HYPOCRISY REDEFINED

Since I came out in the open in 2004, to defy the all pervasive injustice in our country, and to fight to bring down totalitarian rule and a system of governing which had put our people into subjugation and total submission, I have had the opportunity to work with and to interact with a number of my fellow country men and women: in positions of cooperation and adversarial. I had formed my own opinions about their intentions, their capacity to act and their levels of understanding about the turmoil that our country was going through. A detrimental, but necessary turmoil I believe.

Any systems theorist will immediately tell us that for a system which has gathered extraordinary mass in its course to be turned a 180 degrees will have a huge amount of inertia that needs to be overcome, and a counter force of greater magnitude will have to be applied to achieve this turn around. The result of this action will undoubtedly be a period of chaos within the system, but out of this chaos will emerge order, and hopefully, and I believe certainly, the emerging order will represent a better organization of elements within the system, an organization which will allow for more harmonious interaction and will lead to longer term stability with a greater degree of egalitarianism built in. I sincerely believe that we have taken great strides in achieving this.

Among the many people with whom I have interacted on this journey is a remarkable young man, a man with passion and dedication, who sometimes display a sense of purpose bordering on single mindedness. I have observed him in action, displaying flashes of brilliance in finding solutions and quick to react to emerging situations. I had high hopes for him, that given time to mature and mellow out a bit (there is no better teacher than life itself), to develop the skills of good judgment in being more discerning about people in particular, and he would one day prove to be a great leader for this country. I still am hopeful, for people only learn through their experiences and the positive and negative consequences of their actions, and an aberration can be contained and rectified. I had built a great rapport with him, because in him I could see bits of myself reflected (the better bits, I mean!).

He is Mohamed Nasheed, the current Minister of Legal Reform, Information and Arts. A young man on whom has been thrust the responsibility of rectifying the resulting consequences of the deliberate mismanagement by a despot who has ruled this country for 30 long years.

In my interactions with him, I could see the painful internal struggle of trying to reconcile what he believed was right with what he was being asked to do in public (not that he told me in as many words, but here I am making a subjective judgment). He still had not reached that level of Maslow’s need hierarchy to make the decisions to do what he had to do. Misplaced loyalties were forcing him to abandon a proper analysis of real-politik which would have shown him exactly what he had to do.

Ultimately, he has found it necessary to publicly declare that his friend, Ibrahim Ismail, was a hypocrite, based on a completely misguided analysis of events.

Fact is, the President did not make any announcement regarding the date of ratification on the 21^st of July; he still has not. He will not confirm any date even to his own cabinet, until he has played out his game.

Fact is, The President has always let Nasheed believe that he sincerely agreed with Nasheed’s suggestions and advise. But at the last moment, directives will come out, not necessarily from the President to him directly, but often through others, which would force Nasheed to retract his honourable agreements with others. The agreements we arrived at regarding the Transitional Arrangements Chapter, behind closed doors, unanimously agreed by Nasheed’s delegation and the MDP delegation, and me sitting in the Chair, had to be thrown out. I never called Nasheed a hypocrite on any such occasion, because I could understand this process and the players involved. There are many more that I can recount, but I shall not.

Fact is, a number of decisions made by the President to destroy the Amended Constitution, implemented by those who are so willing to do his bidding, were turned around by us through carefully thought out strategies on the Majlis floor, complemented with direct action by the people. The “Spectacle at the Palace” was an action by the people to prevent the President from “owning” the Elections Commission, The Supreme Court and the Prosecutor General. Checkmate should be recognized for what it is.

As Nasheed says, I know the inside and outside of this process very well. I believe I understand the inside much better than him, who is actually on the inside. As for the outside, it brought much humour to me and a smile to my tired face to read his claim that he could gather 7 times more people against us on the streets. That will be the day. But I shan’t dispute him. God knows we all need our fantasies to keep us going. I shouldn’t deny him that.

It saddens me, when Nasheed says, “They would expect us to be all civil and polite and endearing, when we meet again for work”. I wish Nasheed would think back to the number of times I have been “civil, polite and endearing with people at work” when the very same people had tortured me (literally), conspired to lock me up for 25 years, proofread documents in the middle of the night to submit to parliament to open up dead trials against me, gone back on their word numerous times, blatantly lie and try to deceive in broad daylight, accept bills in parliament and reject it in its third reading, wake me up in the morning hours to draft something for the constitution, make a deal, get me to propose it and then vote against it; the list could go on. Such is the nature of this process. Poltics is a pathetic thing.

Nasheed called me a hypocrite because I was able to judge the intentions of his own colleagues better than he could. I believe that one day he will be able to understand that what I did was something I had to do. It is as simple as that.

Nasheed called me a hypocrite. But I will sit with him tomorrow, if I had to, and be civil, polite and endearing, if I believed that doing so had even the remotest chance of bringing a positive outcome for our nation and its people. One should realize that this nation and the aspirations of its people are much larger, much, much, larger than both our egos put together. And it will forever be in the realms of the knowledge of Allah, why He, in His eternal wisdom, chose both Nasheed and I to play some part in this huge transformation of our nation.

The memory span in politics is necessarily short. More so in a closely knit society such as ours. The process of political maturity will allow us to be civil, polite and endearing towards our worst contenders, and the political arena does not allow room for personal feelings of political actors. At the conclusion of any political action, the nation either gains or loses. Infinitesimally small at times, and in large bounds at times. Historians in the future will judge our actions and argue whether ‘The Spectacle at the Palace’ led to a gain or a loss from a national perspective.

I sincerely hope that one day soon, my friend Nasheed will realise where his loyalty should be, and be able to see that President Qayyoom is keen to display to the people of this nation that everyone, including my friend, Nasheed is just as selfish as he is, and that the end game of this chess match involves the total destruction of integrity of anyone that the public may consider as a sensible person; and that in the end, no one is any better than Ilyas, Yaameen, Hameed, Fath-hulla and Zahir Hussain. Sadly, he seems to be succeeding.

Let us recognize President Qayyoom and his 30 year rule for who he is and what he has done. He has proven himself to being an extremely selfish person, who thinks only of himself. A flame in the dark night which attracts moths for their ultimate destruction. The early part of his 30 year rule did bring prosperity to the nation, but the latter part has brought this nation to its knees. His inability to change with the times and bend to the will of the people, his great alienation to the plight of the people, the growing disparities among the people, his reluctance to recognize that his time was over, these are the factors which have forced the people to take radical action. It is beyond me, how anyone with unselfish objectives could work so hard to defend this corrupt and unjust regime, and go out of his or her way to pretend that whatever change that is occurring could be attributed to the President’s or his government’s sincere intention to democratize this country.