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Perspectives

Bereft of a moral content it's the travesty of governance!

M ABDUL HAFIZ
***If the government is perplexed at the development the people also are in no pleasant situation when choosing between compliance with grudge and defiance with accompanying risks. Those who are ruled find neither an example to emulate nor an incentive to comply with the diktat of those whom they consider out and out hypocrite.***
MAO's assertion that 'all powers grow out of the barrel of the gun' perhaps applied to totalitarian system. In democracies one needs popular mandate to derive authority. It has been empirically seen however that the authority so derived also quickly fades away when it is bereft of a moral content. The ruling dispensation is then left only with the state-endowed crude physical power as sole means of ensuring public obeisance. Nevertheless it never proved adequate to govern increasingly complex human society. Yet this remains to be an universal arrangement throughout the developing world where the civil society is still to shape the country's governance which is purely the exercise of state power through its integral organs to
achieve the state's overall objective.
This worked for a while but often backfired bringing to question the government's authority to rule with its stained hand and tainted image. The public did not always appear prepared to accept in silence the double standard of law and its application, myriad dichotomies in the political conduct of the leaders as well as government's failures in dispensing justice and its inability
to redress the genuine grievances of the people. Inevitably, there was a loss of public faith in government's sincerity, if not ability to deliver. Bangladesh presents one of the worst case scenarios in this regard.
There is a deep apathy, callousness and insensivity to public sufferings on the part of establishment which is brazenly manifest in its conduct. In the same coin there is a syndrome of defiance to
authority and an apathy to its writs. The manifest expression of such defiance abounds all around us and all too familiar -- the public taking law in their own hand, the mob dispensing summary justice to suspected offender, a blanket flouting of government orders and the desperados having their way. The public concern over the ensuing chaos and anarchy is obvious. But at the same time the government is also not unconcerned and its responses are seemingly apt.
The government has promptly taken steps to arrest the trend. It has beefed up the law enforcing agencies, clamped down on the criminals with military using or misusing their skills, introduced improved crime control gadgets and devices and also enacted special legislation to deal with the complex cases of law-breaking. Its leaders went about exhorting the docile people to be law abiding. They bowled down plentiful of pet sermons about the public obliga-
tions and the virtues of a disciplined society. But there seemed to be few takers. The people, by and large, remained unconvinced and unimpressed. Also the defiance stiffens and the social order takes much more diabolical shape.
If the government is perplexed at the development the people also are in no pleasant situation when choosing between compliance with grudge and defiance with accompanying risks. Those who are ruled find neither an example
to emulate nor an incentive to comply with the diktat of those whom they consider out and out hypocrite. Also the commands of those who rule ring hollow unless substantiated by a moral authority.
At the core of our problems of governance today is precisely an acute absence of this moral authority -- an authority only with which Bangabandhu, the nation's founding father wielded during the historic non-cooperation, an
unparalleled power. His words became irrevocable writs even without any state apparatus at his disposal because he spoke from a moral high ground. Bangabandhu's magic, however, vanished and he stumbled even when he was at the peak of his state-endowed power as his moral authority gradually eroded.
In Bangladesh whereas we seldom had a chance to build up moral fibres in public life there is, on the contrary, a steep precipita-
tion of existing ones inherited from our ancestors when one looks at the spectre of corruption and immorality that our leaders are steeped in, The corruption with its attendant evils is closing around us with a certainty that is frightening both for its intensity and sweep. What the immorality leads up to is still more alarming.
A time seems to have already come when even decent people have began to question: Why
should they pay taxes as the proceeds are likely to be embezzled by the corrupt leaders or officials. Why they should hand over a criminal to the police who can be easily bribed and the rogue would walk into freedom to resume his crimes with vengeance! Why they should pay back borrowed money to the bank when another -- a bigwig can manipulate its evasion; they helplessly watch how a VVIP with twenty-one corruption and criminal cases against him could be a celebrity in this country. The chicanery, trickery and gimmickry are now the order of the day because these are devices with which the government would have to manage its governance until a moral standard is set at the highest echelon of country's leadership.
When an establishment unable to provide minimum safety to its citizenry, give succour in their grinding hardships and inspire them for a better tomorrow engages itself in hiking its own parks and privileges by 100 to 600 per cent it indeed becomes the travesty of governance -- let alone the question of governance with a moral content.
Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.