Perspectives
An exercise in surrealism
IN a troubled time, when the regular political process is in suspended animation, the best bet for the politicians is to lie low and let the storm blow over. While it's prudent not to make insinuative remarks in political discourse, it's equally wise not to react to innuendoes thrown by others. After all, it's an unusual time!
So, those indulgences only vitiate the charged atmosphere and encourage non-political power grabbers to fish in waters already muddied. Yet a section of politicians, specifically those belonging to the BNP and Jamaat, are behaving exactly so by holding the nation hostage to their quixotic demands on the eve of ninth parliamentary election due on December 18, presumably to extract undue concessions from the government.
Mud-slinging is still their preferred choice in dealing with the opponents, although they ain't in any way relevant to election arrangements. The discerning observers have likened the situation to playing with the tail of a sleeping tiger. They think it's as dangerous as that.
We, as a nation, had a roller-coaster journey to our democratic destination, which has so long eluded us repeatedly. After due deliberations with the political stakeholders, the caretaker government made a public commitment for a democratic transition by the end of the year and, accordingly, a well-meaning Election Commission gave out an election schedule acceptable to the people and all political outfits except the BNP-Jamaat alliance, which has adopted a negative stance and targeted its bete-noir, the AL, with all kinds of insinuations and accusations although it's not an inter-party issue.
Instead of settling the problems, if any, either with the EC or the government, the alliance is flexing its muscles to take matters to the street and is, in a frenzy, making accusations against the AL as well as blaming the government for being partial in its treatment to its archrival, the AL.
In the perception of the four-party alliance, the government has been colluding with AL to catapult the latter to power through a stage-managed election that the alliance wants to shun.
Yet, nothing can be further from the truth because, in the present equation, all political outfits are equally treated by the authority, which alone can address BNP's ambivalent complaints and placate its apprehension, if any.
However, in a tight time-schedule it's doubtful that all of BNP's grudges and grumbling can be looked into -- let alone resolved -- before the year is out. In the meantime, the people, buoyant with an election mood and with their eyes fixed on December 18, are indeed non-plussed as to what the BNP-Jamaat men are up to.
Understandably, any shifting of the schedule will be the proverbial last straw on the camel's back as far as public patience is concerned, and will plunge the country into a dangerous uncertainty fraught with the possibility of a chain of ominous developments. Is the cynical lot of BNP-Jamaat stalwarts consciously taking the responsibility of inadvertently catching the tiger by its tail?
Neither the government nor any other quarter is in any way responsible for the BNP's predicaments -- perhaps, which is why it is shying away from public mandate at this juncture. If required, the BNP will have to take its share of comeuppance without making the nation suffer for its own sins.
To obfuscate the party's terrible ignominy and parry the rationale of an immediate election, Madam Zia may draw comfort from parroting her old rhetoric of "sovereignty in danger" or "country in deep crisis" with a tinge of secular-bashing (the India bashing is spared for now) in her Islamist-nationalist context, but few are any more impressed by her gauzy feel-good commercial.
Informed circles are unanimous in their view that Madam Zia will have to come to terms with hard reality instead of exercising herself in inconsequential surrealism. All that is at stake with the madam is that an unprepared and tainted BNP may, at the worst, lose the election.
But what she has put at stake for the nation is much more grave, fatal and lethal. In its own right, the BNP alone, or in alliance with others, is a force to reckon with and an enduring factor in our politics. But we cannot let her sabotage the national election, an indispensable pillar of our democracy and already painstakingly arranged, on which the millions from home and abroad have pinned their hopes for a much awaited democratic transition.
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