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Politics, compromise and black money

Syed Badrul Ahsan
FINANCE Minister A.M.A. Muhith believes politics is the highest art of compromise. And because it is, it ought to be possible for us to understand what all this whitening of black money is all about. Of course, we do realise that politics, in our postmodern world of increasingly sharpened sensibilities, is a broad matter of compromise between opposing schools of thought. It is, as we have always known, the art of the possible. To the extent that the minister speaks of the nature of politics, we agree with his perspectives on it. But we have hardly any reason to think that politics and criminality can be made to come together, to coalesce as it were, on a single platform. Even ministers can be wrong about the calling of politics in life.
And we say that because of that little worm in the mind we know as ethics. In our childhood, we were told by our parents that honesty was what mattered in life. In school, our teachers inculcated in us values that many of us have never let go of. You do not covet wealth, especially that which is not yours. You do not steal, either as thieves in the night or as highway robbers in broad daylight. You do not lust after other men's wives. You do not send goons to occupy homes that have never been yours. You do not kidnap children and then demand ransom from their parents if they wish their babies to remain alive and well. You do not shoot men and then peddle the lie that they died in crossfire. And then there was our
faith, that foundation of existence which constantly reminded us of the existence of God, of His wrath if we so much as thought of causing harm to our neighbour and our country and our world.
That was morality. And politics drew energy and sustenance from it. Good men like Jefferson and Lincoln and Gladstone and Gandhi and Nehru --and innumerable others of their kind -have informed us through the centuries that integrity is the underlying principle that keeps politics going. In his time, Bangabandhu redefined our perspectives on society through drilling into our consciousness the idea that one reason we needed to move out of Pakistan was the rapacious way in which its ruling classes exploited Bengali resources and so left us all enervated. Those twenty-two families he spoke of were symbolic of grand larceny. Bangabandhu and Tajuddin Ahmed did not think that politics could reach a compromise with men whose profiteering had left an entire country wounded to the bone.
Yes, Minister Muhith is right about a definition of politics. He is wrong about politics being made a weapon to accord respectability to thieves and brigands. These men who have been hunting for dark wealth in the witching hours of the night will now be able to extend their thievery for three more years, before coughing up a mere ten percent of that ill-gotten wealth and thus joining the ranks of decent men and women. Meanwhile, over the next three years, the decent and the unscrupulous will live, eat and work side by side, in clear defiance of the rules of civilised existence. Honest men will look like fools for having resisted the temptation to be bad; and criminals will simply be reinforced in their belief that when an entire, elected government overrides its own election manifesto to come to their aid, not even God can lift a finger against them. The lamb will lie down with the wolf. Honest men will sit at the same table with villains. You call that politics? You call that the art of compromise?
Politics is compromise when Yasser Arafat strikes a deal with Yitzhak Rabin. It becomes art when Anwar Sadat travels to Jerusalem on a November night to make peace with Menachem Begin. Politics transforms itself into huge possibility when Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and Willy Brandt, leading different political parties, cobble a grand coalition in the Federal Republic of Germany and lead their people into newer light.
Compromise is when Tony Blair strikes off clause four from the Labour Party charter in Britain and so makes it a party of government once more. Ask Nelson Mandela. He will tell you what political compromise is all about. It is about creating a rainbow nation out of the darkness that used to be apartheid in South Africa. Long ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. shaped dreams of the children of former slave owners and the children of former slaves one day coming together on the red hills of Georgia. That was politics of the enlightened sort.
Politics is always about the empowerment of society. It educates men and women and inspires them into strengthening the moral pillars of government. It is about putting fiendish, grasping men to flight or in jail. It is about ideas, about creativity, about nobility of thought and action.