There is an official explanation — according to article 49 of the Bangladesh constitution President Zillur Rahman has the absolute power to offer mercy to any convicted person. The prime minister also defended the president’s action arguing that the case against Biplob was false and politically motivated.

Before we try to make sense of this clemency decision, let’s revisit two other events of punishment and clemency that took place during the same time in two different parts of the world.

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On 18 July, few students, aged between 16 and 22, went to Aminbazar — allegedly to look for drugs. Little did they know, the local villagers were fed up with the ever growing robberies and extortions in the area. When the students were roaming around Keblarchar in the middle of the night, the villagers mistook them for robbers and soon they found themselves in the middle of an angry mob.

Within hours, six students were beaten to death by hundreds of villagers in medieval execution style.

The students sought their innocence, but their requests fell on deaf ears. Their plea for clemency, for crimes they did not commit in the first place, was denied by the merciless mob.

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The other event took place in America. After the 9/11 terror attack, a vindictive Texan man named Mark Stronman went on a shooting spree targeting people of Arab descent. Before he was arrested by the police, two of his victims died. A Bangladeshi immigrant, Rais Bhuiyan, survived with shot in the face and was left blind in his right eye. When Stronman was convicted of the attack and was sentenced to death, Bhuiyan launched an extraordinary campaign called ‘World without Hate’ to save his attacker’s life. In a desperate attempt, Bhuiyan appealed and then filed suit against the state of Texas and its governor to stop Stronman’s execution on grounds of clemency.

In the last moment telephone conversation, Stronman thanked Bhuiyan for his campaign. In his final moments, Stronman said, “hate is going on in this world and it has to stop.”

On 20 July, Stronman was executed by the state of Texas. Bhuiyan’s plea for clemency was denied.

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Lynching by mob is nothing new in this part of the world. Every month some criminals or innocent suspects are getting beaten to death by angry mobs in one district or the other. Other than simply saying that we are too angry a nation, one possible reason for such behaviour would be the lack of justice in our society. When rise in criminal activities is not matched with exemplary punishments, people tend to take the law into own hands.

From that perspective, frequent clemency by the president may not be a good thing for us.

But what if the president is just being kind? When we applaud Rais Bhuiyan for his anti-death sentence campaign, can we really criticise the president for sparing one’s life? Well, the debate could be very difficult if it was for and against death penalty. After all, how many of us would really support death penalty if the killer is our brother? Or, how many will really oppose death penalty if the victim is our father? Well, don’t answer that since this is not such a debate. At least the president has not taken a public stance against death penalty by granting clemency for the killer of his wife. Our president is not Rais Bhuiyan.

Besides, for such a stance to be materialised, the nation will have to abolish death penalty altogether. But that’s another debate. Here, it seems that the president picked and chose the clemency cases. Constitutionally, however, the president can do that. But we can also expect better judgement from him. When only members of ruling political party get wholesale clemency, general people lose hope in the system.

But what if the convict is actually a victim of a biased political system, as the prime minister has argued? After all, we have seen how the legal system gets influenced by the successive political regimes. We still remember how an innocent slum dweller George Miah was forced to make confessional statement on August 21 grenade attack during the past BNP regime. Over the past decades, we have also heard several incidents of innocent victims serving prison times. It is in this setting that the ruling party has argued that both Gama and Nurul Islam murder cases were pursued hurriedly in Speedy Trial Tribunals and the convicts were wrongly accused.

For argument’s sake, let’s ponder on this position and explore the Gama killing case. When the nephew of former BNP deputy minister Ruhul Quddus Talukdar Dulu was murdered, the political cadres of the then ruling party BNP wreak havoc in the area for months. The Speedy Trial Tribunal of Dhaka sentenced 21 persons to death for the killing, of which 13 members were from a single family. Since AL came to power in 2009, they had a long time to find out the real killers and expose the perpetrators of the kangaroo court. But they didn’t.

If the biased political system is to blame for the verdict, then why didn’t the current government let the law take its own course during its own tenure? When the case was pending before the High Court, why didn’t the government allow the issue to be settled in the court of law? Why the president had to order clemency to save them? Does this mean that the court is unreliable under the current regime as well?

When the younger son of the current opposition leader was convicted in a money-laundering case, the general secretary of the ruling party, Syed Ashraful Islam, said that “the judgment proves we have to suffer dire consequences if we fail to make our children good human beings”. But the way the presidential clemency is being exercised, people may think that such dire consequence is true only for the opposition, not for the children of ruling political leaders.

I beg your pardon Mr President, but only something wicked this way comes.

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Syeed Ahamed is a public policy analyst and a member of Drishtipat Writers’ Collective.

A tearful Khaleda Zia at the press conference after her ‘eviction’ from her cantonment residence

On 13 November 2010, the opposition leader Khaleda Zia accused the government of ‘forcefully and disgracefully evicting her’ from her cantonment residence. Ironically the same day, some Awami League leaders thanked her for ‘upholding the rule of law’ by vacating the house ‘willingly’.

In the press briefing, the lamenting opposition leader said, “I feel harassed, humiliated and ashamed of the way I was thrown out of my home”. But the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) of the armed forces dismissed her claim as ‘false and fabricated’. They even accused the opposition leader of hurling abuses at army personnel. The accusations, counter-accusations went on and some pro-BNP ex-military officials criticised the ISPR for acting political.

In October, a train ran over and killed a number of participants attending a BNP rally that spilled onto the nearby railway tracks. The leader of the opposition said that the incident was a deliberate attempt by the government to foil her rally. The prime minister refuted by accusing the opposition for deliberately resorting to ‘politics of corpse’. Both accusations were made even before any investigation was carried out.

In September, some senior government officials of Pabna district were maliciously assaulted. In a press conference, the weeping officials accused the supporters of the local AL lawmaker for the attack. But without any proper investigation, the state minister for home claimed that ‘the militants and anti-liberation forces backed the attack and they did not belong to the Awami League’.

When political leaders or institutions offer conflicting versions of the fact, it only means that at least one side is lying.

To quote Thomas Jefferson — “difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth”. But our political system doesn’t enquire the truth. It appoints committees that never publish any report, or it runs investigations that offer hilarious findings. Think of the fairytales they came up with regard to 21 August grenade attack, existence of ‘media created’ Bangla Bhai, killing of SAMS Kibria and Ahsanullah Master, or before that — bomb attacks at Ramna or Udichi concert.

The big lie

Big lie, as the name suggests, is a lying technique that uses a ‘big enough’ lie that is hard to check, and thus disbelieve. Adolf Hitler may not have invented the technique, but he described it very aptly in the Mein Kampf. On general citizens’ tendency to believe, he wrote—

“in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

In our everyday political discourse we face these big lies where either the lie itself is big enough, or the person or institution lying is big enough to confuse us. When the leader of the opposition or the head of the government speaks, we tend to believe them. It’s hard for us to realise that a person of such authority, integrity and position can actually lie to the people.

It’s for the same reason, when the government makes disrespectful claims about the opposition leader’s residence; or when the opposition leader claims her birthday to be celebrated on 15^th August — we get divided and keep faith in the contradictory claims according to our political preferences, believing that the other side must be lying.

Fool me twice

The big-lie hypothesis fails to understand that not everyone gets fooled by the same lie or liar over and over.  People do learn from their mistakes. As the old saying goes — ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’. If we are fooled again and again by the same lie, then shame on us.

But what happens when the lie gets exposed or people stop getting fooled? Hitler says, even when the facts are exposed, ‘they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation’.

But there is more to it.

When a national institution such as the government machinery or a political party lies, it puts its entire strength to protect that very lie in order to protect its credibility. They cannot set an example by saying that the head of the institution lied. If they do so, people will cease to have faith in them. So protecting the initial lie becomes ever more important. It creates a vicious cycle where series of lies are then implanted to protect the first lie. Anyone daring to come up with the truth then becomes the target of the institution and is targeted mercilessly.

If security agencies or armed forces get involved in these vicious cycles, they can ruthlessly be used to gag the truth and to protect the lie. Lest we forget how the investigators tried to hide their incompetence or politically motivated wrongdoings in the ruthless George Miah case.

Liar liar

Every time our leaders lie, they remind me of the movie ‘Liar Liar’ about Fletcher Reed, the liar lawyer. In his professional life, he lies to win court cases. In personal life, he makes false promises to family members. He even misses his son’s birthday party while cheating on his wife. In a desperate attempt to stop his father from lying, the son makes a wish while blowing out the candles of the birthday cake. He wishes that for one whole day, his dad couldn’t tell a lie.

The wish comes true. Fletcher can’t tell a lie no matter how hard he tries. He can’t even hold the truth, no matter how bitter the truth is. That day, Fletcher’s world turns upside down.

But life is not a movie. If it was, we could all wish that at least for a day, our leaders would only be able to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We could wish that their nose grows every time they lie, like Pinocchio or its Bangla version ‘kather manush Vondul’.

If that wish came true, what a wonderful day it would have been!

Lie u ten ant

Mnemonic method is an amusing way of learning spellings that are hard to remember. It uses witty phrase to remember spelling of a particular word. Long ago, this is how a conversation went with a wise man that helped me memorise the word ‘Lieutenant’. He said —

: Lie is like sinful ten ants. Every time you hear a lie, you should voice ‘Lie, you ten ant’.

: Why is that? I asked.

: Because, every time you get doomed for lying, an ‘army of ants’ takes the chance to terrorise you.

During the political doldrums, that line comes to me with a different meaning.

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Syeed Ahamed is an Australia-based public policy analyst by training and a member of Drishtipat Writers’ Collective (www.drishtipat.org/dpwriters). He can be contacted at ahamed.syeed@gmail.com