No Need for National Security Council

No need for national security council

Why the armed forces are insisting that a national security council has to be formed which will ensure peace in the country? The people at large feel that they should not go back to a situation existing before the proclamation of the state of emergency. But that does not mean that in the post-election scenario the armed forces will call the tune. No political leaders worth his salt will accept it,

writes Achintya Sen

New Age recently reported that a high-level government meeting in principle had approved a proposal for the establishment of the much talked-about national security council. The meeting asked the officials concerned to submit a draft ordinance before the council of advisers in a month............................

Democracy can ensure equality

Democracy can ensure equality only when aided by secularism

In these days, when religious intolerance and conflict is increasing, neutrality of the state in religious matters is all the more necessary. If religion of the majority is given the status of state religion it will not only be discriminatory against religious minority but within the majority religious community also it will encourage the forces of orthodoxy, priestcraft and extremism and inter-sect hostility based on misinterpretation of the scriptures, ...........................

writes Zakeria Shirazi

On the question of Legacy

On the question of legacy

It is evident that the Election Commission is far from independent and that it often operates under duress, at the dictates of some silent and powerful entity having links to the government and under its tacit support,

writes Shamsher Chowdhury

AS OF now this government stands completely isolated from the majority of the people of the country. No matter what might or might not have been the cause of high prices of essentials, particularly food grains, the people’s perception seems to be that it has been largely due to the government’s failure to take timely measures in putting a check on soaring prices....................

The defencing silence

The deafening silence of echoes from the past

NM Harun

What is certain is that the powers that be are finding the prolongation of the queer Fakhruddin government increasingly problematic. Hence all the talk about dialogues between the government and the political parties or the disclaimer about the military’s support for constitutionalism and their non-interest in takeover of power. Concerns are also expressed by sections of civil society about plausible ‘exit formulas’ of the emergency rulers. These are signs of power struggle among the rulers themselves and not of political development …One wonders what kind of solution the powers that be may come up with for the real world problem of power struggle through the application of the process of elimination of the exotic political formulas and schemes. That will determine the course of politics in the near future.................

Broken Pendulum

Broken pendulum: radicalism revisited
It is impossible to deny that in the political culture of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the democratic filter have been easily bartered and dismissed by weak political leadership, a military with historical political ambitions, a vacuum that has allowed the domination by radicalised religious political parties and a complacence of the populace and the international community not to hold leaders to standards that best serve the interests of the people,

writes Tazreena Sajjad
ON FRIDAY, January 11, the Hudson Institute hosted a discussion on Maneeza Hossain’s book Broken Pendulum: Bangladesh’s Swing to Radicalism. Hossain’s argument in its basic form is that the current government, while trying to root out corruption, is corroding democracy and creating the impetus for the rise of radical Islamism. Through the process of de-legitimising the democracy project, grounds are being established for a virulent form of political Islam that is fast spiralling out of state control and oversight......................

A Million Mutinies

Magazine Mar 31, 2008
A Million Mutinies Within No hagiography:
'He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.'

PATRICK FRENCH

Patrick French's authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (Picador India, 576 pp, Rs 595), is no hagiography. On the contrary, it is a searingly honest and insightful portrait of a flawed and tormented genius. Reproduced below are three extracts-the first from French's illuminating Introduction to the book; the second charting how Naipaul's views on India evolved and changed over 30 years; and the third from an extraordinary later chapter, in which Naipaul loses one wife and gains another, even as he discards his mistress..................

Remebering Jahanara Imam

Remembering Jahanara Imam: the distraction of ‘dialogue’
NM Harun

It is a truism that any authoritarian intervention like the present emergency rule in countries like ours which have legacies of democratic struggle will eventually be replaced by an elected government. But of immediate interest now is to observe the behaviour of the political leaders and parties: how they carry on the urgent democratic struggle of the people during this difficult emergency period

The issue is the same but the perspectives are different. The Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee (Committee for the Elimination of the Killers and Collaborators of 1971) held a mock trial of the war criminals on March 26, 1992. Sixteen years later, on March 21, the Sector Commanders’ Forum held a national convention of the freedom-fighters to press home their demand for the trial of war criminals.............................

Coutdown to Freedom

Countdown to Freedom
Forum takes you back to the days leading up to March 26, 1971

Reheman Sobhan and Hameeda Hossain

This month we commemorate March 26, 1971, Bangladesh's independence day, the day we threw off the yoke of foreign domination and emerged on the world stage as a proud and independent nation, the day we set into motion a nine-month long war that would lead, through despair and devastation, ultimately to liberation...............