Good people, bad governments and <i>hartals</i>
THE nation's business leaders have appealed to the political parties for an end to hartals in the future. As citizens who remain aware of what has not been achieved in Bangladesh in the last thirty-seven years, and what must be done in order for us to come level with the rest of the world, we will tell these good men and women that we are with them.
It is never a good idea to shut down a factory, to force a country to a stop only because some political parties may be driven by narrow partisan ambitions, by a false sense of ego.
It is outrageous to call general strikes that go out of hand and result in citizens being harassed on the streets, ailing people being made to wait endlessly for their families to come visiting them and poor men condemned to eke out the bare means of sustenance every living day compelled to stay home, deprived of the ability to feed their children because of bad politics.
And we do not, of course, forget that hartals have in these past many years caused devastation to the economy. Our businessmen have found it hard to operate their establishments; garments exporters have missed deadlines set by their foreign buyers; and foreign investors have spotted, legitimately too, in the hartals disquieting images of a country in free fall, incapable of inviting or handling the resources that could come in from abroad. Universities and colleges and schools have gone without classes.
Hartals have often been a matter of humiliation for citizens. Individuals have been stripped in public because they have served a not so popular government; buses and scooters have been set on fire, reducing their drivers and owners to tears. Policemen have clashed with protestors; heads have been smashed, hands have been fractured and sometimes lives have been lost.
At the end of the day, hospitals have struggled to tend to the wounded; families have huddled in prayer for their badly mauled sons and fathers and brothers and sisters. Almost every hartal in recent times has been symbolic of unmitigated shame for all of us in this country.
And so, when our businessmen enlighten us on the need for an end to hartals, we share their point of view. They speak for all of us. And yet, there ought to be a caveat here, even as we try persuading ourselves that hartals are a suicidal act, a patent attempt at political hara-kiri. And that caveat has to do with the reasons why hartals are called by political parties in the first place.
Recall a bit of history, spot the realities around you. The fundamental truth for all of us has been one of a perennial absence of democracy in the country. Yes, we have voted politicians to power. And, yes, we have been mighty happy with ourselves as we have exercised our right to choose governments for this country. But note that not all politicians, not all parties have respected that expression of will by citizens.
Support at the ballot box has been deliberately twisted to mean a wholesale occupation of a country in old-fashioned feudalism. Supporters of the victorious party have swooped on loyalists of the vanquished one, have run members of minority religious communities out of their homes in a malevolent desire to own property not theirs.
When the government formed by people these rapacious men consider their leaders says nothing about these misdeeds, or looks the other way even as the country writhes in agony, how do you propose that the nation reassert its self-esteem? And why should a hartal not be a powerful, peaceful way to draw attention to this humiliation of a country?
There was time when hartals intensified our collective urge for autonomy, for freedom. What if hartals had not been called then? We will leave you to answer the question. In the Ershad years, repeated hartals caused damage to the economy, true. But then think of the bigger picture. It was the nation that gave itself space when no other political way was left for it to push the regime to the wall.
In the five years preceding the imposition of a state of emergency in January 2007, the Jatiyo Sangsad did not function because the ruling party, lulled into a sense of arrogance, saw little reason in letting the opposition speak. Motions by the opposition were shot down, microphones into which opposition lawmakers spoke were constantly shut down by a speaker who saw little reason to stop his own party men from hurling abusive language at the Leader of the Opposition and anyone not with the government. If similar conditions arise in the future, should we really be irritated if the opposition walks out en masse from the House to protest the outlandish behaviour of the Treasury benches?
And when the government of the day, not content with a mere muzzling of the opposition in Parliament, chooses to prevent the masses from marching on the streets by letting the police loose on them, can we morally argue that hartals ought not to be? When those who do not agree with the rulers call for demonstrations all over town, they have all the right in the world to be allowed to register their peaceful protest before the country.
The scandalous happens when the state swoops on the people, puts up barricades all over town and thereby intimidates citizens into a condition of ugly fear. The government treats its rivals with derision; the police cheerfully go into the job of clubbing everyone around on the streets; innocent people alighting from buses in Sayedabad or Gulistan are rounded up as potential opposition camp followers and swiftly packed off to prison. That is a violation of human rights.
Indeed, every time a government seeks to snuff out all peaceful means of political protest, it undermines democracy and wounds the state over which it has a sacred responsibility of governance. And when that happens, it becomes the right of citizens to respond in the only way that remains open for them. And that is to have the country shut down, not because the goal is to push it toward bigger chaos, not because it is the ambition of a political party that must be massaged, but because the state needs to be saved from a government that has mutated into a corrupt oligarchy.
Governments, like any other organ in society, are peopled by good men as well as bad. Sometimes, in this country, governments have been bad to the tiniest bit of the bone. Bad governments do not listen. When they do not listen, you need to make them listen. You do that by closing down everything, by converging on the streets in what you would call a demonstration of people power.
The question, then, is not whether hartals should be put an end to. It is one of whether political parties in Bangladesh can transform themselves into ennobling realities, can truly and unequivocally take governance as a trust to be exercised on behalf of the people of the country. When that truth comes to pass, hartals will be no more.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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