What happened in Rana Plaza on April 24, will be in people’s consciousness for a long time. The blind fear, helplessness and anger felt by the people will haunt the collective memory. It would be wise at this point to consider the affinity and connection between the Rana Plaza catastrophe and the prevailing political situation. In fact, we have already seen this, albeit at a minimal level, in people’s instantaneous outbursts and by the fact that the local political leaders had to go into hiding temporarily immediately after the incident. It was not beyond people’s comprehension that Sohel Rana, the owner of Rana Plaza, is both the product and the perpetrator of the country’s degenerate political culture and corrupt governance.
Recent years have seen the rise of the newly rich who have made their money by illegally grabbing land and property and got away with it through political patronage and administrative corruption. In the process they have become hardened operatives. Sohel Rana is the penultimate example of this phenomenon.
Sohel Rana and his likes typify a specimen of human beings who have no truck with any sensitivity or moral scruples. It takes a specific type of hard-heartedness and monstrosity to force the unfortunate workers to enter the building and work when there were visible signs of big cracks in the walls and pillars, foreboding immediate collapse of the structure.
The incident has another unholy twist. The workers and their leaders were additionally incentivised with the promise of money for participating in a rally later in the day for the incumbent government against an opposition hartal. In fact, Sohel Rana was reportedly holding a meeting that fateful morning in his office for organising the rally. Clearly, greed and callousness in their most abysmal form lay behind the Rana Plaza disaster.
It will not perhaps be wrong to say that similar greed and callousness govern the country’s political landscape irrespective of the political party in power. The greed of Sohel Rana and his gang is for money while among the politicians it is for state power, which, of course, is one and the same thing. The politicians are after state power not for the noble purpose of establishing rule of law and good governance but for personal gains and partisan aggrandisement.
Nor is this perception of the people alone – the politicians say as much about themselves. A year or so ago in New York, the current prime minister, in response to national and international pressure to sit with her rival for dialogue to settle the ongoing political conflict and impasse, said she would not like to have anything to do with thieves and swindlers (chor batpar). The opposition leader recently said that the prime minister’s own people and relatives are involved in high-profile corruption. Long ago, the Bangabandhu said on the record, “when a country wins freedom it inherits mines of gold but I have got mines of thieves.”
It is a blight on our national politics that over years and decades the corruption in high places, which naturally seeps down to all levels, has not decreased – it has rather increased manifold. The shameful irony is that Bangabandhu’s daughter herself blatantly acts as a cover for alleged corrupt ministers and high officials. In such a corruption-prone and money-making political atmosphere our ministers and politicians seem to have accountability to no one but themselves. They show utter callousness for public feelings, perception and opinions.
It is not surprising that after the collapse of Rana Plaza both the local MP and the prime minister were busy trying to prove that Sohel Rana is not one of them. Their claim was, of course, proven untrue immediately. While hundreds of victims were still trapped under rubble, it was particularly insensitive of the prime minister to engage in political maneuvering in defense of a criminal. The heavy burden of such a tragic incident should have rendered the prime minister apolitical for a moment, for a change.
The American ambassador, after Tazrin factory fire said it had given him sleepless nights. In contrast, the prime minster’s stance on the incident was to claim that it was a conspiracy, even before an enquiry was instituted. As the prime minister, she ought to have been more persistent about the building code and safety measure issues and perhaps such persistence could prevent further tragedies like Rana Plaza.
Other government ministers fared no better in their response. The home minister’s theory of “pillar shaking” as the cause for collapse of Rana Plaza was a grotesque piece of black humour and will survive in the collective memory as something macabre. The finance minister’s reported press remark that it was just an accident, not a serious matter, is another example of the government’s callousness, which is arguably worse than that of Sohel Rana and his cohorts. Soren Kierkegaard characterised politicians with three Cs – covetous, coward[ly] and clown[ish]. Our political system evidently has more than its share of them all.
It is the dark reality of our politics that in the place of objective truthfulness, falsity and callousness run supreme. Dodge, drift, subterfuge, equivocation, what Orwell called “double speak” are the norm. But lying and falsity are as calamitous for democracy as cancer is for human body; other nations seem to know this well. President Nixon was held culpable not so much for internal espionage but because he lied. President Clinton had to testify before the Senate Committee not so much for his affair but to vouchsafe that he did not lie at any stage. Something like this is unimaginable in our political context.
Concerning the two big political debates of the moment – the caretaker government and the international crimes tribunal, the whole nation is waiting with bated breath while our politicians are engaged in endless prevarication and double dealing.
Many people believe that there are reasons to doubt the genuineness of the government’s political will to try the Jamaat leaders to make them conclusively face the consequences of their foul activities in 1971; the trial was rather a ploy to isolate Jamaat Shibir from BNP and to make some sort of political deal in their election strategy. The fact that the government maintains rapport with Hefazat-e-Islam and seemingly seeks to use it substantiates this notion.
There is no substantial difference between Hefazat-e-Islam and Jamaat and were Hefazat-e-Islam in existence in ‘71 their role would not have been different from Jamaat’s. So if business can be done with one it can be done with the other. The government’s filing and management of the trial has been plagued with mismanagement and haphazardness, which casts serious doubt on the earnestness of the government’s trial effort.
In fact, in the 40-plus years since the independence war, there have been various political developments which have been to Jamaat’s advantage. It is an untenable analogy to make, as is often done, that Nazi war criminals are still put on trial after more than sixty years. The fact of the matter is that the Nazi war criminals who are now caught and tried were not socially visible; they were in hiding and are now smoked out when located and put on trial. The Jamaat-Shibir on the other hand have been prominent socially and politically. It has worked as a political partner with others, including the Awami League; has been given legal status as a political party; they were in the government; some of the party members even became ministers and in the process have been deeply entrenched in the body politic of the country.
The prominent Bangla language columinst Gaffar Choudhury could not have been more mistaken when in a recent article he argued that it would be as easy for the government to contain and control Jamaat Shibir as it had been for the West Bengal government to eliminate the Naxalites. The Naxalites were an isolated phenomenon without a massive social hinterland. The Jamaat Shibir is a minor political entity percentage-wise, but because of their long entrenchment in the political process, particularly because of its political alignment with BNP and also because of the religious sentiment of the vast majority of the population, they have a comfortable space in the political scene in the country.
After all these years and many political developments the war crime trial has lost much of its relevance. As far as democratic principle and practice are concerned it has become a political non-issue in the sense that either way it has little impact on the lives of regular people. To hold the trial is at best a historical obligation.
It is not possible that the government was not aware of these realities and implications, and with such awareness it is even more impossible for the government to have thought they could hold the trials without problems and bloodshed. Had the government been genuine and not intending to use the trials for election engineering it should not have been so haphazard about such a historically loaded affair. The government ought to have approached the affair more openly and more candidly rather than adopting such propagandist techniques.
The government’s failure to deal with the issue on the international front has been really momentous. The whole of the brotherly Arab world, including Turkey, is averse to it. The western countries, our usual allies, are only lukewarm.
The strongest indication that the government’s war crime trial initiative is neither genuine nor objectively truthful is its unwillingness or failure to come to terms with BNP on the issue. The main bone of contention between the government and BNP is not the trials but the elections and it is just a procedural issue - how to hold the election.
All the parties claim that they want free, fair elections. However, if this was true then the government could have made a compromise on the issue of the caretaker government, which is nothing more than a matter of procedure. This would have taken much of the steam out of BNP’s movement and the nation could have been spared the political mayhem of killing, arson and rampage.
It is amazing how callous a democratically elected government can be that for a mere procedural issue which ultimately serves their ends, and not people’s interest, they have precipitated a political situation which has seriously endangered everybody else’s life and property. One can argue that their callousness is no less horrendous than that of the Rana Plaza perpetrators.
None of the owners of the Rana Plaza complex or their relatives came in harm’s way, the victims were all unfortunate workers. In the political mayhem none of the leaders or their near and dear ones suffered death and destruction, it is again the ordinary people who got killed, their houses, temples demolished and burned. It is therefore easy for the BNP leader to say that more bloodshed will be necessary to achieve her goal.
The fact of the matter is that none of the contending parties wants to abide by the basic norm that in a democracy only one party or alliance wins the election and gets the right to form the government; the losing party or alliance has the rightful position in the opposition. But in Bangladeshi politics, the party in power wants to hold on to power by using the state machinery and at the same time tries to ensure that its rival will not have any shot at power the next time. Regardless of which party is in power, the story is always the same.
The reason for such behaviour of our politicians is that they do not have faith in good governance or their ability to win elections legitimately. Dr Debapriya Battacharya said in a recent talk show that from day one in office, each government starts plotting for the next election, and one may add that establishing good governance or rule of law is not part of that plan.
In a parliamentary system the opposition has a constitutional duty for constructive and respectable engagement in governance. However, being in the opposition, they cannot have access to the whole range of commission taking, bribery, and straightforward theft and swindling which are the prerogatives of the party in power. Being in the opposition, they cannot use the state as a cover for Hawa Bhavan, for the Padma Bridge scandal, for Sonali Bank funds theft, share market booties, and so on and so forth. With such high stakes, elections naturally become a pitched personalised battleground between the contending parties.
The Victorian writer Matthew Arnold’s famous saying “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge” applies to politics as well as many other noble and worthy human activities. By the phrase Arnold meant that the pursuit of true knowledge is above and beyond self-interest. As long as our politicians cannot be above and beyond obsessive self-interest and gross partisan aggrandisement, we will not have a clean, logical and functional governance system.
Let us hope for a new breed of politicians without greed and callousness, but with conscience, ethics, genuine love for Bangladeshi people and commitment to making Bangladesh a respectable country.
