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A failure of politics

Syed Badrul Ahsan
The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party did all of us something of a favour on Thursday. It moved away, ever so slightly, from its 12-hour hartal and permitted the shutdown to come to an end after eleven hours. Now, that is not quite part of the tradition of political agitation in Bangladesh.
We have systematically been led to believe — and indeed have been convinced over the years — that there is either a full scale hartal of six or twelve hours, depending on how strongly the party calling it feels about the situation, or there is no hartal at all. But now the BNP has let us in on the thought that hartals can on certain occasions be shortened, even if only for an hour. You could say that a certain liberalisation has come into the hartal tradition. Perhaps this unprecedented act will in course of time become a precedent for other parties to follow in the times before us.
On a deeper analysis, though, we as a people — and this despite the diversity of our individual and collective political beliefs -- are properly mystified by the reasons trotted out to explain this slicing away of an hour from what had been scheduled to be a 12-hour shutdown across the country. There was the matter of a diplomatic reception organised by an influential foreign mission in Bangladesh. And then there was the excite-ment of a cultural programme where a prominent visitor from abroad was expected to fly in and regale us with his ghazals.
As a people noted for polite behaviour, especially a demonstration of deep respect towards people from other lands, we are happy that BNP was magnanimous enough to take an hour off its programme. The gesture, surprising though it was, was unquestionably noble.
And yet, as we reflect on the 11-hour hartal, we call forth the audacity in ourselves to ask why our political parties have never heeded the many calls we have made over the years for them to turn away from using hartals as a weapon of agitation. Patients in hospitals have suffered, students have been compelled to stay
away from classes, commuters have been left high and dry on streets tense and bereft of transport, businesses have taken a bad mauling -- all because of the ubiquitous nature of hartals. Our protests have not been taken into account, not now, not in years gone by.
Give your memory a good shake. In her first stint as prime minister, Sheikh Hasina told us, to much cheer and celebration, that even if her party went into opposition, it would never resort to hartals again. And in all her time as prime minister, Khaleda Zia never let us forget the damage hartals were causing the national economy. We were ready to believe that our future was finally in safe hands, that both Sheikh Hasina and Begum Zia would together or single-handedly lead us to a valley of rainbow dreams.
We were wrong to be taken in by those promises. Awami League conveniently forgot the no-hartal promise the moment it went back into opposition in October 2001. And BNP, every time it lost elections and went into opposition, chanced on the discovery that hartals were the most potent way of keeping itself in circulation.
Neither party stopped to think of the exasperation, the pain and the disillusionment it was always putting the nation to due to its reluctance to take citizen's sentiments into account. The consequences have been bad, for all of us. The politicians' unwillingness or inability to understand the severe ramifications of an employment of the hartal weapon has pushed us into being a backwater in South Asia, into being an emblem of instability which keeps embarrassing us before
the world. Meanwhile, the world passes us by.
The hartal culture has spawned other ailments among the nation's political classes. For one thing, it has ensured that the political opposition, be it Awami League or BNR deliberately and endlessly stays away from parliament. For another, it has had politics degenerate into a personalised affair, to a point where the head of government and the leader of the opposition do not meet, do not exchange greetings and do not reflect together on the nation's future. There are perfectly democratic-minded individuals in both Awami League and BNP, people whose camaraderie on social occasions is often surprisingly admirable. In the public domain, though, they have never been able to emerge from the shadows of their party chiefs. Which is apity.
Charles de Gaulle, questioned about his attitude to political opposition to his policies once, remarked rather enigmatically, "I respect people who disagree with me, but I cannot tolerate them.”
In Bangladesh, respect between and among politicians has been a perpetual casualty; and intolerance has set in as somewhat of a tradition. Opposition politicians do not hesitate to turn their backs on parliament; and hartals are considered a vehicle to the future, which gets to be increasingly darker with our democracy rapidly getting wrapped in illiberality's coarse garment.
Partisan politics at all levels keeps the door effectively shut to an emergence of decisive, purposeful and enlightening national leadership in this land of shattered aspirations resting on a continuity of dreams.