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If the Jamaat debacle in Monday's Rajshahi University Teachers' Association election is a news of the year so early in the year, there was something more unusual and satisfying in the same polls, meriting surely to be a landmark in the history of political development of this new-emerged nation.
The Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the left parties together contested the election on one joint panel. This panel swept the election with an average per-candidate lead of 300 in a field 456 voters. BNP won the president and treasurer posts with five memberships. AL and the left parties won the Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary posts together with five memberships.
For once AL thus recognised a more vicious enemy in the Jamaat than the BNP. And, vice versa, BNP recognised AL was a lesser evil than Jamaat. It cannot be denied that this has been a purely local development depending upon purely local needs and that it will be downright foolish to expect this to have any influence on the national performances of these parties. And it will be very plainly wrong to see in it any beginning of any departure from the positions of the major parties.
Still this is no dismissable freak either. Far from it. On two counts this becomes an important event worth reckoning not only by politicians. First, this decidedly breaks the growing myth that AL and BNP, like Rudyard Kipling's East and West, 'shall never meet'. If the two feel that the nation as well as their parties would stand to win from some joint action, they would surely go for that. Unfortunately such a situation has not developed so far and the nation's weal continues to occupy a second seat after the prime politics of dislodgement of government or continuing in it.
Secondly, the Rajshahi results should come as a lesson for the Jamaat. Whether they learn from it or not, there is ample proof here of the bankruptcy of their policy of capturing and brutalising not only the campuses but the universities and colleges themselves.
The way to national progress must be for the time being negotiated by a two-wheel contraption.
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