Mahtab Haider Suddenly, there’s a good deal of talk among Dhaka’s chattering classes about whether former military strongman Ershad really was that bad. ‘Were we really worse off under Ershad’s dictatorship compared to the democracy that the two women gave us?’ the chatterers are saying. With Ershad further legitimised by borrowed political capital from the AL, the number of Ershad-era apologists seem to be on the rise in the mainstream. The logic seems to be: if the decision to allow Ershad into the mohajote can’t be defended, the next available option is to defend Ershad. This is akin to drinking from a poisoned chalice. By covering up the sins of a military dictatorship to suit a short term political convenience, those who lived through the horrors of that dictatorship are telling an unconscionable lie to their successor generation. It’s one thing to accept Ershad into a political alliance — and why not, if he comes through the democratic process — given that both political parties have godfathers and criminals aplenty. But it’s quite another to suggest that his record is clean or cleaner than that of democratically elected leaders. Two-and-half years ago, as the two major political alliances had courted Ershad for the scrapped January 2007 elections, I had interviewed Selina Akhter and Marium Begum — mothers whose sons Dr Milon and Noor Hossain were both martyred in the movement to oust Ershad and restore democracy in 1990. ‘How can I accept that my son was martyred for a country that will allow his killer to become president?’ Selina Akhter had asked. Imagine her grief that those in society who lived through those times, witnessed the horrors, now want to sweep the memory of Noor Hossain or Dr Milon under the carpet to defend their party’s inscrutability. By all means, allow Ershad into your political fold, but please, please, don’t distort history to give an autocrat a clean slate.