If we were to assess Hillary Rodham Clinton's
overnight visit to Bangladesh
last week, the best part of it was that she took the words right out of our
mouth. She said that the political parties should sit together. She talked
about good governance and the importance of an engaging parliament. She was
supportive of the caretaker concept, and the performance of plurality to
strengthen democracy. The world's number one diplomat spoke of nothing that we
didn't think already.
The difference is that when Hillary spoke, she
spoke with authority. She met with people who mattered, one by one at a
dizzying speed, covering in hardly 24 hours what the people of this country
failed to achieve in over 41 good years. She said within a few hours what we
have been trying to tell our leaders since 1971.
Whether it will change anything remains to be
seen. While the country's airspace still smelled of the burning fuel of the jet
that carried Hillary to India,
the opposition leader roared with yet another three-day ultimatum for the
government, either to return Ilyas Ali or face tougher political movements. We
don't want our politicians to be subservient to the insidious wiles of foreign
influence. But such a fast resumption is perhaps a worrisome indication that
Hillary Clinton may have wasted her breath on our behalf.
Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa
professes that eroticism has its own moral justification, because it says that
"pleasure is enough for me." He claims it to be a statement of the
individual's sovereignty. Curiously, it's Llosa's definition that sticks every
time we talk about sovereignty in this country.
It's up to each and every one of us to decide
how much pleasure is enough. Is it enough to win an election or to usurp it?
How many times is enough for anybody to win elections? How much money is enough
for anybody? Is it enough to defeat an adversary or to finish him? How many
times does one political party have to return to the power of this country?
It's an open secret that this country is
divided into distinct territories of sovereign individual or group interests,
and each of those interests miserably falls short of the sovereign national
interest. Hillary tried to connect them all, her intention being nothing less
than honest. She tried to use her influence to unite a divided nation. In that
respect, she proved to be one of us, more so than our own leaders, who, blinded
by parochial interests, have lost sight of their own people.
Many of our politicians and civil society
leaders are unhappy because a foreign leader has pontificated on the virtues of
democracy. If you carefully think, what Hillary did was a difficult task. She
must have carefully crafted her words, and polished them over many times so
that she didn't hurt any feelings in the host country. The second best thing
about her visit was how she told our leaders that they needed to grow up.
And this Hillary said in so many words. Those
who look for other motives behind her visit may gladly do so. But she made it
amply clear that the purpose of her visit was none other than asking our
leaders to get their acts together. She hardly mentioned terrorism. She
scarcely commented on US investment in Bangladesh. She said almost nothing
about trade and commerce. While our experts and analysts got hoarse voice from
screaming they knew why she was here, Hillary put her focus where it belonged.
She talked about democracy and the people.
So the upshot of the Hillary visit is that it
showed she and the people of this country are on the same page. She spoke on
our behalf and she hit the bull's eye. We need a national dialogue and a
national consensus. We want an end to political convulsions that are going from
bad to worse. We want this country to come out of what is alarmingly beginning
to look like a silent civil war raging in our hearts.
The history of the Oracle of Delphi has it that
while in a trance priestess Pythia spoke in ecstasy that were translated by the
priests of the temple into elegant hexameters. It is up to us how we translate
Hillary Clinton's words. But she said nothing that our leaders shouldn't have
known beforehand.
Not a pretty sight, when the incumbent prime
minister and the former prime minister of this country have to sit before
foreign visitors like students eager to learn. That itself is an embarrassment,
not to speak of the ignominy of having to listen to them lecturing on rights
and wrongs. People make a republic. Last week, it appeared that Hillary Clinton
knew and understood it much better than our leaders did.
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