Students' movement against corruption
A friend of mine recently expressed his sincere desire about returning to Bangladesh and asked for my advice on what he should do to join a political party. I asked him -- somewhat derisively -- if he had any criminal record in his profile. Specifically, I asked him if he had any police record from his university days in Bangladesh; if he had ever participated in hartal, burning police cars or public properties; if he was involved in extortion and/or forceful and illegal land grabbing, and so on.
After hearing his response, I advised him to return to Bangladesh and start all over again with student politics.
Obviously, the above paragraph reflects my impression about the current state of students' politics in Bangladesh and the profiles of many current politicians.
All signs indicate that many alleged corrupt politicians -- whom I call "corrupticians" -- will contest in the upcoming December 18 national elections, and there are clear signs that they will be elected given the outcome of the Sylhet mayoral election.
I made up the word "corruptician" by conjoining the words "corruption" and "politician" to profile a politician engaged in corruption in one word in the same tradition in which many such composite words were coined. For example, the word "stagflation" was coined from stagnant and inflation to describe -- in one word -- an economy in a stagnant state and experiencing inflation at the same time. A competing word, corruptionist, is more general and applies to all corrupt people in public life.
I felt the exigency of such a composite word as "corruptician" in order to differentiate between politicians who are altruistic (assumed to be in the majority) and those who are identified with the profile of BNPs former MP Nasiruddin Pintu -- and obviously he isn't alone.
I was baffled when I watched in the news that Nasiruddin -- accused of 14 cases of murder, corruption, extortion, and what not, has spent nine months or so in hospital rather than in his prison cell -- physically and verbally assaulted a prison official in uniform carrying out his official duty. I wondered where this "corruptician" got the audacity to do what he did.
His audacity, it seems, is born out of BNP's seven-point preconditions for election participation, in which dismissal of all criminal charges and release of those already found guilty is one of them. He has every reason to feel assured that, like others of his kind, he will soon get his release on bail and contest in the election.
Does anyone really believe the pledges of Khaleda Zia that "if voted to power we will fight corruption?" What she never said, though, was whose corruption she will fight -- of the politicians, civil servants or businessmen. From her demand for the release of "corrupticians" "already judged guilty," and dismissal of all charges against others, it is obvious that combating political corruption is not what she has in mind.
If she had some semblance of morality and qualms of conscious, she'd have desisted from making such crass and puerile demands.
Last week's High Court (HC) ruling about the Truth and Accountability Commission (TAC) being illegal has certainly dealt yet another body blow to the Anti-corruption Commission's (ACC) fierce drive against high-profile graft suspects.
Meanwhile, most of the graft cases at the special courts have already been stayed for several months by the HC. All these have bolstered the hands of the alleged "corrupticians," bringing ACC's crusade against graft to a near halt.
To a degree, corruption exists in every society. But there are not too many countries where political corruption is as safe as it is in Bangladesh. Given this scenario, no one now believes that the ACC alone can curb the all-enveloping ills of corruption. But there may be a way out -- only if an all-out, countrywide youth movement across colleges and university campuses can be launched.
At the international level, the largest non-profit and non-political organisation of students, called Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales (AIESEC) with headquarter in Rotterdam, Netherlands and a network (as of February 2008) of 30,000 students in 113 countries at over 1100 universities, is already engaged in anti-corruption campaigning and promoting political transparency and social responsibility. Transparency International (TI) is actively involved, and is providing all kinds of support to this movement.
Students -- under the aegis of AIESEC and TI -- from around the world signed the Guatemala Declaration on Young People's Engagement as part of the 12th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Guatemala held in November 2006.
TI of Bangladesh organised its first youth focused Anti-Corruption Concert in Dhaka on December 29, 2006. With the theme "The Invincible Youth will surely Resist Corruption," the eight-hour concert was attended by 25,000 youths, which generated 7,500 on line viewers' feedbacks.
Addressing the youths, Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus emphasised the importance of collective social movement to combat corruption.
One wonders why there were no anti-corruption activities undertaken by the youths since that concert. It seems the gathering of 25,000 youths was attracted more by the concert itself than by any real enthusiasm to launch anti-corruption drives. .
Recent events are telling us that politicians will not jeopardise their own interest by fighting corruption. We're also witnessing the legal hurdles in prosecuting "corrupticians" and purging them from the political process. So, what's the recourse?
The only effective alternative is to launch countrywide students' movements for good governance. This must be organised and driven in the same vein as the language movement of 1952 and those against autocratic rule, and so on. Don't forget, all governments are afraid of youth movements and yield to their demands often unconditionally.
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