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The 1970 elections, glass houses and stones

Syed Badrul Ahsan
THE knives are out again, in all their sinister gleam, to stab us in the back once more. This time it is the very ethos of the People's Republic of Bangladesh that has come under assault. Hannan Shah of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and All Ahsan Mujahid of the Jamaat-e-Islam! have given us to understand that the general elections of 1970 were organised by the regime of General Yahya Khan to favour a particular political party. And, of course, that party was the Awami League, though they shy away from saying it.
In the event, Yahya Khan and his Election Commission manipulated the results and produced a winner. The winner was certainly the Awami League. See the ingenuity in the argument here? United Pakistan's last government presided over an electoral process that was aimed patently at ensuring the rise of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to the palpable discomfiture of all other politicians in Pakistan. How inane can one get to be? And how asinine can politics get to be?
And why should Hannan Shah and Mujahid be so upset? Ah, the tragedy of our times is that every time someone talks about values, there is a horde of people ready to run him out of town. It is just that Chief Election Commissioner A.T.M. Shamsul Huda told the country a few days ago that the Election Commission wished to ensure as credible a general election as that of1970.
Those of you who understand history and have been part of it will recall that the 1970 elections were the fairest, the most transparent and, therefore, the most acceptable in the history of cither Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Despite all the bad moves made by military intelligence to produce a victory for the rightwing elements, despite every effort to deny progressive forces their natural triumph at the voting, die people of both East and West Pakistan knew what they needed to do.
They ended up voting the Awami League in as the majority in the new national assembly, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party coming to occupy second place. It is, of course, an entirely different matter as to what happened in the
subsequent three months
But the fact is that at the 1970 elections, the famaat-e-Islami was given a licking, in both the wings of Pakistan, a truth that the party has never forgotten. And so when Mujahid questions the results of those polls, he knows he is distorting the truth. You can ignore Mujahid, for you remain aware of all the sordid things he and his friends in the Jamaat did in 1971 as a way of demonstrating their love for the killers masquerading as the Pakistan army. But Hannan Shah? Are you not a trifle amazed that his voice now resonates with that of die old Pakistani collaborators, that he thinks there was something terribly wrong with the elections of 1970?
He feels, like Mujahid and everyone unhappy with die story of 1970, that diose elections were geared to helping a particular party. And he does not stop there. He goes on to accuse the present CEC of having engineered the victory of the Awami League in his capacity as a sub-divisional officer somewhere in East Pakistan.
That, says A.T.M. Shamsul Huda, is not true because he was at the
time posted in the Punjab But, of course, Hannan Shah has not apologised for his error and, given the tradition in diiscountry, never will.
The bigger truth is that Shah has not seen the danger in his remarks on the 1970 electoral exercise. That was a referendum on die Six Points, as Bangabandhu kept reminding us (and we agreed with him) Is Shah, having been an army officer in the Pakistan era and having observed the circumstances that led to the liberation of Bangladesh, now suggesting diat Bangabandhu and the Awami League ought to have lost the elections, that East Pakistan should yet have been part of our collective life, that Pakistani communalism should not have been replaced by Bengali secularism?
The Lord only knows what politicians without idealism will do in a furtherance of their parochial interest. Watch Khaleda Zia. She has persuaded herself into believing that no fair elections are possible under the Election Commission as it is constituted at present.
A.T.M. Shamsul Huda and the two election commissioners, she says loudly, should resign because they have, In her unexplained opin Ion, been doing everything to ensure the electoral triumph of a particular party. She means the Awami league, though why she docs not say so explicitly is rather inexplicable
But that Is not the point. Then what is? It is that Begum Zia and Hannan Shah have somehow not remembered that we remember what the M A Aziz experience at the Election Commission was all about. Ten million non-existent individuals made it to the voters' list on Justice Aziz's watch; and no fewer that Tk 600 million were wasted in the effort.
He held two offices consecutively, and he paid little heed to the gathering outrage about his acts across the country. He should have left the office of chief election commissioner on his own. He did not, until the Fakhruddin Ahmed caretaker government arm-twisted him into making for the exit. And should he not have been prosecuted for misusing taxpayers' money, for making a mockery of the Election Commission?
The BNP chairperson has said not a word about Shamsul Huda's predecessor That is a pity. There are glass houses and there arc stones. Why is it that some people keep gathering the stones and really begin to believe that their glass houses arc the Great Wall of China? Ah, but that is again human nature. You cannot do anything about it You do not see the dust and dirt in your courtyard. That does not stop you, though, from imagining the worst about your neighbour.
But away with all that! Focus, once more, on the 1970 elections. Hannan Shah thinks those elections were flawed because they favoured the Awami league
That is an insinuation directed at the late lamented Justice Abdus Sattar, for he was Pakistan's chief election commissioner at the time. In all these years since the polls, no one has ever suggested that Sattar had ensured a triumph for the Awami League. Besides, Hannan Shah and his friends appear to have thrown to the winds the truth that Sattar eventually linked up with their own leader Ziaur Rahman in the BNP. was appointed vice president of Bangladesh and subsequently, in the post-Zia penod, ascended to the presidency of the country in his own right. And there you have irony at work. There arc men willing and naive enough to throw innuendoes at you, without remembering the skeletons they have in their own cupboards.
It is not fair to question men and women of integrity ATM. Shamsul Huda and his colleagues have stumbled at times, but they have done a good job so far. And it is morally wrong to think that because you sense the winds and the gods might not be kindly disposed to your brand of politics, you can drag an entire country into the mud, take it down the precipice, as it were, with you. That is not politics. It is premonition of a new nightmare; of the kind we painfully wriggled through -- for the five years until October 2006. Syed Badrui Ahsan is Editor. Current Altars. The
Daily Star