For once, this is an issue in which the ruling party Awami League (AL) is not locked in battle with its diehard opponent, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). This time around, the AL is tussling with Dhaka's senior judiciary over the issue of the latter's independence and accountability. The matter has come to a head with the delay in the review of the death sentence awarded to a number of people for the 1975 killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's first president, leader of the nationalist struggle and father of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed. In the process, the traditionally sacrosanct position of the judiciary in the Bangladeshi polity has been challenged like never before.
The League has let loose its shoguns against the judiciary, most prominently Home Minister Mohammed Nasim who does most of the thunder bolting on behalf of his party. He has spoken loudly that the judiciary should be answerable to the people and the legislature. He did so in the Sangsad, which has given him immunity from the ire of the justices. Sk. Hasina herself has had to meet President Shahabuddin Ahmed, himself a much-respected former chief justice, to explain a remark she made on the judiciary.
The bench, particularly at the apex, constituting the Supreme Court (High Court Division and Appellate Division), have always been considered to be beyond the purview of criticism. Its members, especially the previous chief justice, a renowned jurist and Islamic scholar, have been stout defenders of the Supreme Court´s independence and self-accountability. The position they hold is that the judiciary should be accountable first to its conscience and then to the Constitution, and beyond that, to nothing and no one else.
Critics have an obvious problem with this reasoning, since it seems to place the judiciary above the law, a position not seen to be in line with an egalitarian state. More specifically, the AL government has taken offence at what it thinks has been the judiciary´s lenient attitude towards accused criminals or under-trial prisoners, which it says has taken the punch out of its own anti-crime drives. Human rights groups support the rights of the arrested including political prisoners, while the AL leaders scoff at the practice of too-easy granting of bails.