Prof. Zahurul Alam :
People are the catalysts for all changes. Understanding the logic that the history of mankind is the history of never ending struggle of man would provide us to believe that the existence of social disagreements among different segments of the people and the need to mitigate optimally those disagreements act as the only solution for living in this world peacefully. Socio-political and economic stability being the most important prerequisite and precondition for prosperity thus inevitably depends on social agreements. Some of these social agreements take place automatically by the set rules of the society (ethics, custom, culture and historical norms), while there are many that need to be resolved with proactive, judicious and intelligent involvement of the social leaders, organizations or the ruling machinery.
Having said that, we must also believe that solutions to the problems or disagreements lie in the ability of a party to understand the needs and aspirations of the opposing force(s) or opponent(s), and the intention of that party to address optimally their needs, while proceeding with its own agenda, may be in a changed or modified manner. The bottom line in conflict resolution or mitigating social or any other disagreement or confrontation should be the intention and ability to uphold the fundamental principles of people’s benefit, if that concerns society, nation, religion or broader segments of the population. In resolving political contradictions the question of people’s aspirations, achievements and prosperity must account for the fundaments of conflict resolution, disagreement mitigation or confrontation elimination process. This implies that the parties in question should understand correctly the achievements and aspirations of the people. Any disagreement in defining these fundamental matters will never allow confronting forces come to any agreement. Such situation warrants for the liquidation of one of the two confronting forces.
Assigning above hypothesis into Bangladesh’s political quandary let us try to comprehend how far the never ending political confrontation can be mitigated, resolved or can those at all be attained within the existing framework! Blending the current political impasse by personalizing in unacceptable manners by many, such as the ‘quarrel between two ladies’ is an ordinary mistake or even a senselessness. The main contradiction lies in the differences on belief about the fundament of the state and the constitution. That is precisely the reason of complete exclusion of one party by the other in all matters.
Since the beginning of the history of mankind all socio-political and economic changes always took place with people’s active participation to materialize those changes and in accordance with the will of the people. The primitive society changed into a different more advanced society when people created new technologies and based on those advanced socio-economic and political relationships. However, in most cases those changes transpired by the general mass went at the end of the day against the interest of the majority of the people as the fruits were stolen by the more cunning and economically stronger minority. That is why the history of mankind continued to remain as the never-ending exercise of man’s struggle for establishing, recapturing and retaining his rights. Against this simple theory of social development it is an imperative to agree that any aggression against the people’s interest would ultimately not be supported by the mass. The political programs should not provide people any feeling that their interests will be endangered due to that. The people of this country made supreme sacrifices when that concerned national interest and this nation will again and again do that if situation arises. People want to have a peaceful and prosperous future for themselves and for their children. Surely the mass will support those forces which will sustainably demonstrate in words and in works that they are going to be the ones to fulfill people’s aspirations.
This role of the people in no way undermines the role of the leadership. Leaders lead the people according to people’s will – at the people’s interest, for materializing people’s dreams. People’s leaders remain sincere to the cause of the people throughout the whole struggle. Leaders guide people in the right direction. A leader is not an isolated person. He belongs to a political ideology which is at par with the people’s aspirations. At different stages of struggle a leader makes corrections, modifications and alterations of the strategy and tactics of the struggle for adapting to the newly emerged situations. A successful leader brings peace and prosperity for the people at the end of day, if he is given that much of time by the people, or if he is not assassinated by the people’s enemies. History witnessed many such assassinations of leaders. Bangladesh has witnessed assassination of the Father of the Nation and other leaders almost immediately after the liberation. These assassinations are demonstrative of the fact that the enemies of the people are not eliminated unless they are identified and eliminated in time.
A general rule of any war is intrusion of enemy agents in the people’s army who work to destabilize the movement or destroy that. With that purpose they try to capture top positions of the movement or leadership. These agents acquire trust and confidence of the leadership in various manners and fulfill their evil design once time comes. So, the duty of the leadership at any point of the struggle or after that is to identify those agents and eliminate them at the cause of the people. The eliminations do not always imply physical destruction. Delays or ignoring deliberate destructive attempts of such agents have brought painful results for the people’s movements and of course of the leadership. Bangladesh is a good example of such dilemma as well.
A leader is never an isolated person. His skill builds a nucleus around him which stands as the core leadership of an organization that stays at the leadership of the people. So, there is always an organization behind a leader that upholds the philosophy of the nucleus in accordance with the will of the people. That organization plays the role of vanguard during the people’s struggle. Thus, there is no people’s struggle that succeeded without the leadership of an organized political force. The distorters of the history trying to defame leaders always undermine the role of the leadership or abolish leadership’s role in the struggle. Bangladesh is an example of this as well. There are many in our politics who perceptively deny the political leadership of our liberation war. This fundamental disagreement has, in fact divided this nation.
At the backdrop of reinvigorated attempts of Bangladesh’s opposition parties’ movement against the government, we wish to underline that the opposition parties, those who are trying to build any movement should be intelligent enough to agree to the real principles of the liberation war. There are continuous attempts of distorting the meaning of these principles and all confrontations emerge from such attempts. A sovereign state’s democratic politics should always not only honor but protect the principles of emergence and existence of the state.
For the politicians and all those who serve the people, a very important exercise would be to conduct frequent impartial surveys among the people to learn about how the people want to live, what their aspirations are and what difficulties they experience when they want to live well. Those surveys need to be conducted impartially because guided questions to arrive at a certain conclusion would not reflect the real situation at the grassroots level. And thus it would certainly become even more devastating for strategy formulation by the High Commands, because partially correct information misguides the policies more than ‘no information’.
(Prof. Dr. Zahurul Alam, President, Governance and Rights Centre (GRC), E-mail: [email protected])
