Lessons of August 21

TWO years is plenty of time for political amnesia to set in. There is a meme going around the chattering classes that the more the current government continues to play hardball with the BNP, the greater the sympathy generated for the party, and all its sins from its last tenure in office are being white-washed away in the public's mind.
This is entirely possible, though, of course, mostly conjecture and wishful thinking on the part of the party die-hards. No one really knows whether the voting public has forgiven the BNP for its shambolic reign or how the party would fare in open national elections against the AL or anyone else.
Contemporaneous reports and the available polling data suggested that prior to the aborted elections of 2007, the BNP was extremely unpopular with the voters due to its misrule of the previous five years, and that had free and fair elections been held that the AL-led alliance would most likely have come to power.
August 21 seems to me to be a good time to revisit the tenure of the last BNP government, and to ponder for a moment what the country looked like then, for those with short memories.
After all, what price parliamentary democracy when a grenade attack kills 22 opposition party leaders and workers, including Ivy Rahman, the party's women's affairs secretary, only narrowly missing the leader of the opposition herself. Lest anyone forget, this was the political climate we were living in prior to 1/11, when opposition leaders had to worry about actually being physically eliminated.
Nor was August 21 the only political assassination attempt. Let us not forget that two of the senior-most and most popular AL members of parliament, Shah A.M.S. Kibria and Ahsanullah Master, actually were assassinated during the last BNP tenure.
Nor were these killings the only incidents of political repression. Senior AL leaders Saber Hossain Chowdhury and Mohammad Nasim were beaten unconscious in the streets when at the head of non-violent rallies, and the beating and abuse of opposition party workers was a daily occurrence
Nor should we forget the treatment meted out, first to the BDB when it was formed in 2004 and then to the LDP in 2006. The two break-away parties had their public meetings broken up by stick-wielding BNP cadres and saw their businesses and homes fire-bombed and burned to the ground as retribution for having the temerity to try to split from the BNP to form their own party.
So when one hears BNP stalwarts and stooges intoning piously about the glories of democracy, it is a little hard to take them seriously. The last BNP government, though democratically elected, was as little democratically inclined a government as we have ever seen in our history (and we have seen a few).
Nor was the BNP (perhaps wisely) willing to leave it to chance the next time. People may bemoan the missteps of the current EC, but they pale in comparison with the machinations of the Justice Aziz-led EC that were intended to deliver the 2007 elections to the BNP, if anyone cares to remember.
Prior to 1/11, we were well on our way to a stolen election, which would have given the BNP another five years at the helm to complete the process of dismantling the country's democracy that the party had begun in 2001.
Anyone thinking that an incoming BNP government in 2007 would have been democratic in its inclinations or actions, or would have ruled with any semblance of respect for democratic principles, is either the casualty or the perpetrator of a cynical propaganda job. But then, the BNP always did excel at revisionism.
I haven't even gone into detail about the hallmarks of the BNP rule, the 900-plus extra-judicial executions (many committed to advance the business or political interests of party leaders), the tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests, custodial abuse and mistreatment, malicious denial of due process and bail, a mockery made of the judiciary. Any of these sound familiar?
Now, the current caretaker government has hardly covered itself with glory. It has made mistake after mistake, and continues to do so. The injustices of the past BNP rule -- from extra-judicial executions to denial of due process to custodial abuse -- have all been continued, and many of the abuses that were rife under the BNP have taken even worse form under the current dispensation.
The anti-corruption drive has been a shambles. The current government has signally failed to deliver on almost every item on its original agenda. At the end of the day it may be able to boast of one or two achievements, such as the new voter roll and certain institutional reforms, but it seems likely that the damage done in the past two years may well outweigh the good, and that we will spend the next several years fixing all the problems that were created during the last two.
But the mistakes of the current government and our opposition to military rule should not blind us to the deeply undemocratic and authoritarian government we would have been subject to had the BNP been permitted to steal the 2007 elections.
We can all agree that we do not want military rule. We can all agree that we do not want continuation of the current unelected government beyond the end of this year. We can all agree that we want a democratically elected government that will move the country forward and will not have its hands tied by any unelected entity.
But be careful what you wish for. Do not think that a government which is filled with deeply undemocratic and authoritarian leaders who have nothing but contempt for the voters and no compunction about stealing elections or repressing their political opponents is any solution to the problems we face as a nation.
One of the hopes post-1/11 was that leaders such as these would finally be brought to book for their crimes committed against the people of Bangladesh. So compromised was the judiciary that the hope that these criminals would ever be brought to account through judicial means under a political government was laughably naïve. As if there was rule of law and due process during the last BNP government and all one needed to do to receive justice was to file a case!
So we hoped that under the current government that the criminals would be brought to book. Now we know that that hasn't happened. For whatever reason, the current government has been either unable or unwilling to prosecute the really serious crimes of the previous five years, and has seemingly made a hash of its inexplicable prosecutions for much more minor offences.
But that doesn't mean that the crimes committed were not serious or deserving of prosecution. There are countless Bangladeshis who suffered severe and actionable injustice at the hands of the last government. Do they not deserve their day in court?
They would never get it under the BNP, had the party been permitted to steal the last election. And now we know that they will never get it under this government, either. But that doesn't mean that those who committed the crimes against the people of this country deserve to walk free.
So, as we move forward, hopefully, to elections and to a democratically elected government, and bring the curtain down on the current government, let us not forget the lesson of August 21.
That lesson is that a political party that resorts to violence and thuggery against its opponents, steals elections, and has no respect for democracy is hardly much of an improvement over the current situation.
I look forward to the upcoming elections and will be glad to see this non-democratic interregnum come to a close. But if the elections bring to power those who are undemocratic in their inclinations and their actions, we won't have much to celebrate.