A Rejoinder, on Behalf of Bangladesh’s Politicians

This is on behalf of all the men and women who are now locked up in jail, facing trials under emergency laws without the minimum guaranteed rights, watching their loved one bearing the unbearable, seeing the work of their lifetime seized by the whims of a military government gone mad, or desperately trying to escape arrest, either inside Bangladesh or outside. This is for all the men and women grabbed out of their homes at the dead of night, and taken away with the sound of the wailing of their loved ones still in their ears. This is for the men and women who are currently facing kangaroo trials, where a judge will read out a verdict of three, ten, or thirteen year of imprisonment, and attempt to undo a lifetime’s work.

First, perhaps aptly, a quotation from The Once and Future King: 

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

What have we learned from the past sixteen months? That the entire vocabulary in which politics and governance of Bangladesh is conducted needs to be changed. Slowly, we have expected the vital institutions of our country to be “depoliticized,” even though they are run by politicians, we have sent blamed politicians for this current impasse, sent them to jail, and now blame them for not finding a way out of this mess.

It is worth repeating that politics is the art of finding answers to questions to which there are no good answers. When we have limited resources, which we can only use to build a primary school, a twenty-bed hospital, or a road to the nearest market, we turn to politics. And in our country of one hundred and fifty million people, politics must be all-embracing, inclusive and populist. Trying to administer this country sitting in the air-conditioned drawing rooms of Gulshan and Banani, or even from the heady, well-furnished editorial offices in Karwan Bazar, will fail disastrously, as we have now seen from the past sixteen months.

We need to understand the January 11th, 2007 coup within the broader framework of our historial context. We have previously also lived through times when our entire political class was jailed or on the run, allegations of corruption were rampamt, and a well-orchestrated chorus of toadies calling for political reform and new leadership. We managed to survive each of thse episodes, with a return to democratic politics. We shall survive this one too. But we need to learn how to diffuse these crises without letting them mutate into full-blown coups, into events that set back our nation by decades or generations. 

And any time there will be military intervention against our nation, the first sign will inevitably be an onslaught of slander against our politicians. Remember Tareq Rahman? Remember the stories and charges that were bandied about against him during the last days of the Four-party alliance government, and the initial days of this military government? Remember how he was supposed to have pretty much made enough money to cause serious anguish to Bill Gates?

There are voices in the wind, whispering to us names from the past, harbingers of what is to come. Does the name Sheikh Moni ring a bell? To those of us who lived thought the initial days of our republic, the intense propaganda campaign carried out against Sheikh Moni, Sheikh Kamal, Sheikh Jamal and others of their family were the opening shots in the first attempt to permanently erase politics from this country. Although they failed, the battle has been waged ever since.

There is a vision of Bangladesh, where it does not manufacture, it does not produce, and it does not industrialize. Instead, it exports manpower to the Gulf Kingdoms of the Middle East, to United States, and to United Kingdom and Europe. In these countries, our potential engineers, doctors, industrialists, businessmen, and enterpreneurs hold down menial jobs and send them back to their relatives back in Bangladesh. The vast foreign reserves thus generated are then used to import every possible good, thus turning our country only into a vast potential market to be flooded and controlled. We only exist as a vast pool of unskilled laborers, adding no value to any production chains, only serving as a transit point between South and East Asia, letting out excellent deep-seaport transport oil and gas all over the world.

This is not a new vision for Bangladesh. Either Sheikh Hasina or Khaleda Zia could have signed onto these plans, and been guaranteed the leadership of our country for life, much in the fashion of the ex-communist strongmen who rule the former USSR-stans now. Instead of all this talk about the need for better leadership, they would have been wined and dined in capitals across the world, and become the toast of the international community. If they wanted to, forget little scams like Niko, they could have become legitimate billionaires, several times over.

But they did not sign, did not choose thus, and did not compromise. Nor would a vast majority of ordinary Bangladeshis, presented with this same choice.  And here we are now. 

Tajuddin Ahmed, in difficult circumstances, had to make difficult compromises to steer us to victory during the War of Independence in 1971. It took the blood of two of our Presidents, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman, to cancel those commitments, to ensure that we are still standing today as an independent and sovereign nation, master of our own destiny. We won’t know fully, until the military government has stepped down and handed over power to a democratic government, as to the full extent of the damage that this government will have done to our long-term interest; we won’t know what else they have signed away in the last year, but I fear how many of our future Prime Ministers may have to give their lives to efface the folly of this military government.

All this talk about a national charter, an exit strategy for the stooges who are running the current government is also unnecessary. Khandokar Mushtaque lived out a decade of his blighted life in Aga Mosih lane after 1975, Hussain Mohammed Ershad can still be seen around Dhaka. Nobody wastes time or energy on those who have already sold out their integrity and patriotism completely. Hossain Zillur Rahman will go back to being an economist wondering about the aesthetics of development, and Fakhruddin Ahmed will retire to his town-home in Virginia; they will live out the rest of their lives in obscurity and only the occasional ignomy. Our history will continue to be about the struggle for sovereignty and building a strong, prosperous Bangladesh, where not only the one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of selected Dhaka area codes, but all one hundred and fifty million Bangladeshis matter.