Someone’s filed a case against Sheikh Hasina - an extortion case on some power contract from 1998. At the same time, rumors are rife that Khaleda Zia will leave the country some time with her two sons. So it seems like the SOE government is putting the Nawaz Sharif/Benazir Bhutto option into motion. One hopes that thecorollary of this will not be the Musharrafization of the SOE government.

We have no way of knowing whether the case against Sheikh Hasina has any merit. Certainly, the fact that no noise was made about the extorition incident in the last five years makes it seem highly suspicious. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Bangladeshi legal system will know that filing a case like this is easy.

Note also the significant parallelism: Both TZ and SH are hit with extortion cases. And not also that the allegations comes not from state law enforcement but private parties. It’s word vs. word - and the only thing that matters in terms of how things turn out is not the actual merit of what’s said, but who’s listening.

Awami League will complain. And BNP will complain. But as the Bard wrote, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” They both had their chance to fix the system so that those in power would not be able to perpetrate such abuse. But they didn’t fix it - for the system was the instrument they would use to extract and extort when in power. The simple calculation - that those on the receiving end of injury today may very well be on the inflicting end tomorrow - somehow kept escaping our political leadership.

Anyone who’s seen local politics in rural Bangladesh will know that this type of  case is a common way to settle disputes. The person connected to the party in power simply brings (or threatens to bring) an extortion or attempted robbery case against his enemy. It’s word v. word - and all that matters is not the merits but the fact that the party in power is listening.  It was the fact that this kind of (ab)use of the legal system - for even the most nefarious purposes - was open to whoever captured power that gave our politics its deadly edge. It was the fact that losing power could mean having the weight of the state being thrown against oneself that made politics a game of life and death for our citizens. The political parties knew this too - and they exploited such promise and such fear in creating and solidifying their networks of support.

I hear some of you protest - no, our party did not do this. Oh no! Both parties did do this in the last 15 years - and only the ignorant or the wilfully blind will claim otherwise. And the situation was only spiralling downwards in the vicious cycle of revenge and recrimination. I personally know of dozens of people in rural Bangladesh, whose simple, petty disputes over ponds or property boundaries were transformed into grand dramas of struggle and terror in this system. Oh such stories I could tell you!

Some will claim that it is only just that Sheikh Hasina and Tarique Zia will face the travails of our common citizens in the last 15 years. Some will claim that no matter what the merits are of their particular cases, they deserve to suffer what  common citizens have. No, justice is in truth, and the cause of truth is not aided by falseness. If the cases against Sheikh Hasina and Tarique Zia are false, may they fail ignominiously. May the system that allows lies to trump truth not be perpetuated for even a moment longer.