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The 37 minutes that shook politics

Farid Hossain
WHEN Sheikh Hasina picked up her cell phone and called her bitter rival Khaleda Zia, history was made. October 26, 2013 (Saturday) should go down as a Red Letter Day in the annals of Bangladesh's acrimonious politics. The telephone conversation, first in more than a decade, between the country's two most powerful women, sent the people of Bangladesh into a state of euphoria. It was as if the 37 minutes that the prime minister and the leader of the opposition spent over phone was going to transform Bangladesh's acrimonious politics, forcing the two leaders to scale down their bitter rivalry.
Hopes were raised about a solution to the current political impasse. It was thought that the leaders of the country's two major parties would now be able to resolve the dispute over the polls-time government and end the destructive politics of general strikes that lead to violence, bloodshed and deaths. About two dozen people - many of them innocent ordinary citizens - had been killed during the 60-hour shutdown called by Khaleda's 18-party alliance, which ended on Tuesday evening. More protests have been threatened by the opposition.
Unfortunately, the optimism raised by the telephone conversation is already proving to be shortlived. Khaleda turned down Hasina’s invitation to a dialogue followed by dinner on the excuse of the hartal her alliance had enforced from Sunday to Tuesday. The opposition leader refused to withdraw the hartal despite repeated requests from the prime minister. Khaleda's initial response to the PM's invitation came as a big disappointment even to the neutral non-partisan political analysts who thought that the opposition leader should have called off the strike and gone to Ganobhaban on October 28 for what could have been a historic meeting.
The more people learned about the conversation -- thanks to the media - the greater the shock they got. To many of them a large portion of the conversation was unnecessary and lacking taste. The leaders should not have bickered so much over whether the red phone at Khaleda's residence was dead or not. What mattered most was that the prime minister kept trying to reach the opposition leader, and she finally made it over mobile phone. Instead of arguing over the red phone they should have devoted more time to serious talks; the invitation to a dialogue over dinner and the issues to be discussed.
The contents of the telephone conversation now available in the media and Facebook are raising a big question: has the conversation brought them closer to a dialogue aimed at resolving the political deadlock or has it created more distance between them? People are giving mixed answers, but most believe that the hopes for a face-to-face meeting between the two leaders are fading away fast. What is now expected is a meeting between the general secretaries of the two parties.
In spite of the public disappointment it will be wrong at this stage to dismiss the Hasina-Khaleda telephone talk as a failure. It has at least made the unimaginable a reality. Whatever is the public impression, or sometimes criticisms, about them, the two feuding leaders have demonstrated that direct talks between them are possible. This can be seen as an ice-breaking exercise. In attacking each other during the telephone talks they have at least been able to pour out their feelings about each other. This catharsis should provide a sense of relief to both of them. What they wanted to tell one another at personal and political levels has been said.
They fired their first salvos at each other. The more they fight across the table or over telephone or across the floor of parliament the better for the nation. A day will surely come when they will exhaust all their weapons, paving the way for a ceasefire that may lead to a permanent peace.