Friends assess the incumbent

Friends of the incumbent Prime Minister have not given up on her 'good sense', despite all evidence that it must be seriously 'endangered' - if one might say so. Giving an assessment of her first two years as head of the Mohajot government, one seeded leftist, Mujahidul Islam Salim, talked to the daily Jugantor, choosing to overlook the latest evidence of the PM's better judgement slipping, that is, The Project to Do In Dr Yunus and his Grameen Bank! Not known to be an admirer of Bangladesh's only Nobel laureate, MIS concentrates instead on other screaming failures. In the manner of cautioning a good friend. The government is not working at all, says, MIS, leader of the Communist Party of Bangladesh. The bureaucrats are beyond control; ministers are functioning 'free-style and shooting their mouths without any consistency or coordination among themselves', says he. We are told the PM takes all important decisions - is that at all healthy or possible? The trial of war criminals, execution of the verdict against Bangabandhu's killers, abnormal price hike of essentials, increasing unemployment - all came up in a candid interview published on March 4, 2011. The PM cannot run the country alone, nor can she hope to achieve much with cabinet colleagues who are not up to the task. Instead of wasting time, the PM ought to drop the incompetent ministers and reshuffle her cabinet if she means to meet her election pledges. She must, most importantly, rein in delinquent ministers, MPs, bureaucrats and party cadres or rue the consequences, cautions the communist leader. Interestingly, the good man considers the ouster of the Jamaat-BNP coalition a noteworthy 'achievement' of the Awami League-led Jot, oblivious of the fact that political parties in Bangladesh serve as alternative teams of more or less the same puppeteers! However, he credits the Hasina-government with a 'little' progress in the education and agriculture sectors, besides which it has nothing to write home about! Though the Awami League has deplorably moved right, away from the Bangabandhu's 'socialist' dreams. He goes on to add of course that both the Jot and the Dal are guilty of the same looting and plundering mindset and are in fact fierce competitors. Groups and individuals claiming the same party affiliations are now not above even murderous violence when trying to secure a share of the loot from all kinds of 'tenderbaji', 'chandabaji' and diverse methods of rent-seeking and sources of un-earned income. Foreign and home-grown exploiters are very pleased with this state of affairs, says MIS! Indeed, this leaves the parties to their own devices, politiking and functioning more as agents of business interests rather than serving the people sustainably. This brings to mind the words of a long-departed dear friend who used to try to convince this skeptical scribe, sometime in the 1980s, that 'campus violence and politics' have been planned by our 'enemies' to destroy our educational institutions, turning them into dispensers of low-quality degrees, and our youth into unthinking, exploitable morons! A nation of agents and servants! Yours truly used to consider him paranoid then. Not anymore. Hasn't the quality of both politics and education been sinking deplorably? The former has increasingly been taking on tribal characteristics and, who knows, it might even be possible to stoke this pathological divisiveness into a Hutu-Tutsi-like 'kuchu-kata' conflict! May Almighty Allah deliver us from such nightmares.