I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
-- Robert Frost
I wish this was an essay on poetry or on a poet, which it is not. It is about prosaic things, on matters that pertain to mundane subjects like politics, democracy, governance, rule of law, and accountability.
The purpose of the quote above from one of my favorite poets is to show that in life we all have a choice, just as the wanderer in the poem talks about choosing from two roads that diverged in a road through the woods. Figuratively speaking we all have choices to make when we come to a fork, fork in life that is, and we take one hoping that our choice would lead us to a destination that would be better for us. Sometimes, it is like flipping a coin, but sometimes it is also one of a strong belief that the choice we are making is one that would take us to the place we want to be.
The road that we do not take remains unknown, and perhaps we do not even want to know, out of fear that it will take us to a destination that we want to avoid. But what if we take the less traveled road, and find that the less traveled road is the one that takes us to a destination that we all have been waiting for? What if the less traveled road is the one that bestows on us a future that was unknown to us?
Unfortunately, life is not poetic even though poetry is built on life experiences, feelings, and emotions. Life is harsh, brutal, constantly buffeted by nature and human-made miseries of politics, war, greed, and exploitation. The roads that people take in this world are strewn with violence, corruption, and sleaze.
Control over others is the main driver that impel people to take to these means, and when they achieve that power they do not want to lose it. Hypothetically, at least in democratic countries, this power is obtained from elections, where people decide who they should give this control to. In other countries, people have no choice. Control is achieved by the powerful through force, be it of a group of people like a communist/socialist party or an institution such as the army.
But does a democratically-elected government in a country always look for true competition as in a sport so that the best persons are allowed to run the government in a fair competition? Don't the leaders once elected want to cling to power and rule forever? I bet secretly most of them do want to remain in control forever, but they cannot because of constraints set up in their countries' constitutions, and other checks and balances.
In some democratic countries with presidential form of government these constraints are term limits such as in the US or France, and in parliamentary government the terms are set by each election cycle. Despite these constitutional constraints we have seen in the past efforts in many so-called democratic countries to extend these terms, particularly of presidents, by tweaking the constitutions, either by force or by a pliant set of legislators.
The most important safeguards against these vaulting ambitions of would-be life-long political leaders are institutions such as a strong parliament, and judiciary. These institutions work as a balance of power, and watch-dogs of the constitution as in the US, and in countries with strong democratic traditions and practices.
Autocratic aspirations of political demagogues, however, do appear in some countries where these institutions are weak, and people are manipulated by false promises, by suppression of rights, and by political appropriation of institutions of governance to perpetuate authority and control. These are countries where the leaders do not want to take the road that would endanger their authority. They like to stick to the road that they think is safe for them. A road that they know, and they do not want to deviate from it.
With elections ahead, our country is fast approaching a fork in the road that it has been walking on so long. The fork divides in two parts, one will direct the country to true democracy and the other to the exact opposite. None will be strewn with rose petals, and walking through any of these will not be easy. But a decision has to be made, and like the poet's choice above, it has to be the one that has been less traveled, not the one which has been traversed plenty and has led people to a frustrating destination.
It is a figurative choice, but nonetheless it indicates a difficult decision that our political leaders have to make: Which direction they would like to take their country?
At the current moment we are in a stage of impasse regarding the decisions of our political leaders. Understandably, the leaders currently in control would like to retain their hold on power in the next election cycle. And it is equally understandable they would like to take their known road to victory. For them the road less traveled is the one that involves risks, maybe even loss of power.
For those opposing this position, it is the reverse. For them the road is anything other than that which the party in power would like to follow. It is not necessarily the road less traveled, but one that allows them to walk on also. It is possible that the road less traveled would be one that they like, but we don't know that.
Unfortunately, in this stalemate, the victims are the country and people, who have become hostages of this struggle. In the last two decades the tug of war between the two major political parties over how the elections will be run and who will run the elections, has seen a lot of mayhem and destruction of life and property. The struggles took such shapes that we had to have interim governments, even military interventions to present us with our next elections.
But later, after dispensing with caretaker intermediaries, we had election boycotts, and other acts of violence that made people cringe at the thought of elections. With another general election less than a year away, the air is already heavy with rhetoric of each party going their way, following their road, and ushering the country into another trauma of confrontation in near future.
I know it is easier to wax poetic about roads in imaginary woods than to have real decisions on political roads. But these are matters that concern our country's future and of our people. Intransigence and politics do not go hand in hand. Politics is about compromise, about accommodation, and mutual respect. No political party can claim to have a panacea to heal a country's ills or have a magic wand to guarantee its prosperity. Nor can any political leader claim the same capability.
Our country cannot afford to have another political battle over the impending elections. The parties in contention will have to find a road that leads the country to peace and continued prosperity. This road has to be one less traveled, one that we have not tried before. The one that does not lead to confrontation or a battle of attrition. Let this road be one of compromise, and accommodation.
Ziauddin Choudhury has worked in the higher civil service of Bangladesh early in his career, and later for the World Bank in the US.