How should Noor Hossain be reacting from the heavens to what was happening in Dhaka and elsewhere in Bangladesh on the day of his martyrdom? The two biggest partners in the three-cornered grand alliance that brought down Ershad are at daggers drawn now with the villain of the 1990 piece having his umpteenth laugh. Has Noor's sacrifice gone in vain?

The ties between these two were tenuous even on the day of Noor's killing by an Ershad bullet. And soon after the flamboyant autocrat's exit, the two fell as far apart as was possible only for them. Two elections and two parliaments later, have they been able to take to parliamentary democratic ways of tolerance allowing governance to shape up on dual participation? No. All the bad legacies of undemocratic dispensations of decades are still weighing them down. Neither is ready to give up its private armed cadres. Deep-seated mistrust drives each further away from the other. Political rivalry has degenerated into personal animosity, perhaps even hatred, at the topmost levels — something that hardly ever had happened elsewhere In the world.

Noor Hossain Day should be renamed as Democracy Day. And the political parties owe it to him to cry a halt to their interminable mutual vituperations and be demonstrably tolerant of each other. Did the political party which called for the two-day hartal and then extend it for another 12 hours care to know that they were sullying Noor Hossain's memory? The memory of his supreme sacrifice for democracy? Perhaps not.