When we remember the gentle bitterness with which Anwarul Kabir Talukdar spoke, not long ago, of the infractions and the lapses at the ministry he headed briefly before making his way out of office, we know that justice, even fractionally, has at last been done.

Of course, there is the right of every individual to move up in life, in his career. But there is, too, a very necessary accompaniment that must come with the exercise of such rights. Those rights, all rights, must be deserved.

ANH Akhtar Hossain has not been able to convince the country that he deserved to be placed where he was by people who simply had little, or a convoluted, notion of how civil administration functioned. It is, we will say once more, good that a manifest wrong has been set aside.

But that, you might be inclined to pipe in, is a mere piece of all the action that remains to be taken in so very many areas. And you would be right to think so, for there are around you and me all those bits and chunks of darkness we will surely be expected to scythe through if we mean to restore morality and good government in this agonized country.

Let the mind wander to thoughts of education, of how mercenary intentions have lately been coming into a system upon which the long-term welfare of the nation depends.

When the authorities of Motijheel Ideal School decided, arbitrarily and without any reasonable shadow of logic, to enhance admission fees for children from around eighteen hundred taka to more than six thousand, they created the perfect conditions once more for all of us to raise all those old questions about the abominable state of our academia.

You look around for explanations for such behaviour; and when you do not come by those explanations the only conclusion you can draw is that we have all fallen on bad days. But that would be a terribly short-circuited way of observing these social conditions we go through. A better understanding of circumstances would be to remind ourselves that, as a nation, we are in a pit. And we are still plunging.

That, however, is not the way the authorities of Ideal School would define the situation. The headmistress has already been riled by the protests of the guardians. She does not see the point, which is that a very large number of guardians who would like to place their children in her school may be earning in a whole month what she demands for the admission of a single child to her institution.

There is a malady abroad in the land. In these past many years, spots and dashes of the dark, if not exactly evil, have wormed their way into our sensibilities, enough to make us immune to all the corruption we once thought would never be part of our political and social landscape. It is this imperviousness to the bad and the dark and, therefore, the ethically unacceptable that now gnaws away inside us. Our immunity to assaults on our sensibilities has now come to a pass where putatively respectable men indulge in questionable deeds with impunity, and then expect to get away with those deeds. Or is misdeeds the right word here? But let that be.

What cannot be permitted to go unquestioned, though, is that deeply disturbing matter of why three photojournalists were detained by the authorities of Bangladesh Open University, without so much as fear of the law coming into the hearts of those who made that reprehensible move.

You expect idealism to come forth from academics. You expect them to keep you informed of all the good that can come through keeping the environment safe, through making the trees around us secure from the predatory instincts of men.

But when your teachers turn predators, when it is the trees on the campus of Bangladesh Open University that become the target of collective greed, you cannot but marvel at the quality of duplicity that underpins the times you inhabit.

And yet a shrugging acceptance of conditions as they are will not do. That is because it is the innards of our society, which are, today, in bad shape.

It is a state that can be neutralized through penalizing transgressors of the law, beginning certainly with the serving, terminated and superannuated bureaucrats who came together not long ago in the conspiratorial hours of the night in Uttara.

The inquiry into such an instance of badness ought to have produced good results. It did not, for there were those who simply and deliberately went into deception through coiling the issue around other, clearly inane issues.

The men who ran from the cameras, and from the intelligence people, that night had an awfully big truth about themselves to conceal. Their benefactors did make sure the concealment came in, slapped in concrete.

But it does not have to be that way, for these men, ranging from car-owning and apartment-buying assistant secretaries to high flying secretaries, are elements whose deliberate violation of service rules ought to be enough to bring them into interrogation rooms.

There must be some good men and some good women bold enough to look evil in the eye and shoot those darts right into the center of that shameless stare.

Which now brings us to that small matter of what we must do about the Election Commission. Justice Mahfuzur Rahman and his friends (and that includes the leave-spending Justice Aziz and SM Zakaria), having been part of a sordid plan to put the country through grinding pain for months on end, should now be asked to take the road to retirement and necessary inactivity.

But let that not be a wiping off of the uncomfortable sparks the Election Commission has set off, one after another, in these past many months. The degree of intransigence of those who have kept the commission in their grip, the incalculable and unimaginable financial sins committed in the name of producing voters' lists that deliberately papered over political realities in a safeguarding of vested interests, et al, are acts that call for full-scale inquiry for overall public interest.

By all means, see these gentlemen out but, at the same time, make sure that they answer to the country for all the wrong things they have done, and for all the right things they have not done, during their time at the Election Commission.

It all comes down to a question of right and wrong. The surveillance that a particular set of politicians has been placed under ought to be followed by foolproof inquiry into their coming by windfalls in the last few years.

There are the rags to dubious riches stories that call for exposure. Let the exposing be done, without mercy and without relent. There is the mediocrity, which leaped ahead of excellence, and so speared our notions of justice and fair play.

It is here that the balance requires to be restored. In politics, the profitable trade that has come into awarding of parliamentary nominations is in urgent need of uprooting, for if it persists it will be all the bank-loan defaulters, all the gun-running elements, indeed all men and women experienced in living life on corruption who will snatch our dreams and our poetry right out of our hands.

A nation that builds dreams in rainbow colours cannot be expected to plod endlessly through a ubiquity of nightmares. Ironically, though, our nightmares have always lengthened, and our paths have always disappeared into a region of darkness that did not have to be.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.