Today a court in Bangladesh passed a judgement finding Ms Khaleda Zia, the former prime minister of Bangladesh guilty of corruption. Earlier in Bangladesh, the government set up a special tribunal to prosecute some people accused of a crime against the humanity some of whom were leaders of an Islamist party. Bangladesh is not the only country, there are a number of countries where the leaders of the opposition were tried and found guilty of some crimes, in most cases corruption.

I am pretty sure a large number of people see these trials and the judgements as an action of the government to oppress the opposition. I have seen very reputed newspaper and magazines raising their objection to such trials. In most cases, their main objection is that the government is trying to silence their opposition by sending the leaders of the opposition in jail through these trials. In some the reporting of the newspapers, the journalist points out that it is not the newspaper itself, but ‘critics’ are alleging that the trial for corruption is being used to send the opposition leaders to jail.

And to some extent, we cannot blame the newspapers and the ‘critics’ for their stance. It is very much true in some of the countries where the government will do anything to stay in power, they will forge documents, produce fake witnesses and charge the leader of the opposition so that the opposition could not challenge the government. It happened in the past and still happening and will probably happen in the future.

Personally, I have a problem with such allegations. This kind of criminal case against the opposition leaders takes place in countries where democracy is not developed yet. And in most cases, the government and the bureaucracy are corrupted. You can be pretty certain that the party in power are engaged in corruption. In Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko is a former prime minister. She led the country from 2007 to 2010. Then she lost in the election to Viktor Yanukovych. Later Yulia Tymoshenko was convicted of abuse of office over a gas deal. The same goes for Ms Khaleda Zia. She is a former prime minister of Bangladesh and now convicted for corruption. In both cases of Ms Zia and Ms Tymoshenko, there are chances that they or their party member were engaged in corruption when they were in power. For your information, both Ukraine and Bangladesh are on the top 30 list of the most corrupted countries in the world.

My question is unless we are very much certain that Ms Zia and Ms Tymoshenko were not engaged in any kind of corruption, can we claim that convicting them of corruption is an act of ‘oppression of the opposition’? Please note that I am not saying that Ms Zia and Ms Tymoshenko were engaged in any kind of foul play, I am just using them as an example to make my case. They may be innocent.

So, if a leader of the opposition party is engaged in any kind of crime, she or he must face trial. Just because s/he is a leader of the opposition, s/he cannot claim immunity from his/her past crime. If prosecuting any leader of the opposition is termed as an oppression of the opposition, then all the criminal would run for the office and try to become a political leader so that they cannot be prosecuted. All the leader of the political parties will feel free to engage in corruption knowing that their prosecution will create a lot of buzzes and at the end, they might not be tried for their crime at all.

I am not saying that all trial of the leader of the opposition is not politically biased, or all opposition leaders are guilty. What I am saying is we should be careful before saying that the trial of a leader of the opposition party is actually an attempt to oppress the opposition. Otherwise, we will support crook politicians.

Being a political leader should not be a Get Out of Jail Free card.