My responses to Mrs. Majid's comments appear below.
>It is unfortunate that an all-important subject like the impact of
military take-over of civilian governments has been reduced to the issue of who
is 'faulting' whom. I am not in the habit of using the word "fault" as a verb. I
thought we were engaged in a collegial discussion, and not a school-yard
scuffle. Eager "to fault" the other, these school-yard rompers look for
foul-mouthed, bloody, nose-busting victory.
I did not "fault" Rabiul Islam. My posting was not directly
addressed to him.<
Perhaps "fault" is too strong a word to characterize what Mrs. Majid did. But telling someone that he "missed" doing something is the same as telling him that he committed an error of omission. If Mrs. Majid cares to review Mr. Rabiul Islam's original post, he will find that he already said too much, not too little, to refute someone else's claim to the effect that the military rule is presumably a remedy for the culture of "cultism" created by civilian politicians. No more was needed by Mr. Rabiul Islam to make his point.
My objection was also logical. I was merely pointing out the logical fallacy of requiring every presentation of a position to be exhaustive of all supporting arguments and evidence. My objection could not and did not "reduce" it to anything. I also did not address or discuss the merits of the arguments presented by Mr. Islam. Subsequent posts in this thread show that the discussion not only did not get "reduced" but actually got expanded into other issues around the original argument.
I understand Mrs. Majid's objection to using "fault" as a verb. Mrs. Majid is perhaps a linguistic purist and objects to using nouns as verbs. As I am not so sophisticated as Mrs. Majid, I generally like this new practice introduced into the English language mostly by the media over the last couple of decades. As far as I can remember, I saw conservative columnist Mr. George Will use the word "fault" as a verb for the first time, and I liked it. For the record, I detest most of Mr. Will's views but admire his writing style.
>My aim was to engage the general reader and increase the awareness of how
seriously damaging the pattern of military rule had been to the very existence
of Bangladesh and the Martial Law's blatant violation of the idealism with which
Muktijuddho was fought.<
I did not have any problem with that aim and Mrs. Majid achieved the aim pretty well. I had a problem with her saying that Mr. Islam "missed" saying what she said.
>The Bangladesh Constitution was framed in 1972 with all the efforts by both our
own people and a group of experts on constitutional law from abroad. The Jamaati
and the Islami-pasand people keep spreading denigrating lies about it, and
people do not know how to dispute the lies.<
This comes as a shocker. The constitution of an independent and sovereign Bangladesh was written with the help of foreign experts! I hope what you say is not true. If it were true, it would be the very first violation of the idealism with which the Muktijoddha was fought. I know that Bangladesh had many fine jurists and legal experts at the time of independence, and a rich legislative and judicial history going back to the British period. I do not understand why it was necessary to enlist the help of foreign experts to write the most important governing document of an independent and sovereign nation, which already had the resources and expertise to accomplish the task.
>The quote from the 2006 Judgment on the Moon Cinema Hall writ petition at the
High Court Division gives a vivid idea how under the clout of an illegally
imposed Martial Law our precious Constitution was mangled. [I took a lot of
trouble acquiring the quote traveling by rickshaw from one end of Dhaka to
another. I knew Advocate Jahed Karim, youngest son of Dr. Ahmad Sharif, had a
bound copy of the Judgment. I sat in his Chamber and hand-copied the quote].
Therefore, my exhortation to "memorize" was more of a rallying cry meant for all
of us. It was just another way of saying -- Let us not loose sight of this
important judicial criticism of the odious Fifth Amendment, 1979, to our
Constitution.<
It was indeed a very bold and sensible judgment by a couple of courageous judges. The "rallying cry," if that is what it was, was already expressed clearly and well by the word "remember." If Mrs. Majid chooses to think about it again, she may realize that the word "memorize" goes a little further than "remember" and more often used after one has delivered a lesson or platitude. Anyway, I will take her subsequent explanation at face value and will apologize for misunderstanding what she meant to say.<
It now appears that despite all my efforts and good will, the importance of it
is totally lost upon Mr. Zaman.
> I do consider Mrs. Majid a person of good will and I am sure she wrote the post under discussion with good will. I am just offering a friendly suggestion that her choice of words may appear to be condescending and this needs to be addressed if she does not want to be misunderstood. As I said before, I am also quite impressed with her erudition from many of her previous writings.
As for the importance of preserving the constitution, I agree with Mrs. Majid and fully understand her outrage at its repeated violations. While she seems to be focussed on violations in the form of arbitrary and capricious changes to the constitution itself, I am more concerned at our failure to practice whatever we agree to write on paper. The principle of secularism, which she seems to be so passionate about, received its first blow not when it was dropped from the constitution but when the 1973 Bangladesh parliament not only failed to repeal but in fact ratified the highly discriminatory Enemy Properties Act (first enacted by the Ayub regime). This Act has been abused by rogue elements to unethically appropriate properties of Hindus. The practice of misappropriating Hindu properties also continued with impunity and continues to this day. This is not the only example of hypocritical posturing by our leaders, civilian and military alike, and there are many other examples.
We need to work a lot on this gap between pious proclamations and actual practice. Until we begin to do that, inspite of all the pious exhortations to the contrary, the constitution will continue to remain an inconsequential piece of paper, to be mangled at will.
With best wishes,
M. Harun uz Zaman
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