by Nurul Kabir
I understand by ‘freedom of spirit’ something quite definite – the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No.
   Friedrich Nietzsche
   
   While consent – the consent of the people at large that is – remains the fundamental principle of democratic governance, the governors’ respect for dissent – the dissent of even a single thinking individual – remains the political essence of democratic pluralism. The consent of the citizens to any matters of national importance, or their dissent against such matters for that matter, can only be expressed if the people have the legitimate right and scope to speak out their minds freely – without any restriction. It was not for no reason that the intellectual protagonists of classical democracy, like John Milton, put ‘the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely… above all liberties’, or Voltaire was ready to ‘defend unto death’ one’s ‘right to say’ something that he does ‘not agree with’. Understandably, a government with democratic values not only guarantees the people’s inalienable right to freely express their views in general, it also ensures safety to an individual citizen for expressing even unpopular views.
   But the people of Bangladesh, a people with which associated is a prolonged history of painstaking political struggle for democracy, have once again been denied of their fundamental democratic rights that include the right to the ‘freedom of thoughts and conscience’ and the right to the ‘freedom of expression’ – thanks to the ‘state of emergency’ apparently imposed by the head of state. The citizens are told that their fundamental rights to think freely, express their conscientious thoughts frankly, move the courts if their personal liberty is at stake, assemble publicly to voice their protests against injustices – social, economic or cultural, etcetera have been suspended for their own welfare!!!
   That the group of corrupt politicians breaching people’s trust needs to be taken care of, that the anarchic national economy needs to be freed from the grips of the plunderers, that the opportunist public administration needs to get rid of crude partisan influences, that the intellectually moribund education system/s require to be streamlined, etc is unquestionable. But quite questionable is the proposition that suppressing the fundamental rights of the millions of people is the prerequisite to the streamlining of the corruption-ridden politics, anti-people bureaucracy, anarchic economy and obscurantist education, etc. Equally questionable is the proposition that the governors of the day would eventually succeed to effectively address the problems in questions without taking into considerations the opinions of the different sections of the people who are rather the perpetual victims of the problems.
   But the rulers, particularly those who are not the product of a sound process of democratic polity, always love to believe that they can do without the consent of the people – a baseless belief that forced the nation to wage the language movement 54 years ago, the movement that eventually culminated in the war, and achievement, of the country’s national independence in 1971. The rulers of the erstwhile Pakistan refused to accept that the Bengalis needed to freely express their political, economic and cultural aspirations to the managers of the state, and that such aspirations of a populace could only be expressed properly through their mother tongue, Bangla in the present case, and, therefore, the demand for Bangla to be one of the state languages within the political framework of Pakistan was a genuine one. The failures of the Pakistani rulers to recognise the importance of the people’s voice ultimately resulted in their humiliating defeat. None of the extra-political, extra-constitutional regimes, both of pre- and post-independent eras, have ever been able to ignore or suppress for long the aspirations of the people, expressed through newspapers, magazines, novels, poetry, music, processions, public rallies, and at times, court verdicts, etc. There is no reason for the rulers of the day to experience any exception in this regard. Then why suspend all those rights and that too in the name of people’s welfare?
   The incumbents of the day, who have promised the nation to ‘put the country’s derailed polity on the right track’, presumably on a truly democratic track, would rather need to listen to people of different strata more – if they really mean business. The reason is simple: The country’s polity has been derailed, because the successive elected regimes had stopped respecting the dissenting views to accommodate the views of the self-serving sycophants. To ‘put the polity on the right track’, the incumbents would, therefore, need to allow every thinking citizen to speak out, without any restrictions, in all possible manners and forms, which essentially calls for doing away with the idea of suppressing the fundamental rights of the citizens, albeit including the freedom of expressions. The sooner the better – both for the governors and the governed.
   It is fundamentally unfair that a small coterie of rulers will enjoy unrestricted liberty to express their opinions on all issues of national interests, while the millions of citizens, whose ‘political will’ is supposed to be the guiding principle of the rulers of the modern times, will remain barred to have their say in matters of public importance. No fair objective, social, political or economic, can ever be achieved by unfair means.
   Ekushey, or the anniversary of the historic language movement, comes and goes, every time with different significance under different political circumstances. But the spirit of the Ekushey remains almost the same: The courage to say ‘no’ to anything undemocratic.