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NU's naming game

28 October 2004, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Esam Sohail Kansas City, Missouri, USA
28 October 2004, 18:00 PM
It was not that long ago it seems that I had taken the pen in many forums, including this one, to take the Awami League government to task for its ludicrous policy of naming every edifice after the first President of the Republic. Well, it seems the naming disease has survived mightily after the October 2001 changeover. This proclivity of the current government and its sycophants is all the more painful to me personally because I happen to be a life-long admirer of the late President Ziaur Rahman, his works, and his ideals. By willy nilly naming the National University and other assorted institutions after Ziaur Rahman, the BNP partisans do little but drag a martyr into controversy, a patriot into partisanship, and a hero into histrionics.

Shaheed Zia needs no cheap naming games to consecrate his memory. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln's famous address, Ziaur Rahman is too far beyond petty political gimmicks to memorialise: his lasting memorial is the multi-party democratic republic we call our own today. If his so-called followers were really serious about showing respect to his memory, they would have lived up to his motto, "Party above self but country above party". Rather they hide behind these silly naming games to hide the fact that their extreme partisan militancy in subduing legitimate dissent is slowly unravelling the fabric of the multi-party democracy that Ziaur Rahman restored to us a generation ago.

With the NU re-naming, the professional toshamod (flatterer) class has reached a new nadir!

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