Hurling invectives, innuendo and insults at one another has for decades been a staple with Bangladesh’s politicians. Such behavior has in the past three decades and more prevented the emergence of a national leadership, of the sort typified by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the four national leaders Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmad, M. Mansoor Ali and A.H.M. Quamruzzaman. It has effectively stymied the growth of democracy in its proper dimensions.

In the period when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party was in power between 2001 and 2006, one of its lawmakers felt absolutely no embarrassment at taking every opportunity in the Jatiyo Sangsad to make below the belt remarks about then Leader of the Opposition Sheikh Hasina. For her part, then Prime Minister Khaleda Zia went around the country informing people of the many ways in which the Awami League had bartered away the interests of the country through its dealings with neighbouring India.

A particular impediment to the growth of a healthy democratic order in Bangladesh has been the inability of many of its politicians to comprehend the consequences of the remarks they have made from time to time. It did not occur to them that a day might come when they just might have to eat their words. The instance of Shah Moazzam Hossain says it all. Once part of the Chhatra League and then the Awami League before linking up with Khondokar Moshtaque in our post-1975 medieval darkness, Moazzam eventually became a valued partner in General H.M. Ershad’s military dispensation. He rose to being deputy prime minister and toured the country hurling obscenities at Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. At one point, he titillated his audience — and this was a time when the two leaders were engaged in a mighty struggle to push Ershad from power — through telling them that two women in intimacy could not produce anything. He felt little shame in indulging in such scandalous acts.

And here now is the irony. Some years later, after Ershad had fallen, Shah Moazzam Hossain made his way to the office of the BNP, presented Begum Khaleda Zia with a bouquet and joined the party. No one in the BNP felt any need to turn him away. After all, they needed anyone and everyone who keep the Awami League from spoiling their broth. Political insult, you see, had given way to political expediency. Over the years, political insults have taken newer forms and dimensions, with the callow Tarique Zia displaying the temerity to question Bangabandhu’s nationalistic credentials. To what extent such behavior has hurt the party he and his mother lead remains to be judged in the future.

If the BNP has been inventing its own brand of insults to wound its opponents, the Awami League has not remained far behind. The cavalier manner in which some of its more prominent figures have occasionally tried to question General Ziaur Rahman’s role during the War of Liberation has been in poor taste. There is little question that after August 1975, Zia took the country down a path of revisionist regression through his advocacy of ‘Bangladeshi nationalism’, which really was a subtle way of reviving the discredited two-nation theory of the Muslim League in the 1940s. But to suggest that Zia was an agent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence even as he waged war against Pakistan in 1971 is an insult not just to the man himself but to the entire concept of our struggle for freedom. If Zia was indeed an ISI agent, how is it that no one in the Mujibnagar government discovered that fact in 1971? If he had been a plant of the Pakistanis, how did Bangabandhu appoint him deputy chief of army staff in 1972?

In these present times, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina enlightens us on the ‘conspiracy’ Begum Khaleda Zia is engaged in, against the country, in the course of her on-going visit to London. The recent murder of two foreigners in Bangladesh, some prominent figures of the Awami League have loudly proclaimed, has been part of a BNP plan to destabilize the country. No one, if you have cared to notice, has explained the details of the ‘conspiracy’. And no one among the ruling circles seems to have noticed that such wholesale accusations of bad dealings against a political party, indeed against anyone, without credible explanations to support such accusations, only leads to cynicism among citizens, perhaps even to an erosion of popular support for those making such incendiary statements.

Insults hurled across the political spectrum have not had anything remotely of the artistic about them. In countries away from Bangladesh, they have generally exposed the parochial and sometimes the paranoid among political leaders. In Maoist China, a classic way of humiliating politicians who did not quite see eye to eye with the supreme leadership was to describe them as capitalist roaders. It was an insult which Deng Xiao-ping repeatedly went through, for he had earlier had the audacity to suggest that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. If you look back at China as it was between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, the Cultural Revolution was an elaborate arrangement aimed at humiliating intellectuals and all other citizens who dared to question Mao. Even the suave and sophisticated Zhou En-lai was careful to maintain his silence on the excesses committed by the Red Guards.

In India, the irascible Morarji Desai was upset that he had been upstaged by the young Indira Gandhi in the race to succeed Lal Bahadur Shastri as India’s prime minister in 1966. He was quick to hurl the insulting at the new leader. She was, in his eyes, a ‘chhokri’, a mere slip of a girl, the underlying meaning being that she was incapable of administering the country. Subsequently, he became deputy prime minister and finance minister under this very ‘chhokri’. At one point, the finance portfolio was taken away from him. He did not forget the insult and in his brief stint as prime minister following the election of 1977, his preoccupation appeared to be to insult the fallen Indira Gandhi in every way he could.

Injecting insult into Pakistan’s politics, even before the country came into being in 1947, has prevented the intellectual growth of the state. In pre-partition India, when a Congress delegation went to a meeting with Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League leadership, Pakistan’s future founder shook hands with everyone but pointedly refused to take the hand proffered by the Congress’ scholar politician Moulana Abul Kalam Azad. In the 1950s, an arrogant Iskandar Mirza threatened to shoot Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani ‘like a dog’. In the run-up to the 1965 presidential election in which he was pitted against Fatima Jinnah, Field Marshal Ayub Khan publicly made a disparaging remark about General Azam Khan, once his partner in the October 1958 coup but at that point aligned with Ms. Jinnah’s campaign. He called him a man whose head was filled with ‘bhusa’ (hay). In the course of the election campaign in 1970, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, went around hurling expletives, for no reason at all, at Indian leader Indira Gandhi. For him, she was a ‘mai’, a housemaid or lowly woman. Ironically, it was to this ‘mai’ he went in July 1972 for what would become known as the Simla Agreement following Pakistan’s military defeat in Bangladesh eight months earlier.

The venerable Moulana Bhashani too was prone to insulting reputed politicians in public. He once let his audience at a public rally at Paltan Maidan know that the country was in the throes of a food crisis — and this was in 1974 — because a Hindu was in charge of the ministry of food. The reference was to the eminently respectable and veteran Awami League politician Phani Bhushan Majumdar. The Moulana, at that particular stage in national history, was consistently critical of Bangabandhu and reminded people at every opportunity that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had merely been one of the secretaries who had worked under him when he was president of the Awami League.

Attempts at political humiliation can only prove counter-productive, as Pakistan’s General Yahya Khan was to discover. His characterization of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the man who should have been Pakistan’s prime minister, as a traitor who would not go unpunished eventually led to the collapse of his country in Mujib’s Bengal. His reference to Indira Gandhi as ‘that woman’ only revealed his shallowness of judgment. In an interview with an American journal in 1976, Prime Minister Bhutto contemptuously referred to his rightwing opponents in Pakistan as ‘the beards’. In the end, it was the beards who celebrated his fall in July 1977. Bhutto’s nemesis, General Ziaul Haq, was not averse to terming his benefactor (Bhutto had promoted Zia to army chief over six other generals in his mistaken belief that the latter would be loyal to him) as a man who had to die. ‘I shall see that bastard hanged’, fulminated Zia while Bhutto was undergoing trial on charges of murder. Zia did hang him in April 1979.

Winston Churchill was one man whose humiliation of others came misleadingly wrapped in wit and humour. He had this to say of Clement Attlee: ‘An empty cab drew up outside 10 Downing Street and out of it stepped Clement Attlee.’ In 1950s’ America, Senator Joseph McCarthy engaged in a long, vicious campaign to hunt down communists and suspected communists in the government, a process that was to destroy lives and careers on the basis of his lies. Richard Nixon’s political career began through humiliating his rivals, notably Helen Gahagan Douglas, in public. As the Watergate tapes and documents were to reveal, the terms he used against people he did not like, people he thought were enemies of the state, were ‘bastards’, ‘bloody bastards’ and ‘sons of bitches’. He once called Indira Gandhi a bitch.

There are scores of other instances that demonstrate the propensity on the part of political individuals to undermine other political individuals through a resort to invective, to denunciation for reasons that are not there or are not strong enough to warrant such abuse.

Sometimes there are those wittily suggestive ways in which people can politely insult men holding high office. At the height of the Anglo-American led war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Americans staged a protest rally in Washington. A young woman carried a placard that was as telling as it was humorous in the message it meant to convey: ‘The only Bush I know is my own’.