The nation’s presidency is once more in the public domain. In recent times, it became a matter of renewed interest with the death of President Zillur Rahman and his subsequent replacement by Abdul Hamid. The election of President Hamid was absolutely in line with the constitution, as are so many other things in this otherwise flawed democracy of ours.
But constitutionalism is not what we speak of today. We choose to dwell on the presidency again because General Hussein Muhammed Ershad has informed us that if an election is called for the presidency, with him and Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia as aspirants for the office, he will win hands down. Not even the combined strength of the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party can defeat him should a presidential election, based on adult franchise, be held.
The former military ruler may be right. Or he may not be. But what he does is give all our memories a jog about the tortuous, serpentine ways the presidency has travelled down the years since the liberation of Bangladesh. Begin with Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was named the country’s president by the provisional Mujibnagar government in April 1971. But since he was a prisoner of Pakistan at the time, it fell to Syed Nazrul Islam to serve as acting president during the entire course of the war. In January 1972, when Bangabandhu came back home from Pakistan, there was somewhat the expectation that he would either adopt a Gandhi-like role, meaning he would not seek or accept any office; or that he would continue to be president, leaving governance in the hands of Tajuddin Ahmed.
Bangabandhu did neither. Two days after his return, he took full charge of the government as prime minister. Tajuddin Ahmed had little choice other than agreeing to be his finance minister. Bangladesh opted for a cabinet form of government, which meant a dilution of the powers of the presidential office. And into that ceremonial office stepped Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury. A respected academic, Chowdhury began well. Along the way, however, disillusion set in. And by the end of 1973, President Chowdhury resigned, to be replaced swiftly by Mohammadullah, the speaker of parliament. Early in August 1975, Justice Chowdhury came back into the limelight when he joined Bangabandhu’s government as minister without portfolio. That was on August 8. Soon after the coup of August 15, he took over as foreign minister in the usurper Moshtaque’s government.
Having served as president, Justice Chowdhury ought not to have agreed to be a minister. But that is beside the point. What is critically important here is that in January 1975, the presidency went through a revival in terms of political power. Through the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, politics became presidential and an already all-powerful Bangabandhu took over as president. Cabinet government went out of circulation. Over the next many years, it would be a powerful presidency overseeing the nation’s fortunes, with mixed results.
The presidency has had its dark moments. Through a brazen violation of the constitution, Commerce Minister Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed seized power and proclaimed himself president once Bangabandhu had been assassinated. For good measure, Vice President Syed Nazrul Islam was placed under arrest together with three of his colleagues. The blood-drenched Moshtaque presidency was replaced by a seemingly moral one, in the person of Supreme Court Chief Justice ASM Sayem. Once General Khaled Musharraf had ousted Moshtaque and his killer majors and colonels on November 3, 1975, he had Sayem take over as president. The Taher-Zia counter-coup the next morning pulled the country back into darkness, but it left Sayem untouched. With Zia becoming the strongman of the new regime, Sayem now became nominal chief martial law administrator as well.
The ambitious Zia could hardly wait to take over the presidency, a job he accomplished in April 1977 when he ‘persuaded’ Sayem to turn over the office to him. And so it was that a la Ayub Khan in 1958, Zia became Bangladesh’s president. He remained in office till his life was brought to an end in May 1981. If Zia was a powerful occupant of Bangabhavan, his successor Abdus Sattar was a symbol of ineffectual leadership. Within five months of his election as head of state, he was put out to pasture by General Ershad who, clearly wanting to be seen as a man without unbridled ambition, placed Justice Ahsanuddin Chowdhury in the presidency. But since ambition is a fire that rages and leaps ever higher if it is not satisfied, Ershad by the end of 1983 predictably showed Ahsanuddin Chowdhury the door before taking over the job himself.
Bangladesh’s presidential history suggests a mix of the good and the bad, with big patches of the ordinary. President Abdur Rahman Biswas, contrary to popular perceptions of him, moved swiftly and bravely to check the advance, literally, of his army chief and therefore helped the country to go ahead with an election in 1996. That courage went missing in President Iajuddin Ahmed, whose unashamed loyalty to the party that elected him led the country to near disaster in late 2006-early 2007. President AQM Badruddoza Chowdhury simply caved in when his party pounced on him over his attempted neutrality as head of state. He resigned when he could have waged an epic battle with the ruling party over the place of the presidency in the life of the nation. President Mohammadullah remains a rare example of a politician whose career comes close to being an economic graph: he moved from being a lawmaker to deputy speaker to speaker to president to minister to vice president to lawmaker.
Ershad would like to be president one more time. Suddenly you are reminded of Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria.

The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.