THE whole world would have already celebrated the advent of the New Year; the New Century and some even the New Millennium. And so would we have. But ours was slightly different. Behind our celebratory veneer lurked the fear as to how happy our New Year would really turn out to be. And here Ues our real tragedy. Today our fear for the future does not come from the unforeseen natural calamities or from the debilitating effect of crunching poverty but from the selfishness, greed and total lack of Imagination of our political leadership. Therefore our New Year's wishes are mosuy addressed to them.

The first wish is to urge our leaders to tell us of their long-term visions about the country and its people, with a clear guidelines and time-table to implement them. Let AL and the BNP tell us what plans they have for us. Today there is a dangerous lack of vision all around which has. naturally, led us to a lack of understanding of our problems. As a consequence, we have been running on ad hoc and short term measures that only further complicate the already complex Issues.

The second wish, which follows from the first, is to urge our leaders to do some reading. There Is plenty of research — some very good ones — available on almost all the issues that bedevil our progress today. But the sad fact is that our leaders do not read them. They are so used to listening to their own words and so much in love with the resonance of their own voice that they are quite happy giving repetitive speeches rather than slogging through documents, statistics and analyses that may provide pointers for their policies. The most dramatic example of how our leaders ignore the scholars lies in the fact that neither the BNP government nor the succeeding AL government made any use of the Task Force reports that our best thinkers and researchers produced in the early 90s under the leadership of Prof. Rehman Sobhan. By all accounts it was a magnificent attempt to articulate our own thoughts — not the usual donor driven prescriptions — about our own problems by our most recognised scholars. And yet it made no impact on our democratically elected policy makers. This must change in the 21st Century if we are to take any advantage of the huge reservoir of knowledge that will become available.

Our third and final wish for our leaders is that they must try to fight corruption in some meaningful way. We know they will find it hard to admit but the fact is that our politicians are among the most corrupt elements in our society. The interest of the country or of its people are sold in the marketplace of vested interest for a song without any idea how this will affect our future. Criminal elements find their most loyal patrons in the politicians. All this is making a mockery of our democracy. For most of our leaders politics is becoming — or may have already become — a business. You invest some money to get elected, and then realise many times over that amount through corruption.

This is the modest wish list we have for the New Year. Hope we have some takers.