Code of Conduct for Ministers

"Ministers, emboldened by a 'speak as you like' license, have created pandemonium in governance, eroding professional standards and public trust."

Former Minister Suranjit Sengupta has called upon the government to introduce a code of conduct for ministers. This call in the wake of the explosive nature of what senior minister of the government Abdul Latif Siddique said in a meeting in New York that had led to a bounty of taka 5 lakh to be laid on his head by the Hefazat e Islam. A number of cases have been lodged against him and the Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate has called him for a hearing in his court. The Prime Minister has said that he would be removed both from the cabinet and also from the party.

Latif Siddique has caused a political sensation at a time when the AL -led government did not need one. On a visit with the Prime Minister on her trip to New York, the minister took the opportunity of a meeting arranged in his honour by the expatriates of his home district Tangail to speak out against the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and one of the five pillars of Islam, the hajj in a manner that would even Islamophbics would not do. He referred to the Prophet like a common person and said his companions were dacoits. He also said that Hajj was a total waste of money and ridiculed it as nonsense. The way he delivered the diatribe was also significant. He gestured and ridiculed Islam in an unbelievable manner.

The diatribe of the minister has caused uproar in the country, particularly among the religious parties. BNP looking for the opportunity for a movement against the government has also joined the religious parties. They have dismissed the assurances given by the Prime Minister as inadequate although if the Prime Minister’s assurances were carried out, he would even lose his membership of parliament. The religious parties and BNP want the minister arrested and given punishment as prescribed by the law. They have given the ruling party till the 15th of October to act as they have demanded and have further added that if their demands were not met, there would be hartal on the 25th. HM Ershad has called the minister a murtad and demanded that he be hanged!

The holidays for the Eid and Durga Puja that intervened went in favour of the government because it helped put a brake on the ground swell of anger at the grassroots against the minister’s statement. Nevertheless, the issue still has serious potentials for public anger going by past occurrences. Poet Daud Haider and Taslima Nasrin have not yet been forgiven for their attempts to humiliate Islam and have not, decades after what they had done, allowed to come back home. Last year, when it was revealed that the some of the youth in the Shahabag Movement had indulged in anti-Islam postings on the Internet, a potentially extremely powerful youth movement that was heralded as the second liberation war of the country to re-establish the spirit of 1971 simply fizzled away within days. For two weeks, Shahabag had become a place of pilgrimage for the people of Dhaka and young and old were all making daily visits to Shahabag in hundreds of thousands. Within days of the public knowledge of the anti-Islam postings, almost all of them abandoned Shahabag underlining the power of Islam to the common folks in the country.

Suranjit Sengupta nevertheless spoke about the code of conduct for ministers out of frustration. He knows very well as does everybody in the country that in the last few years, the ministers of the government have acted as lose cannons under an unwritten approval from the highest level of the government to speak in public almost anything they wanted as long as it was directed at the opposition.  In fact, the free license to ministers to “speak as they like” was given by the ruling party as a political strategy to attack/ridicule and humiliate the opposition.  He himself has liberally done that as a minister. The strategy has worked fine and the ministers have been to a large extent able to keep the opposition on leash by the constant attacks in public. It has helped the ruling party to create division/confusion and an element of tentativeness in the opposition.

Nevertheless, the strategy always had a danger of boomerang. In giving the ministers the license, the government/ruling party did not consider the possibility that the ministers could use their license for their own personal gains and may not always use this license to only go after the opposition. Thus in the past six years of the AL led government, ministers have embarrassed the government umpteen times by going in public over issues that were their own interpretation of government polices or events and contradicted with those of the government. Ministers have regularly contradicted one another and often ended giving impression to the public that there was an utter lack of coordination in the government and among the ministers. 

That was of course only a natural outcome of the system that this government wittingly or unwittingly demolished. In the past, ministers very seldom went public on issues of governance. For matters of governance, every minister/ministry had a Public Relations Officer (PRO) who shielded the minister and his ministry from the media, aware of the dangers of exposure to the media. That system of course had due respect for the media because it always had access of the minister or his ministry’s views on any issue of importance to the public through the PRO. In case of matters of extreme public importance, ministers came before the media to satisfy public concerns. There is still a PRO for every minister/ministry but although his/her job description has not been altered even a bit, he/she now has a desk but no responsibility because the ministers these days play his/her role.

In fact, the ministers have been so much emboldened by their license to speak as they like that they these days do not even bother that in their open ended role in the media, they talk about the government without being designated as its spokesman. In fact, all ministers these days think they are spokesman of the government. It is not just the ministers, even party officials think that they are also part of the government and act as its official spokesman. The Minister of Communications is the example of one who has given himself the power of the government spokesman on all issues. The party joint secretary Mahbubul Alam Hanif is a party official who, forgetting he is no part of the government, has taken upon himself of the responsibility of not just the party but of the government’s as well. In the process, he has lumped the party and the government into one.

What Abdul Latif Siddique has done, its absurdity notwithstanding, is nothing unusual. Ministers of this government have said much more outlandish things in public in the past because of their license to “speak as you like”. There has thus always been a pandemonium in governance as a result of the way ministers have spoken in public without any legal authority. No one cared and the media seldom or never spoke against this deterioration of professional standards of governance. Latif Siddique has landed this government in trouble and it could be very serious one because he has decided to speak against Islam. Therefore the code of conduct for ministers that Suranjit Sengupta has talked about only underlines the fact that as a result of the “speak as you like policy”, the government has finally landed itself in a n extremely serious predicament. However a code of conduct is not certainly the cure.

He should ask himself why. He has taken the liberty to speak on an embarrassing truth of this government but he does not have the authority to speak on such an issue. The problem apart, his call for a code of conduct has established that the ministers of this government, supposed to be public leaders, do not know how to conduct themselves in public. Surely no party government anywhere would allow one of its own to go public to try to establish such a shame about itself.

In fact, the proper answer to Suranjit Sen’s concern is a very simple one. It is not in a code of conduct for the ministers that are already prescribed by law. The government must return to the existing laws and conventions. It must without delay designate the minister/s to be the official spokesman of the government and stop all others from making statements like they too have the right to do so. Simultaneously, the right of ministers   to speak in public on issues of governance as they like must be restricted only to their ministerial responsibilities where also they should be required to speak through their PROs unless the issues are of extreme public concern.

(This article was originally published in The Independent)