Is the July charter drive losing its way?

It is customary for a pilot to plot a plane's flight path long before it takes off. In fact, this is essential for the sake of ensuring safety, efficiency, and airspace coordination. Only then can it be determined if the aeroplane has veered off course, or whether something has gone wrong. Through this exercise, the pilot also knows when and how the plane is supposed to land before it takes off. This advance planning—charting the full course of an operation or undertaking—has obvious benefits. Yet this is precisely what seems absent from the interim government's attempt to arrive at a consensus on the implementation of the July National Charter.

The government's latest gambit (or more of a stopgap measure)—urging the political parties to sit among themselves and reach a consensus, preferably within a week—has not worked. That suggestive one-week deadline expires today with no headway. The message from the BNP is quite clear: the party will not respond to an invitation from Jamaat-e-Islami for talks. It insists that the call has to come from the government. This stance indicates that the largest political player in present-day Bangladesh was not quite aligned with the idea of parties discussing issues among themselves. If anything, Salahuddin Ahmed, the BNP policymaker who has been representing the party in the negotiations held by the National Consensus Commission, said his party would rather have the government stand in as referee, and that it would be open to discussions initiated by the chief adviser. Salahuddin also dismissed the deadline, saying the government was in no position to put this kind of pressure on the parties.

In other words, when Law Adviser Asif Nazrul announced last week that the government expected the parties to sit among themselves and arrive at a consensus within a week, he and the council of advisers had probably not plotted the flight path, and likely not for the first time. On Sunday, however, following Salahuddin's remarks, he dismissed them as a negotiating tactic to put pressure on political opponents.

That the interim government did not clearly think through the initiative to secure a political consensus on the July charter has been evident since the day of its signing, when, to the surprise of many, the National Citizen Party (NCP)—natural heir to the July uprising—refused to sign the charter. Being the most visible and notable stakeholder of that uprising, the NCP's refusal was quite telling. They said that there was no concrete plan or mechanism to make the charter's proposals binding upon the next government, which was their main point of contention. The BNP and Jamaat, on the other hand, differed over when the referendum would be held.

To make matters further complicated, the consensus commission proposed that the referendum be held with a single question covering dozens of constitutional reforms that many parties had disagreed with during the months-long discussion at the commission. This likely puts months of hard work at risk if, by any chance, the question mark over the referendum continues to loom.

More notably, however, the law adviser's announcement had come after months of discussion at the consensus commission, which implicitly admits the failure to arrive at a functional agreement—something that the government must have known but chose to brush under the carpet to be able to go through with the grand ceremony of signing the charter before the nation.

The seven-day deadline move, which came amid a raging dispute between the two political camps led by BNP and Jamaat, also smacks of an attempt to pass the buck. The government clearly did not want to be seen as the one "holding the pillow". That attempt has now been dashed, with the BNP snubbing Jamaat's invitation to talk.

In the meantime, Jamaat has threatened street protests demanding the referendum be held before the election, as well as proportional representation in both houses of parliament and an implementation order for the July charter. Some of its demands are understandable; some are quite unreasonable and rather disruptive. On the other hand, given the BNP's notes of dissent on some key elements of the July charter, Jamaat is clearly not ready to leave it up to the former's discretion when (or if) they form the next government.

Clearly, at this point, there is a need for a strong voice of a referee, one that prevails over the bickering sides and calms the nerves. Jamaat needs to be dissuaded from its street campaign, BNP from its stance against diluting the reforms, and the NCP from its fixation on a binding instrument signed by the chief adviser (and not the president). That strong voice has to come from the interim government, which is something it has pointedly shirked. In fact, it has changed its stance almost every time it has been faced with such resistance.

With the one-week deadline now over, the government has yet to point to a new direction in the protracted drama over the July charter implementation. So, to return to our initial analogy, the aircraft is still flying, but the pilot has yet to chart a flight path. For us citizens, there is still no indication of when or where the aircraft will touch down. What may be even more worrying is that the pilot does not seem to be too bothered by it.

Tanim Ahmed is digital editor at The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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