If we were to see the last five years of AL rule as a five-act play, then we could say that we are now in the third act. The plot is beginning to unravel and we are heading fast towards a denouement. Are we shooting headlong down the Niagara towards a resounding crash, or can we manage to keep our heads up somehow and survive? Nobody knows for sure, but everybody has an opinion.
The play – that is, our politics – is problematic in the first place because of difficulties in characterising it. Let’s call it a “problem play” first (as many of Shakespeare’s plays are called), because we are not quite sure whether it is a pure tragedy or a comedy, or absurd drama, or a melodrama, or something else.
Then again, it is a “problem play” in the sense that there is a real problem every five years about how exactly the elections should be conducted. We faced this problem in 1996 when BNP first held elections without AL and that had to be cancelled for a second round in July the same year; there were problems again in 2001 for reasons which I have forgotten but are discussed endlessly in talk shows.
And finally, there was the grave situation in 2006 when the late Professor Iajuddin doubled up both as head of the caretaker government and president of the republic. That was unacceptable to all except BNP people, and acceptable to Dr Yunus (this I cannot forget) who came back from a foreign trip and gave an A+ to Professor Iajuddin’s government.
Like Mr Micawber in “David Copperfield” I can only say “something will turn up.” Only application of the Micawber Principle makes it possible to go on from day to day.
The prime minister refuses to budge from her position and so does the leader of the opposition. In a “problem” situation such as this, only some sort of divine intervention can take the play towards a resolution. Perhaps not one god but many gods may be necessary to start the process of disentangling the knot that we are tied up in.
Even as I write, the deus ex machina (god-from-the-machine, for the non-literary) has descended on us. He is the UN Assistant Under-Secretary Oscar Fernandez-Taranco who has been shuttling between visits to the prime minister and visits to the leader of the opposition, meeting Jamaat leaders in his hotel, and other very important people. The god-from-the-machine is a very busy-body indeed but it is not yet clear if he will succeed to move mountains.
There are two-bit players as well who have suddenly, unexpectedly, emerged from the wings and taken centre-stage. Like a character in a cartoon I saw recently, I usually watch talk shows on mute, except when the un-redoubtable old dictator Ershad pops up on TV. Then I turn the mute off.
Ershad’s antics and his utterances (“I’m all-in-all of JP”), beginning with a half-dozen of his men and women joining the interim government and now the on-going drama with their resignations, are hilariously farcical.
When Ershad appears in hastily-called press-conferences with his furrowed brows and pain-etched wrinkled face (but always nattily dressed), when he pleads to young journalists that they shouldn’t satirise him, when he promises to do one thing one morning and changes his mind at night, I sit riveted and cannot turn the mute on.
Just over two decades back when he was still in power, I couldn’t stand to watch him whenever he appeared on TV. Ershad is now the comic relief in this “problem play” which is our life, and also amazingly, a factor that simply can’t be written off from electoral equations.
Reasonable people like Dr Kamal Hossain, or Sultana Kamal, or Dr Shahdin Malik say reasonable things and ask reasonable questions about what should or should not be done. When they met the president some days back, they presumably conveyed some of their reasonable concerns to the president with the reasonable expectations of a solution. Nothing happened. The god-from-the-machine is also having reasonable discussions with different people and something eventually will turn up.
I find it difficult to ask reasonable questions. The question that came to my mind is this: How many bullets does one need to kill oneself? What would have happened if Ershad had actually pulled the trigger of one of his four pistols (or is it one pistol with four bullets?) after he threatened to commit suicide when RAB had surrounded his house? Now we will never know because the DMP is considering taking his toys away.
