We are all rattled by the incendiary comments which Mainul Hosein hurled at Masuda Bhatti last week. We understand that he called Bhatti later to tell her how sorry he was to have referred to her as a woman without character on national television. That certainly was not enough. And women among the journalists’ community as well as some of the nation’s eminent personalities were properly doing their job in demanding that the barrister apologise in public for the outrage he had caused.
We do not know if Mainul Hosein intends to do that. But even if he does, he has done himself incalculable damage by the hauteur he brought into display on television. That is not the way we expect a public figure, no matter how misplaced his politics is, no matter what his record of public service is, to carry himself in the public eye. He was asked a simple question, which was whether it was true, as his critics have alleged, that he spoke for the Jamaat-e-Islami. The barrister could have come forth with a denial. Or he could have explained his position. He did nothing of the kind. Instead, he went on the offensive, by noting the ‘audacity’ of Masuda Bhatti’s question and then going on to cast aspersions on her character. He then did something else, which was to ask Bhatti to ask a different question. He was obviously in need of a question that would be more to his liking. In passing, he questioned the professionalism of the nation’s journalists.
In this dark era of ‘Trumpian’ anti-politics, respect for people on the part of well-known men has been in steep decline. There are yet in our ears the very disturbing chants of ‘Crooked Hillary’ at partisan Republican rallies in the United States. There are the gross instances of insult thrown by politically powerful men and women at one another in India. In Bangladesh, in societies like ours, this impulse to humiliate women, for all the talk of women’s empowerment, remains our undying shame. We have not forgotten, and we will not, the very pejorative term used by the chief of the Hifazat-e Islam against women when he compared them to the taste of tamarind, igniting lewd passion in depraved men. Much opprobrium descended on the man. And yet he has survived, in much the same way that men who once cheerfully linked up with Khondokar Moshtaq Ahmed in his embarrassingly named Democratic League have survived.
This tradition of insult, especially directed at women, goes back a long way in our part of the world. In recent times, there has been that ugly tale before us of the obscenities which defined the politics of men like Shah Moazzam Hossain. And, yes, he too was cheerfully part of the Democratic League, before he threw in his lot with General HM Ershad in the 1980s. He rose to the questionable heights of pointless power as deputy prime minister, further abusing that hollow position by debasing the calling of politics. Even as the country rallied to the support of the political classes in their movement to push the regime from power, Moazzam went around titillating the crowds with his unashamed verbal assaults on Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, the political leaders then united in their resolve for democracy to be restored. Moazzam’s obscenity was to tell people that the union of the two women would produce nothing. There was the disturbingly unhealthy in that statement, a patent sign of the immorality he demonstrated. Some years later, he felt little shame in making his way to the doors of one of the two women, in this case the Begum, and joining her party. And she was happy to welcome this foul-tongued man into her camp.
Insulting women is a problem we cannot any more take with equanimity or indifference. If that is a moot point with us, there is also the larger question of why sections of our electronic media feel no qualms in bringing before their audiences men whose past and necessarily negative record should have condemned them to oblivion. Not many years ago, a television channel caused much pain to rise in us when it telecast a segment of an interview with a leading player in the assassination of the Father of the Nation. That was a humiliation heaped on the country. One might as well ask why that despicable act was resorted to by the television outlet in question.
And the channel which last week brought Mainul Hosein on its show was the same which four years ago happily brought on its programme, prime time, an uncouth politician determined to peddle some new lies before the audience. His villainy had a single objective, to tell people that Bangabandhu had taken the collaborator Shah Azizur Rahman with him to the Lahore summit of OIC countries in 1974. He did not know --- or was deliberately casting aspersions on the nation’s founding father --- that the Shah Aziz he spotted in the photographs he carried to the television studio was Pakistan’s President at the time, Chaudhry Fazle Elahi. He was swiftly shamed into silence.
Should such men --- individuals who question the character of women, who salivate in their obscenities about women, who shamelessly spread innuendo about our national icons --- be accorded the undeserving dignity of finding places on television discussions?
There is as much a need to condemn these men of insidious intent as there is of questioning the judgment of those who highlight them before the country.