Don't weaken Interim government while pleading to strengthen it

Mostafa Kamal Majumder

Mostafa Kamal Majumder
For the last one week or so, cases have been filed against former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and some of her former ministers and advisers. The charges include murder. The cases are many. Needless to say, apparently it looks like an unnecessary overdoing.

Some former ministers and advisers have been arrested from hideouts and produced before courts. Arrestees include a former justice of the the High Court and journalists who were first detained while they tried to leave the country on different routes.

While the interim government is struggling to restore order, a section of journalists have started expressing annoyance over the arrest of leaders of the AL and its alliance partners and filing of numbers of cases against them. They are also asking for showing respect to people of different shades of opinion. Criticisms are being made of political workers who are trying to fill the vacuum at different places and levels left by those of the last Awami League government that collapsed with the resignation and fleeing of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on 5 August.
It seems there is nothing wrong to say so. The question however arises over the timing of this campaign and the persons they are pleading for plus the dislike they are expressing for some forces, which look likely to benefit from the change of power that came through the August 5 student-mass revolution.
Barely over a fortnight has passed since the 5 August change. While one cannot condone overdoing, one should keep in mind the fact that this is not a business as usual scenario. The change has come at a big price of at least 650 vistims of  mass-killing during the July-August student-mass movement, plus 17 years of systematic political persecution that included thousands of secret, open and extra judicial killings, and at least 600 cases of enforced disappearance, according to news media reports. People in their word of mouth communication say, the tallies would be much higher.

If families of the not less than 650 mass-killing victims file cases against people of the ousted AL government, the number would come to hundreds. And who can stop these families from seeking justice against the cool blooded murders of the unarmed and innocent victims, mostly students, who held demonstrations for a society without discrimination? A possible answer to many cases filed against former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and some others is that there are much too many aggrieved parties to sue them.  
Some of the critics of the present dispensation of things have however acknowledged that the grip of the last authoritarian government was so strong and complete that people had started believing they have no way out of the sufferings. Some people have openly said they had lost hopes seeing a change for the better in their lifetime.

Some call the immediate past regime a dictatorial and fascist one-party rule under a façade of democracy with some obliged splinter parties presenting themselves as partners and another rather domesticated party as the opposition. All of them went into hiding after the collapse of the AL government. They all collaborated and shared the loaves and fishes while the democratic fabric of the society was destroyed. The interim government has undertaken to help rebuild the same.

The discrimination against which students fomented movement was an all-pervasive political doctrine of denial of the role of the opposition calling them anti-liberation forces, terrorists and militants to be dealt with the way they rulers wanted. The ruling party called itself and its allies a pro-liberation force which monopolized not only power at all levels of the administration, but also government jobs, trade and business. They owned new banks and insurance companies and plundered people’s money deposited to those plus looted the share market. The law enforcing agencies and the courts from lower to high levels denied people of opposition backgrounds their due fundamental rights. The student dormitories of the public universities and the better known colleges remained under the capture of armed cadres of the ruling party who used to stop general students from expressing any discontent, using machetes, other sharp weapons and fire arms, the student-mass movement revealed.

They closed down opposition newspapers and television stations and opened new ones loyal to the party in power. The loyal news media was used to spread government propaganda and ills of the opposition even adopting techniques of disinformation. French news agency AFP detected 300 fake news stories that were published through the Bangladeshi news media in the year 2023 alone. Some such stories were published even in a handful of newspapers that are considered to be credible. The loyal news media remained full of accounts of hate speeches against the opposition political parties and their leaders. Even some retired judges of the High Court were heard making hateful statements in television talks hows. Political vocabulary of the leaders of ruling party was full of words of hate even at public programmes like press conferences.

With all respects to those asking for upholding the rights of people with dissenting opinions, may one point out that the dictatorial regime emerged by abusing a nascent democratic order of 16 years that had started getting deeply rooted, taking advantage the patronage of the last Caretaker government of Moin U Ahmed-Fakhruddin Ahmed that ruled for two years by promulgating a state of emergency. This was the second and longer phase of veritable one-party political order that took charge in Bangladesh abusing the liberal democratic system. An inquisitive observer would not miss seeing the miseries of opposition political leaders and workers in all those 17 years. Political workers having the ability to mobilise people faced tens to hundreds of cases each. Those who succeeded to secure bails failed to live in their homes because of action from the ruling party or the police against them. Many opposition political workers secretly migrated to different cities, mostly in Dhaka, and eked out an existence even by pulling rickshaws.

Revenge attacks that took place after the collapse of the last government should be viewed from this context. A conscious journalist should also take note of the absence of the police administration for about a fortnight, as the members of police, used politically for 15 years, got demoralized in the face of the courageous student-mass movement and took time to report to duty stations. The Interim Government and the opposition led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) raised their voices against revenge tendencies. The BNP dispatched its workers to their respective areas from Dhaka to prevent such attacks. Fortunately, revenge attacks have been contained.

The paramount question, that however remains, is how to stop the recurrence of one-party dictatorships that emerge in our country taking advantage of the loopholes of liberal democratic system. Germeny has provisions in their penal code against the propagation of Nazi ideas and hate speeches. Police there takes action against such practices. In our country leading journalists, intellectuals and thinkers have to brainstorm and suggest how our polically vibrant social order can be insulated against fascist tendencies from time to time to build a peaceful and prosperous society for all.

Journalists may subscribe to political ideas, consciously or unconsciously, but the pragmatic ones succeed to prevent this from being reflected in their writings or statements. In our case however, some otherwise successful journalists were unfortunately directly linked to the elements that introduced the military-backed caretaker government in 2001 and sent the nation into 17 years of wilderness. They did this because they had disliking for some political parties and their leaders. But this disliking should not have been so much strong as to suggest their rejection even when they had the popular support to vie for power.

During the last 15 years it was not just the political leadership giving diktats, but also a propaganda system to present the diktats as best possible things done on the earth as against the opposition ideas portrayed as nasty things spread by enemies of the people and the state. While the government had its own propaganda machine fully engaged in the social media, some motivated elements in the news media publicly, in press conferences or talk shows, flattered people in the corridors of power while at the same time blaming all bad things on opposition parties and their leaders. So intense was the propaganda that people were treated at government offices or public places not on the basis of their merit but by their political identities.                 

One should view the revolution of August 5 as an extraordinary development, not just an ordinary case of unseating a government. The successful popular student-mass movement created an opportunity not just for change of power, but for change of an autocratic system into a democratic one with safeguards against recurrence of autocracy and abuse of a liberal system and its ideas and practices. The controlled political culture of the last 15 years created scopes for massive economic and social crimes which are hugely large. There are millions of families whose members were denied not only government jobs, but also opportunities to do business, old age and disability allowances, and even relief materials on political grounds. One cannot correct the wrongs in a business as usual scenario. One should call black ‘black’ and white ‘white’. It’s not fair to expect the shattered society to be back to normal in just three weeks and to blame all wrongs on either the interim government or the opposition political parties. One should be happy to note that the society displayed resilience by rising to the occasion to maintain law and order itself when the police force was off-duty across the country.

The people are lucky that the August 5 revolution has not been an armed one, nor the victors are champions of extreme ideas. Let us thank God the society has escaped a potential disaster. While saying this, it would possibly not be too much to expect all to be sincere about overcoming mistakes of the past to chart a prosperous future where no one will be neglected or left behind. The people look for a society where everyone would be equal before the law, get equal protection of the law and dealt with only in accordance with the law without discrimination, plus an equitable distribution of resources which will not make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

(A veteran journalist, the writer is the editor of GreenWatch Dhaka online news portal)