffidence, control and slack, dialogue and deadlock.
In all fairness, the game as it stands right now, looks like a zero-sum game. One side wins another loses, but by no means a win-win option.
I would like to blame the entire thing on the Stalinesque lunacy, which still dominates the attitude of this government. It still shows the streaks of genetic engineering as though it could rearrange the political DNA of this country.
Even now, the government believes it's in a position to transform our politics. At least Stalin was sensible enough to recognise his follies. At least he knew when to stop and cut his loss before it was late.
So I say that this government is badly confused. It doesn't know whether to learn from its mistakes or repeat them again and again. Fresh round of arrests, fresh round of releases, rise of another nano-party alliance, arm twisting some, handshaking with others, these are reruns of old techniques. This government can further negotiate the negotiations and further manipulate the manipulations, but its chance of creating either super-candidates or super-elections looks remote.
Now that the elections are near and the days of the caretaker government are numbered, the only thing clear about this government's strategy is what should have been its highest secret.
More than anything, even more than creation of a durable democracy, it has showed its preoccupation with the exigency of its exit. More than taking care of people and the country, it got busy taking care of its own escape. It can't wait to go.
If 1/11 was the culmination of chaos, it's going to culminate in chaos as well. This government will expire, and then, elected or selected, a new government will take over. There will be change of guards, but no changes to guard. More agitations, more clamour, more rumours, but in the end there will be more of the same. Changes will change to protect the constant. The reformers will come out reformed.
Genetic modification can be risky as well as rewarding, and what this government has created is terribly scary. Now that it's getting ready to leave, it reminds us of Victor Frankenstein who created his own "perfect" human from scavenged body parts, but once it lived the creature was hideous. Frankenstein was disgusted by its ugliness and ran away from its horror, while the monster wandered around looking for friendship.
I would like to come back to the animal kingdom once again. Mammals in general can drink and breathe at the same time, but humans can't do it. This is a price we have to pay for being able to talk. This caretaker government has talked too much, said too many things, and is now leaving behind a long trail of empty words. In the laboratory of its own fertile imagination, it has created a monster that will make it difficult for us to drink and breathe even if we keep our mouths shut.
One needs to wonder if this nation has been so badly botched up before. Has ever before its immune system been so badly tweaked? Has the vapidity of this nation been so ostentatiously exposed? Have its hopes been so senselessly dashed? Has ever before this nation been taken for such an outrageous ride? Corruption condoned, terror sublimated, politics muddled, it will take a long time before this nation heals again and dares riding into another reform rodeo.
How are we going to remember the reforms of the last two years? We have changed so much that nothing has changed. Here is an idea of change to save the day. The two leaders have agreed to talk, courtesy foreign diplomats. Why not pick a foreign diplomat as speaker of the next parliament? He will make a super-speaker since our politicians listen more to his kind than they listen to their own countrymen.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments