With democracy, we survive and will thrive
IT is not just the Bangladesh Rifles we are talking about today. Neither is it only the Bangladesh army, grievously wounded as it has been by the murder of its brilliant officers, that we focus on at this point. There is, significantly and in light of the sad, unfolding history we have been witness to since the liberation of this country, the vast need to reassure ourselves that democratic government will survive, that parliament will go on being the epicentre of all our activities as a nation.
Our choices are limited. Or they are non-existent. With democracy we survive and someday expect to thrive as a society. Without it, we mutate into an emasculated body of men and women.
In this past one week, it has been the elected government that Sheikh Hasina leads as prime minister which has been in as grave a danger as other institutions of the republic. Make no mistake about it: those who perpetrated the grisly horror at the BDR headquarters on February 25 were not merely undermining the nation's military, indeed trying to maim it for long if not for good. They also had within their sights a government that came to office barely two months ago through a decisive popular vote at general elections.
It is easy for many to take the government to task for perceived lapses in its handling of the crisis. And indeed there have been lapses, mistakes which could have been avoided. The manner in which the government has been responding to questions relating to its performance, in parliament and outside it, says it all.
But our collective sense of relief today is in knowing that the government has survived, that indeed the parliamentary process has stayed in place. In a society where pluralist politics has either been dysfunctional or paralytic or both, it is easy to understand how messy things may turn out to be.
Chaos has by and large been part of life in Bangladesh. And frequent have been the moments when extra-constitutional forces sent elected governments running for cover.
Observed from such a perspective, it is for the people of Bangladesh a fortunate happenstance that the government elected to office in December last year has survived the worst in terms of the crisis at BDR. It has handled the crisis well, because it has handled it politically. Ignore the rancour of the debate in Parliament between the treasury and opposition benches.
Go beyond these partisan overviews of the situation, for bipartisanship will yet take a long time to become an indelible feature of national politics. So move beyond the patently partisan that occurred on the floor of the House on Sunday and remember only that we now have a legislative body where sensitive issues of national importance can be debated in public, that both the ruling party and the opposition can keep the nation abreast of conditions.
More than anything else, the murder of the army officers on February 25 has only brought the nation together in a quiet and yet loud demonstration of unity. On a bigger scale, it has surely helped that a government chosen by popular consent has been around to calm nerves, to take charge of things rendered dangerous by the madness of a mob intent on murder and mayhem.
A non-elected government, because it is that, non-elected, quite possibly would have gone for an entirely different approach. Or it may have done precisely what this government has been doing. The bigger reality here is that the degree of popular support, or public understanding, that a government voted to office enjoys is conspicuous by its absence in all other manifestations of governance.
And therein lies the beauty of government by the consent of the governed. There is legitimacy to its actions, a recognised acceptance of its acts as being in the public interest. Which is why the reluctance of the powers that be to authorise an assault on the BDR premises by the army has been acknowledged to be a politically astute move. Thousands of lives that would have come under risk have been spared.
Anarchy that would be the result of precipitate, ill-considered military action has been avoided. Ministers have acted with restraint and have sought to assure the country that hell would not break loose, despite the fiendish work that did away with the lives of the soldiers on February 25. The prime minister has been going places, has been to army headquarters to listen and to be listened to.
There has been no overkill because the democratic political process has been in overdrive about a preservation of public order. And the orderly, the disciplined is what democracy is all about.
Elected governments sometimes fumble because of the many perspectives within which they operate. But, mark this! Once the critical decisions are made, these governments do not flounder or collapse in a heap. Parliament then becomes a remarkable exercise in political engineering.
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