Exhuming the caretaker corpse

The corpse of the caretaker regime of Moeen U Ahmed and Fakhruddin Ahmed, pejoratively referred to as 1/11, is cheerfully and insistently being exhumed by Bangladesh's political classes these days.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in light of certain admissions of guilt by the editor of a newspaper in recent weeks, has been speaking of the sufferings she was put to by the caretakers between 2007 and 2008. Her son and her party loyalists have shared her old pain in fresh new light and have empathized with her.

Former prime minister Khaleda Zia, having herself been a victim of caretaker wrath, has demanded that the head of government bring the architects of 1/11 to justice. The BNP chairperson says she knows where those architects happen to be today and has dared the prime minister to take them into custody.

A couple of ministers have asked that an inquiry body be formed to probe the excesses indulged in by the caretaker regime.

All across the country, arguments are being thrown around, for and against the caretaker regime. Overall, the impression which grows is that General Moeen and former chief advisor Fakhruddin are responsible for all the miseries we as a nation happen to be going through in these times. Nothing could be more misplaced.

Memories of the dark deeds perpetrated by the caretakers are coming alive, and justifiably too. But there are other memories as well, those about which our politicians are curiously and yet predictably being selective. Or are we expected to think that amnesia, deliberate or selective or naturally induced, is running riot all across the national political spectrum?

Here is an attempt — humble, simple and truthful — to give a jog to our collective memory.

President Iajuddin Ahmed, having failed to go through the full constitutional course of a search for a chief advisor to take charge of the country upon the end of the BNP's term in office, had himself inducted in that office in October 2006. The leading figures of the outgoing political government, including Khaleda Zia, happily attended Iajuddin's swearing-in at Bangabhaban. Sheikh Hasina and her party stayed away.

The Iajuddin caretaker administration maintained close links with the powerful elder child of Begum Zia and appeared not at all uncomfortable or embarrassed as the Election Commission, led by Justice Aziz, went about enrolling the names of non-existent and dead people on its voters' list. It made all preparations to hold general elections on 22 January 2007 despite concerns, voiced by local and overseas individuals and organizations, that the elections would be without credibility and therefore gravely flawed.

Four advisors eventually resigned from the Iajuddin caretaker regime.

Slightly over two months later, on 11 January 2007, the army led by its chief of staff, General Moeen U Ahmed, stepped in, forced Iajuddin Ahmed to declare a state of emergency, vacate the office of chief advisor and have former Bangladesh Bank Governor Fakhruddin Ahmed installed as chief advisor in a new caretaker administration. This time, the swearing-in ceremony at Bangabhaban was attended by Sheikh Hasina and her political allies. Begum Zia and her party and alliance partners stayed away.

That is part of the collective memory.

And then there is more.

Sheikh Hasina went on record with her view that the arrival of the Fakhruddin-Moeen government was a result of her movement for democracy. Predictably, Khaleda Zia and her people, having seen their plans, under Iajuddin Ahmed nipped in the bud, were unhappy at the new arrangements.

On the watch of the Moeen-Fakhruddin caretaker government, law and order improved. The bureaucracy, known for its sloth and inefficiency, went into overdrive to impress citizens with its new-found vigour. Traffic on the roads was smooth; men made affluent by possession of black money quaked in their shoes; expensive cars bought by the nouveau riche were carefully stowed away.

The caretakers, in one of those admirable acts they will be remembered for, went for a restructuring of significant national institutions.

Under former army chief of staff Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury, the Anti-Corruption Commission found a new sense of purpose. Never before or later has the ACC been as vibrant as it was under the leadership of General Chowdhury. Tax dodgers and owners of ill-gotten fortunes shivered at mention of the ACC. Phone calls from it were signs of trouble for those at the receiving end.

The caretaker administration put in place a new, truly independent Election Commission with ATM Shamsul Huda, Shakhawat Hossain and Sohul Hossain in charge. Together these men dedicated to public service devised the ways and means by which a credible general election could be organized. They did the job marvelously well.

These are the brighter of the memories we have of the caretaker government.

And then come the darker phases of the regime, a period set into motion through the uncivil manner of the arrests of Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia. The former especially bore the brunt of the regime's ill-treatment, dragged as she was almost literally to court and then prison. It was an unedifying moment for the country. Politics lay prostrate in humiliation.

The darkness assumed even more calamitous proportions when politicians, at both senior and mid-ranking levels, were hauled away to prison, blind-folded and interrogated relentlessly by faceless military officers. It was a violation of everything that was decent and moral when tape-recorded 'confessions' of the detained men were mysteriously released in the public domain.

The extent of abuse, in verbal and other forms, which detained politicians and detained academics were subjected to in the gathering darkness of the nights has been carefully recorded by the victims. The politician Moudud Ahmed and the academics Anwar Hossain, Harun Or Rashid, Sayeedur Rahman Khan will not forget, nor will the country, of what was done to them by the caretakers.

Nor will students, teachers and the young easily cast aside memories of the humiliation such august institutions as Dhaka University were subjected to in August 2007.

The state of emergency imposed on the country in January 2007 clamped a lid on political activities. And yet the caretaker regime saw little that was wrong, legally as also morally, in overseeing the formation of new political parties, the goal obviously being a supplanting of established political parties through patronizing and promoting certain pretenders to power. The Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus cheerfully formed a party and so did Firdous Ahmed Qureshi. Emergency regulations did not apply to them. They stayed brilliant in the darkness of the emergency. Their light went out with the nation's return to democracy.

Meanwhile, a clutch of journalists went overboard in cheering Yunus, in advocating a notorious 'minus two' formula that would have Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia banished from politics. Hasina was permitted to go abroad but then found roadblocks to her return home. Much pressure was exerted on Khaleda Zia, once her none too reputable son, after unacceptable horrific treatment had been meted out to him, was packed off and out of the country, to board an aircraft and fly into exile. For once, Hasina and Khaleda forged unity. The former advised the latter to stay put. Both leaders felt the need for a joint resistance to the regime.

Things were beginning to fall apart. The centre was not being able to hold. The regime had lost its way.

These, then, are the chronicles of the last caretaker regime and today an indelible part of national history. The regime operated in a curious, fast mix of light and shadow. You can properly condemn it for the hubris it brought into its exercise of power.

And yet you need to step back a little, to remind yourself of an unalterable truth: had the Moeen-Fakhruddin administration not stepped in when it did, the ramifications of an election supervised by the Iajuddin outfit would be wide and calamitous. Partisanship would have marred the political process, leaving open the possibility of violence and long-term chaos seizing the country.

In a big way, minus its transgressions, the 2007-2009 caretaker administration could have been a bridge to a new political future — transparent, accountable and modern — for the country. It is quite another thing, of course, that the politicians have, consciously or otherwise, marched energetically back into the past.