Dear honourable Chief Adviser, you have stepped forward to take the helm of the government at a very critical time in our history, regardless of how one might view our arrival at this juncture: Your courage indeed deserves the highest applause. Even more deserving of applause and promising was your commitment to embrace the country as one “family” in striving to fix the fissures and fractures in the governing processes. As an academic myself, I saw in your words the true manifestations of the spirit of our academic community, our commonly-held faith in ourselves as selfless scholars in pursuit of truth and the common good, free of the contamination of narrow political interests or alignments.
The country is in need of reforms, but with your background in economics you know quite well that building institutions to serve as guard-rails of nationhood in all its dynamism is not a one-day affair, nor can we build institutions through rewriting the Constitution or by constructing committees and councils: The British democracy, enduring as it has been, does not stand strapped to a written constitution.
The walls and pillars of nationhood are best constructed by monumental examples of fairness, transparency, and disbursement of justice with inviolable guarantees of human rights. We as a nation need to build “living national memories” of the ideals we cherish. And, honourable Chief Adviser, you stand at a point of time that calls for you to set such examples that will forever become a beacon for us in our forward journey. It is our hope that indeed you will work towards that, now that you are in the position to put in motion our drift towards unity.
But before you can delve deep into this territory, an important question to ask is why did we get so fragmented in the first place?
The first realization that comes to me is our disrespectful fragmentation of our history of liberation: the motivated practice of selective and redacted reading of our history after the brutal assassination of the father of the nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, has become a cause of the ever-widening chasm in the mantle of our nationhood. This needs to stop -- our history cannot, and should not, be abused for narrow political constituency-mongering.
Bangabandhu’s political career is our long march to independence, and Gen Ziaur Rahman’s announcement on radio on his behalf was the call of a son of the soil that galvanized us to rise as an army of Mukti Joddha ready to lay our lives for independence: No party owns them individually and no party should build its brand on singular ownership of one of them excluding the other. Honourable Chief Adviser, there needs to be a commission involving scholars and members of the civil society to settle this for all times.
The second most important step is to set an example of unity. Right now, Awami League seems to be cornered in all ways and its members are in hiding for fear of getting arrested; ironically, on the other hand, Jamaat affiliates are coming out of the closet freely expressing their thoughts and ideas. This is by no means has any semblance of a nation marching in unity as a family. Honorable Chief Adviser we need to take steps that unambiguously give proof of our commitment to national unity, and not leave out Awami League and its allies. In my humble opinion, you ought to invite all political parties that have had parliamentary representation at some point of time, leaders of civil society and professional classes to constitute a super advisory council to serve as the equivalent of a legislative entity; let this body have the final say in approving reforms by absolute majority. This would effectively give the reforms the force of law.
The third, but by no means any less important than the first two, is about the transparency and the integrity of the judicial process, an equitable legal system homogeneous in its deployment. Right now, the indiscriminate hounding and incarceration of AL affiliates -- even before the indictments have been formalized or preliminary investigation completed -- is unmistakably, and I will say indelibly, undermining the standing of the interim government as an honest and unbiased arbiter of justice. And further taking into the recent appointment of a defense lawyer for Jamaat leaders charged with war crimes, attorney Tajul Islam as the prosecutor general of the ICT, it all begins to send out the wrong message, at least so it would seem to any external non-Bangladeshi observer of events in Bangladesh.
Protection of law, freedom, and right of expression should be equally accessible to all, I’m sure you’d agree. Honorable Chief Advisr, you wouldn’t want such a stain on your legacy: Please do not condone or endorse decisions that could be attributed to you as an act of vengeance. I earnestly appeal to you to heal the fracture that divides Bangladesh.
Dr Farooq Sheikh is an Associate Professor at SUNY Geneseo.
