Falling back in love with politics

We have always held that not everything should be political nor each issue should be politicised. The decisive version working at the back of this notion is to have consensus on major national or provincial issues which is something missing out from our political history. But the reality in this case is far flung than traversed mythically. Being political centrally means being able to question the choices and agree on selections. We have come to the maturity level where we should by now absolve ourselves of the quake utopia that politics is the root cause of all evils.

In keeping things away from politics, we engineered a system of extreme discrimination. Few amongst the millions got the hold to steer the destiny of the people. This secretive management of national issues was never the need of time but was rather the wish of few amongst us. The anti-populism drive took over the all-inclusiveness from the nature of our state apparatus. The Fall of Dhaka further intensified this phobia that once national issues are handled through the dissenting trends of politics, the results are havoc irked without peeping into the sad reality of sealed intellect and apolitical scenarios leading up to the sad separation.

‘We did not have to be political’ became the hashtag of our state management. The rise and fall of each democratic political party strongly followed this version with each giving no space to dissent in each of their respective tenures until even now. For issues to get political, there could not be find a phase in our history. It has always been the say from the party chief or a hawk as the cases had been. We therefore got stuck in time and the 75 years we think we travelled has been just a back and forth march.

Blanket polarisation in defining, strategising and resolving major national issues with inertia of apoliticism turned us skeptic of believing our own citizenry with entrusting them a share in decision making processes. Our approach towards debating the national issues has thus been from a certain pivot of viewpoint which narrowed our version of exactly approaching the problem let alone resolving it. Again, we considered it better not to politicise the national issues thereby meaning to shut down the critical tools of questioning and pondering. Disabled with that, we always ended up with making selective decisions and so we always hatched selective results and therefore selective good for selective people of the holistic society.

The mental faculty is one such gift from providence which when is not utilised, rusts and is consumed by the heavy sands of times. Once this multiplier comes to act, there is no turning back and no pausing and we flow to the sway of circumstances where we are governed by the physical laws of pull and push where we are neither the selectors of our fortune nor the controllers of our fate. Politics has been since times immemorial the innate attribute of Man and has been something that elevated him from other contemporary species. It is the gift of reason that has been the chief virtue of Man and this has been the mark of his distinction.

The episodes of blood and pain from our bygone history hold a rich chest of lessons which sadly as a nation we have yet to learn. A society where dissent is not celebrated and is put behind the bars, it dies in suffocations of ignorance and backwardness. We have to come out from the yoke of silence and allow disagreement to flourish in our society. Politics is the art which combines together conflicting ideas and when such meeting up is reached, the results are always on the positive end of the spectrum. Politics is not our enemy and is surely not the root cause of all our evils.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2020.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.