Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

DESPITE the growing spectre of internecine violence within the Bangladesh Chhatra League that is routinely claiming lives and suspending academic activities at educational institutions across the country, the Awami League leadership has once again demonstrated diffidence rather than a strong political will to rein in its student factions. At an emergency presidium meeting of the party on Saturday, prime minister Sheikh Hasina chose to step down as the organisational leader of the Chhatra League rather than take disciplinary action against activists who are the root of the violence, as was expected of a leader of her stature. The party spokesperson and LGRD and cooperatives minister Syed Ashraful Islam hinted at the abdication of responsibility by the AL leadership in reining in its student factions when he told the press that law enforcers will be expected to crack down on campus violence in the coming weeks, as reported in Sunday’s New Age.
   At the root of this violence is the effort to establish territorial supremacy, which earns large amounts of money in illegal toll and extortion, and lucrative university supply contracts tendered by the government, illegally secured by student factions of the ruling party of the day. The AL leadership cannot be exonerated of the violence because it has on the one hand failed to stop the student activists from engaging in such malpractices and on the other given indulgence to student activists lobbying for government contracts, etc.
   Side by side, university authorities are also morally responsible for allowing these practices to carry on without hardly any disciplinary actions. It is not without the explicit or implicit approval of the university authorities that student leaders control the building and supply contracts of the public universities, intimidating rival suppliers and preventing them from bidding for contracts. These practices are not only ruining the academic environment of our public higher education institutions but have also ruined the image of student politics in the country, which is endowed with a rich heritage of ideological struggles.
   We have watched with growing concern over the past three months as BCL activists first spread a reign of terror against activists of rival political parties in the public universities and are now locked in intra-party battles, while the party leadership talks tough against such incidents and the perpetrators. We do not believe the prime minister’s resignation from the Chhatra League has been systematic – as the party constitution endows her with that post ex officio – and we further don’t believe it will have a meaningful impact. The impact of disciplinary action within the party might have better succeeded in checking the violence. The onus, however, will now lie with the police and other law enforcers who can no longer take shelter in the argument that the party leadership is shielding errant student leaders from their grasp. In the coming weeks, either the law enforcers will deliver results, or should speak up and expose those in the ruling party whose protection these violent sections of the Chhatra League are operating under.
   Overall, atrocities by student activists of the ruling party have become too big a problem for any piecemeal solutions. What is required is a comprehensive and coordinated approach, involving the government, the ruling party leadership, the university administration and the law enforcement agencies.

Govt needs to be on EC’s side in
upazila polls irregularities probe

THE electoral process in a democratic dispensation is not merely limited to the holding of elections in a seemingly free and fair environment that gives it an impression of credibility. The electoral process also includes certain formalities and reviews before and after the day of elections, which are extremely important as well. Holding of peaceful, credible elections is as important as reviewing the elections if only to improve them in future. This review, or rather investigation in the current context, is all the more important when there are numerous complaints and allegations with regard to the holding of elections.
   The investigations into alleged irregularities, almost all of them by ruling party candidates, in the upazila elections of January 22 have been thwarted due to aggressive intervention of the winning candidates backed by the Awami League, as reported in Sunday’s New Age. These candidates and their cadres have reportedly refused to cooperate with the Election Commission or the judicial inquiry committees, obstructed investigation and even threatened witnesses to prevent them from giving depositions. According to reports, one person was even killed in such violence one day before a scheduled deposition.
   In this regard the Election Commission must be lauded for publicly stating its resolve to fulfil its responsibilities of completing the investigations. However, the commission chose to conduct investigations into only a handful of complaints it received and discarded a number of other similar alleged instances of irregularities that should also warrant full inquiries. But even in the handful of cases that it deemed worthy of further investigation, the ruling party cadres are proving to be the main obstacle to proper investigation. It is also regrettable that the law enforcement agencies are evidently not playing their desired role.
   In this context, the government’s role in ensuring that the Election Commission, a constitutional body, is able to conduct and conclude full and transparent investigations into the alleged irregularities becomes imperative. The statement of one election commissioner and one contestant makes it evident that the Election Commission is having to go it alone as far as the inquiries are concerned without any cooperation from the government. It cannot be expected that a constitutional body should have to weather through such difficulty due to government inaction, which amounts to non cooperation in this instance.
   On one hand, the Awami League-led alliance government must instruct its party machinery to remain disciplined and refrain from obstructing the Election Commission’s activities and on the other there must be clear and unambiguous instructions to the law enforcement agencies for them to cooperate and provide full assistance to the commission officials and judicial magistrates engaged in investigating the alleged election irregularities. If the government is at all serious about bringing qualitative change to the nature of politics in our country, which was its principal electoral pledge, it should at least ensure that elections held during its tenure are free, fair and credible and every incidence of alleged irregularity that would prevent any election from being deemed as such are properly investigated.

IT IS customary to revaluate a poet or writer on the occasion of centenary or bicentenary of her or his birth or death. Nikolai Gogol whose 200th anniversary fell last week is in no need of a revival as he was never forgotten or ignored nor did he command the kind of frenzied popular admiration which usually proves short-lived. His fame was steady and has endured for 150 years both in Russian and world literature.
   Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on the 31st of March (new calendar) in 1809 in a Cossack village in Ukraine. The family was not wealthy but belonged to the landed-gentry class. His father Vasily Gogol-Yanovsky was an educated person with literary aspirations; his mother was an illiterate lady, terribly superstitious and believing in charms and incantations. The family spoke both Ukrainian and Russian. Gogol chose Russian for his literary pursuits. Cossack life is reflected in his early writings. In 1820 Gogol went to a school of higher art in Nizhyn, the ancient Ukrainian city and education centre. A university there was later named after Gogol. There he began writing.
   In 1828 on leaving school he migrated to Petersburg. While he was in Petersburg and doing minor government jobs he took time off to write on men and matters pertaining to Cossack life. At this time he published two collections of short stories which included two of his masterpieces, namely ‘Tarus Bulboa’, a moving tale of Cossack past, and ‘Diary of a Mad Man’. The latter is written in the form of a diary of a frustrated and humiliated government office clerk who experiences fits of hallucination and eventually subsides into insanity.
   In Petersburg a turning point in his career came when he was introduced to Alexander Pushkin in 1931. He began to write in Pushkin’s journal Savremennik. Pushkin admired and encouraged him and was something like a mentor to him. He owes to Pushkin the themes of his two major works, The Inspector General and Dead Souls.
   The remarkable fact about Gogol is that his output during none-too-long a life of 43 years is slender, made more slender by self-destruction – he destroyed some of his valuable manuscripts. It is not uncommon in Russian or in any literature of the world to achieve a lasting fame on the strength of a few hundred pages of writing. Take the case of another Russian short story writer of classic eminence, Ivan Bunin who won the Nobel Prize (1933). But what did Bunin write? One unforgettable short story, but little else besides. ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ is universally acclaimed as among the all-time greats of its genre. Bunin did write more but one can hardly cite any other title offhand. Gogol will be remembered for his five-act comedy The Inspector General, and a novel Dead Souls, apart from a few short stories of which ‘The Overcoat’ is most widely applauded.
   Dead Souls is regarded as one of the greatest in world literature. It is a picaresque novel written in the background of serfdom which prevailed in Russia till 1861. The word ‘souls’ is used to mean serfs. Land owners had the privilege of owning slaves and treated them as chattels. The hero Chichikov, a sacked civil servant, wanted to acquire a large tract of land in southern Russia. The size of the tract would be determined by the number of serfs to cultivate it. He goes round the homes of several land owners with his bizarre proposal to buy up the dead souls (serfs), that is, serfs who died after the last census but are not dead on the official register and the land owners must pay tax on account of them. His travels reveal all classes of Russian society at their best and their worst. Chichikov is eventually exposed and landed in prison but finally escapes from the town and settles down in his new place as a country gentleman. The novel is full of hilarious and absurd scenes.
   The reason why fiction showed such robust growth in Russian literature is perhaps that under the absolute rule of the Czars novels, short stories and plays were the only organ of protest. And novelists kept registering their protest, of course in an indirect and diluted form. Social realism is a dominant theme of Russian literature while another school led by Ivan Turgenev was anarchism. Gogol is called the father of social realism in Russian literature but because of the satirical overtone he is compared with Jonathan Swift rather than Charles Dickens. Gogol’s characters are often cartoon-like. At times he produced absurd scenes which may have inspired the latter-day writers of absurd drama. He did not portray psychological intricacies like Dostoevsky or promote any moral philosophy like Leo Tolstoy. The Inspector General is a biting satire on the corruption and pettiness of government officials in Czarist Russia. And the people were not only oppressed by the royal ukase and the local officials; the ruling land owning class did no less to make their lives miserable. Shelley called the poets (perhaps without justification) the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Russian writers of fiction can be called unacknowledged legislators of the oppressed Russian people.
   It is difficult to contemplate that the enormously rich Russian literature that we find today has been in the making for no more than two hundred years and has largely been shaped by the creative endeavours of only a handful of poets and writers. This is true without prejudice to the great antiquity of Russian literature. From 1820 when appeared Pushkin’s first book Ruslan and Ludmila, till 1883, the year of death of Ivan Turgenev, is a period of 63 years which has been called the golden age of Russian literature. This is the period that was marked by the advent of Gogol, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, also of that overrated novelist Leo Tolstoy who reduced literature to moralist propaganda. The first twenty years of this ‘Augustan’ age was ruled by romantic literature with two romantic poets, Pushkin and Lermentov, overshadowing the literary landscape. During his last years he was suffering from some mystical self-doubt and self-torment. He struck up a close friendship with a holy man and under the influence of this holy man he engaged in some esoteric mystical cults and destroyed some unpublished manuscripts. His death was not suicide but in some way it may be called self-inflicted due to extreme self-abnegation.
   Gogol was one of the first masters of the short story when this genre was still in its infancy, before Maupassant, Chekhov and alongside Pushkin and Edgar Allan Poe. Anatole France called the short story an elixir, a quintessence and a precious ointment. He certainly did not mean any short story. Those of Gogol can be counted among the finest ones ever.