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Dr. Kamal Hossain’s call to the nation to elect good, honest people to Parliament resonates with all of us. That has indeed been the aspiration among citizens for a number of years, particularly in light of the fact that politics in recent times has taken quite a nosedive. There is certainly that other important factor of the symbols for which people cast their votes. A symbol is essentially a statement, an underscoring of the realities that a political party may assume need to be dealt with. In a very important way, democracy or for that matter the parliamentary system of government depends on the symbol it operates under. More to the point, a symbol is what gathers people to a political programme or pulls them away from it. If the former foreign minister is of the view that the Bengali electorate should now be casting its ballots for honest, dedicated individuals rather than party symbols, he surely has a point. As our collective experience has so amply demonstrated in the last couple of decades, symbols have often been misused or abused by the very people who have wanted the country to think that they speak for them. So there now comes into the issue a rather academic question of how we relate our choice of individual candidates for political office to the need for symbols to help us decide our course of action at the ballot box.
   Matters ought not to have come to a pass where we would need to worry about the kind of people who can represent us in Parliament. And yet we realise, in a very collective sense, that the sheer cavalier fashion in which politics has been treated over the years leaves us perhaps with little choice other than telling ourselves that more than parties or symbols we should now be engaged in a search for good men to shape our destiny. A few years ago, a survey laid bare the fact that as many as eighty four per cent of our lawmakers happen to come from a business background. And the rest comprise quite a significant segment of bureaucrats and retired military personnel. Could that be a reason why politics as a profession has been in decline in Bangladesh? The answer could be a yes and a no. In the first place, the presence of so many people with business connections in the law-making body naturally raises the suspicion that public welfare may in the end be subsumed to individual aggrandisement. In the second place, insofar as the presence of superannuated civil and military officials in politics is concerned, there may well be the feeling that their collective as well as joint experience in government is a good thing for politics. Overall, therefore, it is a mixed feeling that we have. But in a larger way of looking at the whole matter, politics is about drawing into it people whose concerns about social issues will help them to develop increasingly sophisticated views of governance or what it ought to be. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, the trend in the last two decades has been one of politics being replaced by party and individual concerns, to the very great detriment of the country. It is this dilemma that Kamal Hossain now speaks of, one over which we certainly share his concern.
   Beyond and above the question of individuals and symbols comes the question of how best we can ensure the survival of parliamentary democracy in the country. Do we really have to make a choice between individuals and symbols? Democracy, after all, is a constantly changing, constantly improving method of politics. That being the case, there will surely be the ways in which we can weed out the bad men who have in the past twenty years or so cast a very dark cloud over the nation’s democratic structure. Individuals are important. And these individuals, good and honest and dedicated, can only get behind a symbol and thereby raise the profile of politics in the land.

Politics and God

It is rather intriguing how politicians sometimes pull God into all the bad things they do or might be tempted to do. Britain’s Tony Blair has just tried telling his country that going to war was what was ordained for him by the Creator. Predictably, it looks like setting off howls of protest, especially on the part of families who have lost their men in Iraq. Mr. Blair is certainly not the first politician in modern times to speak of God, to make it seem that the Almighty is actually part of the political decision-making that affects the lives of people everywhere. Rightwing politicians in Israel, like the late Menachem Begin, kept telling people of the Biblical claim to lands that they could not otherwise justify in terms of legality. In the post-1947 conditions in the South Asian subcontinent, every time the Bengalis of what was then the eastern part of Pakistan raised their demands for political and economic rights, cunning politicians in Rawalpindi swiftly raised the bogey of Islam being in danger.
   And so it has gone on, this endless play upon and around the personality of God. In India, the Hindu fundamentalist class conveniently employed its gods in a showdown with people it did not particularly approve of. In America, men like Ronald Reagan remembered God and then went around invading places like Grenada and bombing countries like Libya. For the entire course of the Cold War, communism was mocked in the West as a godless system that would push morality out of the lives of people. In our times, men like Osama bin Laden have taken to believing that God, their God, really has no wish to love people other than those whom bin Laden likes. Such tales are but reminders of the times when missionaries from the West spread out to the world outside their frontiers in order to be able to drill the message of Christianity into people they called heathens. And that was that.
   One waits to see how Tony Blair emerges from this new battle he has engaged in. Think of this, though: why do men who get progressively weaker in power tend to veer more towards God and dump Him with responsibility He had no hand in the making of?

These days, there is a good deal of talk going on in Britain about when, not if, Tony Blair will be making way for Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street. It is a matter of transition. More to the point, it all boils down to an issue of departure. There are few happenings that can be more defining than the way a politician leaves office in order to make room for another. There are examples aplenty that we can cite here. Before he actually left office last year, people kept talking about Colin Powell’s departure from the Bush administration with something of regret mixed with irony. The regret stemmed from the considered opinion that he had been the only moderate, and by extension the only gentleman, in an ultra-right administration. And the irony came through the recollection of the determined manner in which Powell justified an attack on Iraq at the United Nations early in 2003, an image that more than any other act of his long public career brought his reputation down a considerable number of notches. Overall, the alacrity with which President Bush accepted the Secretary of State’s resignation at the end of 2004 was proof that people in the administration had been looking for an opportunity to see the back of Colin Powell. It may well have been that Powell entertained some slight hope that he would be asked to stay on, given that the president was aware of how negatively people around the world viewed the neo-conservative underpinnings of his government. In the event, George W. Bush did not appear willing at all to ask the retired general to hang on. That must have been a bitter moment for Powell, whose arrival at the State Department in January 2001 was heralded, a little exaggeratedly, by many as an event akin to the arrival of General George C. Marshall at the same place in the 1940s.
   There are all the emotions which well up through departures, both in those who leave and those who watch them leave. In the mid-1960s, Pakistani foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto quite astounded the country through informing it of a secret pact he alleged had been reached by President Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent in January 1966. As the subsequent unfolding of events was to show, Bhutto’s charges were wide of the mark and indeed there was nothing that lay concealed beneath the very public Tashkent Declaration Ayub and Shastri signed only hours before the Indian leader died in the then Soviet city. But it was a charge, call it a lie, that Bhutto began to use to good advantage, without doing the decent thing of resigning from the government. He went on long leave, which again was rather unprecedented since ministers do not normally go on extended leave. Ayub Khan tolerated him for as long as he needed to in the belief that Bhutto on his own volition would leave his government. When the minister gave no hint of doing any such thing, it remained for the president to ask him straightaway to resign or be dismissed. Bhutto was one man who could not stomach the rejection that would accrue from a sacking. He therefore resigned, a trifle reluctantly. There were many who thought he had committed a heroic act, without of course knowing of the reality. It was this popular sentiment in his favour that Bhutto built on, went on to found the Pakistan People’s Party, led his party to a position as the second largest at the national assembly through the general elections of 1970 and then proceeded swiftly to create the conditions that would lead to the dismemberment of Pakistan in its eastern wing.
   In the United States, there have been some rather instructive instances of political departures in recent times. There is the story of Robert McNamara, one of the so-called best and brightest John Kennedy picked to be part of his administration in 1961. But what started out as Camelot, the myth that would surround the JFK presidency, would actually get embroiled in crises that would take years to resolve. By far the most gaping wound in the American body politic would be caused by the escalating conflict in Vietnam, policy over which was largely shaped around the thoughts of the secretary of defence, in this case McNamara. It was McNamara’s belief that the Vietcong would be defeated by steadily greater infusions of military strength in South Vietnam which led to President Johnson’s hardline stance on the situation. But by 1967, McNamara began to have his own doubts about the war he had helped to ignite, or expand. He thought of leaving government, one of those rare instances of a soldier preparing to walk away because the war was not going according to plan. In the early part of 1968, a time when Lyndon Johnson himself had decided not to seek a second term in office, McNamara left the Pentagon. He was compensated by being given the top job at the World Bank, where he was to remain for thirteen years. In the mid-1990s, McNamara emerged with his mea culpa in the form of a book he called In Retrospect. He appeared on television shows, shed tears over the wrong policies he had shaped on Vietnam and the death and destruction that had resulted therefrom. It was a little too late for comfort, but there it was.
   Often there is a tinge of drama which comes to resignations, or attempted resignations. After the Arabs were beaten decisively by the Israelis in the June 1967 war, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser went on the networks to tell his demoralised people that he was stepping down from office. Almost at once demonstrations broke out in Cairo and other places demanding that the president rescind his decision. He was, it was made clear, needed in those dark days of depression caused by the huge losses on the battlefield. There was already the instance of Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s suicide in the aftermath of the defeat (though questions remain on exactly how a man considered close to Nasser had died so unexpectedly). In the face of the demonstrations, the Egyptian leader stayed on. But those last three years in office – he died in September 1970 – were marked by half-hearted efforts to revive confidence in the people of Egypt after what had been the worst moment in their lives. And Nasser, in those final days, just did not seem to be in possession of his old self. With the country losing the Sinai to Israel, with Syria and Jordan equally seeing their territory gobbled up by Yitzhak Rabin’s forces, there could only be ruminations, much brooding, on the cause of defeat.
   One of the more poignant instances of political departures was the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974. A man who had struggled all his life to rise from humble circumstances and occupy centre stage in politics, who had come back from defeat and humiliation to reach the White House saw the gathering shadow of Watergate claim him as its foremost victim. That last wave of the hand from the helicopter before he flew off to California bore, in every way, the signs of defeat. Nixon, if you take Watergate out of the story, was a good president and would have occupied some of the highest peaks in modern history. His opening to China, the links with the Soviet Union, the process of détente, et al, were evidence of effective leadership at work. Watergate destroyed him; and by the time he died twenty years later, Nixon had salvaged some of the reputation he had lost in 1974 through the many books he wrote and the foreign policy advice he gave to each of his successors at the White House. Ronald Reagan learned about diplomatic toughness from him and Bill Clinton was given tips on how to handle foreign policy in a post-Cold War situation. Something of the humiliation Nixon felt because of Watergate was also visited upon West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in May 1974. It was the month in which the architect of Ostpolitik resigned on charges that an East German spy worked as an advisor in his office. Brandt would have made a lot of difference in the global scheme of things had he been permitted to stay on. He chose to walk away because he knew a hobbled government could not go anywhere. Helmut Schmidt took over from him.
   The resignation in October 1974 of Tajuddin Ahmed from the Bangladesh government was the earliest public sign of discord in the political administration of the country. The disagreements which had been simmering between Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his finance minister (that was Tajuddin) were surely exacerbated by a young cabal close to the head of government. It was a battle Tajuddin Ahmed could not hope to win, despite the clear, level-headed leadership he had provided to the country in Bangladesh’s war of independence only three years earlier. He left quietly and until his tragic death in prison a year later, he kept his lips sealed.
   Resignations come in various flavours and packages. Some people resign from a sense of moral responsibility. Some plainly need to be forced out. And some who should be leaving stay on out of fear that quitting office is actually a loss of power and influence. It takes all kinds.
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk