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The recent verdict by the High Court regarding the Fifth Amendment to the constitution has quite predictably aroused the interest of the nation in the political process followed in Bangladesh since 1975. The matter was serious enough for the government to appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for a stay order, the result of which has been a grant of stay on the verdict for the next two months. While the nation will wait to see what emerges from such exercises in legality, what it cannot understand is why some people from the Special Branch made their appearance at the High Court the other day, ostensibly to meet the judges who had delivered the verdict vis-à-vis the Fifth Amendment. In other words, the allegation is that one of the officers created a situation which compelled one of the judges to leave his bench in the midst of a hearing and meet him. Earlier, when news was conveyed to the judges through a peon of the court that these officers wanted to talk to them, the instruction was sent out that the registrar should speak to them. It seems that that did not work and despite the pleas of the lawyers engaged at that point in the hearing to the judges not to leave the room and meet the SB officers, one of the judges did go down and returned a few minutes later.
   The incident certainly will not go down well in the annals of the nation’s judiciary. What happened on Wednesday through forcing a judge to leave his bench because some policemen wanted to talk to him is not only unprecedented but deeply disturbing. Of course, one of the reasons given out to explain the situation was that the judges were offered the services of gunmen for their protection. If the security of the judges is truly a matter of seriousness for the authorities, one can understand it. But that surely did not warrant a situation where a High Court judge had to leave his bench and come down to see the police officer. All that one can now say about the episode is that it is likely the judge in question felt intimidated. That is not supposed to be the way the judiciary should work. Anyone who sees nothing wrong in the incident will only be missing the point. And the point is that once a verdict has been delivered, there are other ways for those not happy with it to look into the matter or to go for a review of the issue in hand. But to have police officers in plain clothes make their way to the court and send the message that the judge should meet them right away is not only indecent but also a grave threat to the rule of law. It should not happen again. More importantly, it ought now for the authorities to pinpoint the people (and they are in the administration) who were instrumental in sending the police officers to the court. Moreover, the government should be able to reassure the nation that the judges who delivered the verdict against the Fifth Amendment, or any judge or judges deciding cases in future, are perfectly safe and there will be no attempt made by anyone to come in the way of their professionalism.
   At this critical stage of our national life, it becomes important that everyone exercise restraint and good judgement — and we mean people across the spectrum and in every area of life — in the matter of how they perceive developments in the country. It will simply not do to undermine ourselves in any way.

The childless Angela Merkel

Does a woman have to be a mother in order to understand the issues women face? That appears to be the question arising out of what the wife of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has just told people. By the way, she happens to be the third Mrs. Schroeder and at this point is worried about her husband’s political future. He just might lose the elections this month to the Christian Democratic Union led by Angela Merkel. Now, politics is the business of accepting things with equanimity. It ought never to be a below the belt affair, though we do realise that all too often politicians are saying and doing things that stray from the core principles of politics. Mrs. Schroeder has done the sadly surprising thing. She has accused Mrs. Merkel, a very competent politician, of an inability to understand women’s issues because she does not have a child. That amounts to a suggestion that men and women who do not happen to be parents can have nothing parental about them. Besides, this is precisely where the wife of the chancellor is being unfair and irritating. Must the question now be one of women or men being unfit to administer states if they have no children?
   There have been people (and there always are) who have done remarkably well for themselves and their societies without having had to go through the job of rearing children. In places like Japan, women these days are developing ideas of life without marriage in order to focus on their careers. That is of course causing something of a crisis where population growth or decline is concerned. But the point is that these women are doing well. And let no one forget that Condoleezza Rice is unmarried and so has no children. Is she doing a bad job as US secretary of state? It then follows that what Mrs. Schroeder has just flung at Mrs. Merkel is not only in bad taste but also likely to harm her husband’s cause. There have been quite a few women in modern times who have seen their spouses’ political careers screech to a stop because of their interference in their work. To this day, many people in Israel believe that one reason why Binyamin Netanyahu had to leave office as prime minister was his wife. In Zimbabwe, Mrs. Robert Mugabe’s extravagant lifestyle has regularly undermined her husband’s hold on politics.
   In Germany’s elections, Mrs. Merkel could well turn out triumphant. In any case, her childlessness is not an issue in the race.

The arrest and the subsequent detention of Major Moynul Islam, first in a rather curious instance of mistaken identity and then for desertion, the latter charge coinciding with the time of the Chittagong Circuit House killing of President Ziaur Rahman on May 30, 1981, is now hopefully a matter of institutional inquiry of the armed forces and of the legal processes involved. There are yet no evidences against, and overt or covert reference to him, in the much-mourned tragedy that saw one of the largest congregations of men, women and children in Dhaka offering the last respects to, and praying for salvation of, the soul of the late president.
   Major Moynul, a Canadian citizen who lived in Toronto, led a quiet and humble life with his family, and is known to have been frequenting Dhaka since 1996. In the immediate past years during the tenure of this administration, he is reported to have visited Dhaka on three more occasions quite openly. A file initiated to absolve him of the necessary institutional trial processes for desertion, at the behest of the PMO during the preceding Awami League government, has since been gathering dust at the defence ministry. That Major Moynul would explain, hopefully, does not add to his offence of desertion.
   The trial and punishment for gross violation of the strict service rules of the men and women in uniform are not highly consequential, even if the offence is seen to be somewhat prejudicial in the shadow of a particular circumstance. The government and the armed forces hence quite wisely cleared up the public confusion over the mistaken identity and set in motion the legal procedures involving punishment for desertion. Earlier precedents have it that in a number of desertion cases the formalities were waived, though under due legal process, with a minimum penal award.
   What was thus headlined as an intelligence coup - that never was - would surely have diverted a lot of media attention from the on-going governmental clamp-down on the lunatic fringe of the JMB which claimed credit for the feat of the August 17 Islamic terror-bombing across the country. It has not blissfully happened that way, despite attempts by a section of the media and the power-contenders, and stayed the course. The hunt for Shaikh Abdur Rahman, the prophet of the so-called Islamic violence and said to be a mentor of Bangla Bhai (Azizur Rahman), still at large, is on. The government of Khaleda Zia has finally overcome its inhibition to act against such individuals and forces that had so long been enjoying the direct collusion of some of her ministers and MPs of the northern districts. It's a welcome awakening, no doubt.
   But caution must be exercised in not making a mountain out of it. In our considered opinion, the religious extremists, having the capacity of creating lethal terror, are still on the margins. The organisational proficiency demonstrated by them in the bombing feat does not quite reflect the sanity or the potency of their garbled manifesto as laid down in the leaflets left at the bombing locales. The cellular organisation, required to plant the cracker bombs with some evidence of timers and sophisticated devices, provides too thin a spread for a domestic 'Islamic' explosion. The vanguard of domestic Political Islam is still the unloved Jamaat-e-Islami, now very much a part of the core power under a somewhat passable representative political order. The stakes hence are too high for the Jamaat to take an uncertain and risky 'high jump' to home-grown Islamic terror. That could be too devastating for the Jamaat and would nullify its mainstream gains and its expiation from its pariah status of a killer collaborator of the Pakistan army in the genocide of 1971 and the pogrom of intellectuals by its storm-troopers and the blackshirt executioners belonging to the Al Badr and Al Shams.
   The madrassahs, claimed to be controlled by the ruling alliance partner Islamic Oikya Jote (IOJ) and its loose-cannon leader in clownish desert attire, Fazlul Huq Amini and men of his ilk, might at worst be the breeding grounds for mediaeval obscurantism. But they, alas, do not produce the militants who measure up to the spirit of, and the will to, sacrifice by the diehard Jihadis. The training camps, if any, are essentially the dens of preaching the ideology to the gullible converts, and not to equip them with the armoury and training necessary for an armed-terror campaign on a guerrilla-footing against state power in the populous plains of Bangladesh. A man-eat-man population density leaves no space for such terror fancies as target-shooting armed training. A police blank fire will send the madrassah crowd, including the anti-Ahmadiya vigilantes, running for their lives.
   The second point of caution is about the external hands at play. The propaganda rhetoric is so strident that the external hand, if any, finds a suitable cover behind the local devil of the JMB and vice versa. Jamaat-e-Islami Minister Matiur Rahman Nizami betrayed his knee-jerk defence-mechanism when he turned the guns on India and Israel to absolve the Jamaat of its complicity, as alleged by the opposition AL that did not even spare Khaleda Zia. These impolitic outbursts, for which Sheikh Hasina is notorious, undermine domestic and international credence in such matters of concern and import as that of the August 17 bombings.
   External factors, whether of state powers or of terror-outfits, come into play only when there are internal breaches and contradictions. If the leaders at the political command-post of the day do not address them with good and firm governance, they fester and render the affairs of the state vulnerable, as has happened several times in the last thirty plus years of Bangladesh's existence as a sovereign state. We, hence, hope that Khaleda Zia's government will also wake up to good and accountable governance in the last leg of her present tenure to restore both domestic and international confidence in it. Bangladesh's external political and economic relations, the grapevine says, have hit the lowest point in recent days. Only a series of determined and harsh reform programmes in various areas, including law and order, corruption, madrassah education, civil and police administration and a drastic spring-cleaning of its own house, can not only stem the rot, but also restore order in the overall state and society.
   There is always a good side to a crisis. It helps in self-correction. Bu then one has to look at the mirror.
   — Enayetullah Khan
   from Toronto
   Smultaneously published in
   New Age & Holiday