The Twenty-three Percent- Part 1

 

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Being a first time voter isn’t easy, especially if you’re a class moddhbitto or above. There so many expectations. Everybody sees you and talks about you as the future of the country and how we will be at the helm of things soon. But at the same time, we’re dubbed irresponsible and uninterested. Some are actually nice enough to say that our generation (born in the 80’s) is just disenchanted. Fair enough. A lot of us, if not most, don’t see the point in queuing up and voting for people we barely know or know only from our social circles (Kamrul uncle, Ershad nana etc); people who’ll never get to know us either. Yes, it’s true, most of us don’t ardently follow politics or politicians, but the real question is, are they following us?

I missed my first ever chance to exercise “democratic” right as an adult citizen of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in January 2007. Needlessly to say, I was ecstatic, spastic and thoroughly confused. Here are some comments from people like me who were/are excited about their voting rights. Barring the “drawing-room politics” of Dhaka, my political beliefs were naïve (sometimes they still are as I still dream of a utopian realm where religion isn’t abused), often misguided, sometimes based or judged simply on the basis of hearsay (TR’s alleged billions) and in most times just a spontaneous reaction to something I had just watched on the news (a former home minister’s comments on the accidental death of a child during a shoot-out or the public humiliation of a wife by her ex-president husband). Then the riots started. Anyone who was in Dhaka from December 2006 till January 2007 must remember the sights and sounds of public slaying/incineration of men, of burnt buses and terrified people. The whispers of “martial law” and “blue helmets” and rhetoric of a new and improved “option three” didn’t help either. We watched one party run a parallel government for five years paying no heed to rampant corruption and its media-aided world-wide publicity. The other went blood-hungry and berserk on the streets of Dhaka.

 

And then, in the second week of January, the crusaders marched in. They seemed to be on the right track with their trying to rid the system of the corruption which, at that point, they had made sound like the only obstacle in our path to development. All those seemingly malignant people who had almost earned us the “failed nation” status were shoved into jail. Then, there was a lot of shuffling and reshuffling of people, of policies, of stands, of arrests and releases. At the end of it all, the allegedly “most corrupt” were released/allowed out of jail/bailed out and then also, given nomination. So to summarize, we started with a corrupt system, run by a group of corrupt people. A few good men and women decided that it was now time for these people to go and to pave the way for a group of “un-corrupt” new leaders. Clearly, the ploy backfired and then the same “corrupt crooks” got out of jail and started preparing to run for public seats again. And now, it’s for us to decide, which of the “crooks” we want to run our country for the coming five years.

Amidst all this, there are now public campaigns sponsored by (or so I hear) the same few good men and women who had thought of the original 1/11 plan to encourage people to vote for the uncorrupt candidates. As the song goes, “isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” given how it’s almost the same group of corrupt nominees that we had in 2006? This time, just the “reformists” got axed.

My constituency is Dhaka-17. My options are Ershad (pardon me for not adding the expected pre-fixes, negative or positive) or Brig General Hannan Shah. I won’t even go into the Ershad issue, but why would I want to cast my vote for Hannan Shah? Didn’t he also go to jail for corruption? Is his slate clean? Or should I just vote for him like the die-hard BNP supporters will just to stop Ershad from coming back to power?

I keep hearing how we’re not ready for “No vote”. May be. I’m not a political analyst. But I’m not going to queue up on the day after my wedding reception to elect either Hannan Shah or Ershad to power. The EC has yet to confirm the “No Vote” option. A lot of us 23% are unsure of who to vote for as we are aware that the nominees are the same old crooks. But even we had that option, what good would it serve if the partisans are still looking to elect either a BNP or AL government instead of a transparent and accountable one?

to be continued….