Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina does not see any need for a Presidential initiative to get the all-important, and yet so very illusive, government-opposition dialogue underway. In an interview with the BBC on Friday she vented out such a feeling when asked whether she was thinking of requesting the President to take a role in the matter. To our mind, this was quite a legitimate question to ask in view of the constitutional provision for the President to act on the advice of the Prime Minister.

She has put forward two reasons why she does not see any necessity for a presidential initiative: first, her doors remain wide open for talks; but to avail themselves of the opportunity, the opposition need shedding any preconditions to the dialogue. Secondly, the Parliament is functioning, so that the opposition is free to discuss any matter on the floor of the House.

If the PM is keen on drawing the opposition into talks then she is hardly speaking the political idiom needed for it. Besides, what is important, and indeed very crucial to note is the fact that she might have poured cold water on a donor community initiative for bringing the contending parties to a dialogue with the President exercising his extra-ordinary moral standing to catalyse the process. They have already met the leader of the opposition Begum Khaleda Zia, and are due to see the Prime Minister now before they round off the se- • ries through a meeting with President Shahabud-din. One hopes not, but what the PM .has said amounts to foreclosing that option.

The problem is we have seen the ruling party and the principal opposition party BNP on both sides of the spectrum — being inter-changeably in power and out of power. So. we can conclude that both of you have not proved equal to the exalted positions you have held and are holding. If the offices of the Treasury Bench leader and the leader of the opposition had operated normally there would be no need for the nation to turn to the President.

When in the opposition, the present Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had refused to sit down for talks with the ruling BNP till such time as her demand for a caretaker government to hold the elections were met. She boycotted the parliament, resignations of her party's MPs followed. The Parliamentary process was subverted then as it is being done today. So, she must be the best judge of how the opposition's mind works and be accordingly accommodative to them. This is not a question of compromise, but of gracious and practical accommodation from a position of authority, power and responsibility. If she thinks 'politics is going her way', then well, she must feel all the more secure in being friendly to the opposition.