Political reforms needed

The photograph of our Nobel laureate, Prof Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank and his defending lawyer Dr. Kamal Hossain together coming out of the High Court, which was published in almost all the newspapers in our country on Friday last, caught my attention and struck me to pause for sometime. These two easily rank as among the top luminaries of Bangladesh. Prof. Yunus has made our country so proud. It was he who introduced and implemented the concept of microcredit by providing collateral free loans to poor farmers of our country, and more importantly to working rural women, making them empowered with badly needed funds to start something viable on their own. This concept has been and continues to be replicated with equal success in different countries of the world, including many developed countries. On the other hand, Dr. Hossain is the man who was one of the framers of the Constitution of Bangladesh right after its birth in 1971 and is known and respected internationally as a legal expert. But both stand degraded in their own country for the one and only reason that they were entangled with and chose to enter into politics--Prof. Yunus once unsuccessfully tried and later withdrew and thereby may have annoyed the present ruling party. While Dr. Hossain was pushed out of the same party and, not understandably, still keeps dabbling into politics. I do not want to go into the details of these that are very well known to all of us. The present trend of politics is vastly different from its trend that existed in the Indo Pak subcontinent, say, 50 years ago. Politicians then used to come from a separate genre of people educated, civilised, cultured, committed and die hard. There are innumerable examples of such personalities but they seem to have gone extinct by now. Presently, people who have even a semblance of these qualities stay away from politics as they do not wish to lose them. The need of the day now is to try to bring reforms to the existing social, political and administrative systems prevailing in the country. Over the past few decades, the biggest hit has been taken by our political system which has, by now, seeped through down to all strata of our society. Politics is now considered as an investment, demanding appropriate returns, over the tenure of the elected members of parliament. It seems there is no use trying to reform our political system any more which has gone out of bounds. Our present generation has to be reformed and taught what lies ahead so that it can finally take the reins of our country in their hands. There are many people who have crossed their 70s and are lamenting the state of affairs. After their exit, I wonder who will be left to guide our nation. A concerned citizen Dhaka.