By Asif Uzzaman:
When the word, ‘wing’ falls in our ears, immediately our thoughts roll and come to a halt at a scene of an unbound eagle or a dark crow or an angel or a hopeful sparrow, flying freely high in the air. Wings are connoted with reaching heights and taking off for achievements never earned before. Yeah, that’s what wings are supposedly for — for making one reach ultimate heights and spread one’s vista to look at the scene from a number of angles, discovering many scopes for any given circumstance.
But what about the wings that affect us, the people and the nation, in an absolutely contrary fashion? What about the wings that, instead of widening our vistas, make them narrow?
Two wings of a sparrow make it touch the sky because of their collaboration with one another to make the bird take off without fear. But, again, what if the two wings of a bird try to take it in different directions? Would there be any flight? Would there be persistence of conditions for achieving great heights? Would there be any stability at all within the very entity of the bird if its wings tend to move the bird in different directions? “No” is the answer to these questions. A bird’s wings must work in well accordance. Yes. It ought to. So, then how can we imagine a country; a nation, to achieve great heights when there thrive powers constantly looking for chances to gain control and drift the nation in different directions? How can we expect stability where there are two wings constantly trying to take the nation in separate ways.
Though it is good that people of different wings – right, left and centre – have ideas and plans for different sections of society, yet what is generally seen is that many do not even follow their ideology for development of the respective sections they claim to uplift. Rather, wings are merely used for dividing and gaining political benefit from them. Sad but true. Instead of making the country achieve great heights, wings are seen to create polarisation in the society, and thus bringing down people’s condition to that of a shattered bird whose wings quarrel to take it in different directions.
Being born in families from different social groups, living in different parts of the country, having different cultural histories – all these shape a person and his ideologies. It should be agreed upon that everyone cannot be the same, and that existence of difference is the sole feature of any democracy. We all must agree to disagree first. It should be noted that liberalisation and accommodation has been a major feature of our country and this is where our strength resides. Our economy, for instance, has been a mixed form of ideas from capitalist as well as socialist economies.
What actually should be done by the people belonging to different wings is that they should look for pros and cons in their ideas, and also try to develop a common platform where representatives from all these sections can have healthy discussions — actually healthy ones, not like the ones we see on TV. For instance, the rightists should work to create harmony in the society by developing the feeling of unity in integrity in its followers instead of creating the feeling of ethnocentrism, and the leftists should work on actually uplifting the deprived sections instead of just blaming the rightists.
The Left needs to drift a little towards the Right and the Right needs to drift a little towards the Left, thus coming closer towards the centre, towards commonalities. Rigidity and ego that leads to high level of partisanship should be liberalised. If we aim to make our nation achieve great heights in true sense, then we should chop off those features of the wings which are hurdles in the flight.