Judging by his reflections on what happened, or did not happen, in March 1982, it would appear that the country was in a condition grave enough to warrant the intervention of the army and its chief of staff. We do not have to fall for that argument, to buy it as it were. And where it is a question of Ershad coming forth with his views of the world as it used to be in our lives all those years ago, we will comfort ourselves through recalling all the old tales of military intervention in Bangladesh and, prior to that, in Pakistan.

Ershad is surely not the first military ruler to enlighten us on the necessity of military intervention in politics. Neither does he happen to be the first among all the soldiers who have commandeered politics to try to give us an explanation for behaviour that is certainly not tenable.

The fact remains, all these years after March 1982, that the overthrow of the Sattar administration was an act of manifestly sinister intent, seeing that it was a clear violation of the constitution and the rules of civilised behaviour. Of course, there is little question that Justice Sattar, only months into his term as Bangladesh's elected president, found himself in an embattled state, again owing to causes springing from within his ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

The President at that point of time had clearly drawn the conclusion that drastic action against elements in the government was necessary in order for the country to have democracy set on a firm, clear new path. There was little reason, therefore, for General Ershad to strike out at the government, one he was constitutionally pledge-bound to defend as a servant of the republic. But when he did decide to put the elected government out to pasture, it was one more instance of how democracy had all too often been undermined by ambitious men in the military in these parts.

The casualty, as always, was politics. Worse, every instance of military intervention has been followed by a systematic campaign aimed at a denigration of politicians and political parties, a process that began with General Ayub Khan's seizing control of Pakistan in October 1958.

But, then again, the entire course of the movement for Bengali regional autonomy followed by the armed struggle for independence was supposed to have signified a move away from the Pakistani legacy of military-bureaucratic dominance of the state.

It turns out that the People's Republic of Bangladesh has, in more ways than one, mutated into a political entity through the legacy of military rule in Pakistan coming to be a defining feature of politics within Bangladesh's geographical and political territory between mid 1975 and late 1990. It was that single phase in national history which left democratic politics crippled in the country. The nation continues to reel from the consequences of the various bouts of military rule imposed on it by our own Bengalis.

One certainly does not need, after all these years, to travel back to the past. And yet the legacy of the past calls for good, deft handling on our part. The rather disturbing reality in our lives is that the past has not quite been handled the way we would have liked it to be handled. General Ershad's act of removing an elected government by force of arms should have been dealt with, once democratic politics reasserted itself in early 1991, by a judicial process. That was not done.

The legal complexities in which Ershad found himself after his fall justifiably related to the charges of corruption building up around him; and yet the far more serious charge of undermining the state and subverting the constitution through his coup d'etat of March 1982 has never been focused on. The man remains a player on the political scene, to our collective regret.

But just as you comprehend the need for a necessary settlement of old scores, where the matter of a violation of the constitutional process is concerned, you remember too all the other patently illegal acts that have remained outside judicial inquiry. The coup that led to the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the violent overthrow of his government was not only not condemned but was also, morally inexplicably, justified through the Fifth Amendment to the constitution.

In similar fashion, the dissolution of a judicial committee set up to inquire into the murders of the four national leaders -- Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, M. Mansoor Ali, and AHM Quamruzzaman -- in early November 1975 was never questioned despite the restoration of parliamentary government in the early 1990s. The difficulty with a propensity to look away from sordid political realities is not so much an attempt towards finding a convenient way out of a mess as it is of pushing unpalatable truths under the rug until such time as they resurface, to test the patience and intelligence of a new generation of citizens.

It will perhaps never be possible to do justice in all the areas of politics and social life where injustice has been a glaring truth. More worrying, though, is the thought of whether, if at all, an attempt at restoring a sense of justice, at reasserting the place of morality in our collective national life has at all been made. The trial of Bangabandhu's assassins was a good move toward making people remember criminality at its highest perch. It would have been a better one had the powers that used to be not decided to set aside the role Khondokar Moshtaque Ahmed may have played in the planning and execution of the coup in August 1975.

The mere fact that Moshtaque had gone to his grave by the time the Awami League returned to power in 1996 was hardly reason for him to be allowed to go free. There is, after all, such a thing as a posthumous trial. And speaking of trials, posthumous or otherwise, or inquiries, you can only wonder why the murders of General Khaled Musharraf and his colleagues in November 1975 or General Manzoor in June 1981 have not been investigated by the civilian elected governments that have been in office for the past sixteen years.

There is too the ubiquity of questions relating to the modalities that were applied in the trial of army officers allegedly involved in the killing of President Ziaur Rahman in 1981. Suspicions have lingered, all these years after the abortive coup in Chittagong, of a wider web of conspiracy than has been publicly spoken about taking hold of politics in 1981.

Contrary to General Ershad's assertions, elected leaders do not hand over power to military commanders. They merely see it slipping from their hands, or seized from them, by unscrupulous men driven by inordinate, less than moralistic ambitions. In April 1977, General Ziaur Rahman forced President Sayem from office before taking it for himself. The law or the constitution did not offer any basis for such a seizure of power.

Back in 1975, no legal provisions existed to enable the commerce minister of the country to replace the dead President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Yet Moshtaque made himself top dog, even as Vice President Syed Nazrul Islam was placed under custody.

The legacy is therefore terrible and bitter. The spells of military and quasi-military rule we in Bangladesh have passed through have done far graver damage to politics than the incompetence or crass opportunism of our political classes. The militarisation of politics, spawning as it has political organisations with roots in undemocratic soil and such monstrosities as the once well-promoted (again in the Ershad years) Freedom Party, has left liberal democracy badly wounded in Bangladesh. Add to that the corrupting of politicians, with all the bad odour that emanates from it.

Sixteen years into elected civilian government, our politicians still carefully stay away from a whole, wholesome, and public debate on national budget allocations for defence. That is a pointer to how the power of politicians to engineer change in the country remains captive to the legacy of the kind symbolised by men like General Ershad. Such men once seized power through subverting the will of the nation. The course of life has since flowed in directions we had rather stayed away from.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.