Syed Badrul Ahsan - A sadness in Bangladesh
NB - This article and the one by Zafar Sobhan, is a pointer to what happens when communal 'sentiment' becomes the basis for political legitimacy. It is in some degree or other the story of what has been happening across S Asia in the past 7 decades. We in India have equal cause for worry, with the impunity that allows the murderers of Gobind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar to go unpunished, and mass murder accepted as if it were a fact of life. Our so-called 'parivar' has even been singing the praises of Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse. (See The Abolition of truth). Either we learn to combat this unitedly, across community divisions and national boundaries, with full recognition that every kind of communal politics simply mirrors the other, or we carry on with our one legged secularism until the entire fabric of society collapses - DS
Bangladesh is an unhappy country these days. Its unhappiness goes up a few notches, day by day. The recent murder of yet another young blogger, Washiqur Rahman, by Islamic fanatics in Dhaka is a sign of the impunity with which criminality thrives in the country.
Bangladesh is an unhappy country these days. Its unhappiness goes up a few notches, day by day. The recent murder of yet another young blogger, Washiqur Rahman, by Islamic fanatics in Dhaka is a sign of the impunity with which criminality thrives in the country.
Rahman’s killing comes a little over a month after another
blogger and writer, Avijit Roy, was butchered to death in full view at the
Ekushey book fair organised in remembrance of the language martyrs of February
1952. Roy, who held dual Bangladeshi-US citizenship, had been threatened with
death for a long time, but he clearly did not take such threats seriously. On a
visit to Bangladesh with wife Rafida Ahmed, who also came under attack, he
obviously thought, like so many others, that the book fair grounds were a safe
place for Bangladesh’s liberal classes. The police and other security forces
had, after all, assured citizens that there were three or four layers of
security on the premises. In the end, those layers amounted to nothing.
And therein lies a fundamental problem in Bangladesh today.
The country is still reeling from the effects of an unending siege and general
strike called by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in early
January, to demand fresh general elections under interim arrangements. The BNP,
leading a so-called 20-party alliance and headed by former prime minister
Khaleda Zia, has found itself in a spot, partly because of its own political
miscalculations and partly because the government has doggedly ensured that
party members and leaders are unable to appear in public.
A large number of senior BNP politicians are in prison;
others are fugitive, within the country and abroad; some have lapsed into
silence. Khaleda Zia remains in self-imposed confinement at her party office in
Dhaka’s affluent Gulshan residential area. She has defied summons by the court
to appear before it in a corruption case. Her lawyers and she have demanded
that prior guarantees of security be provided before she makes her way to
court. The government has laughed off the suggestion.
The ruling Awami League, for all its bravado about
conditions in the country being normal, is worried. Fears of a slide in the
economy, which projects an annual GDP growth rate of slightly over 6 per
cent, remain paramount. Then there is worry about the government’s image
slipping from not-so-good to bad, given the incompetence it has displayed of
late. The case of the missing BNP politician, Salahuddin Ahmed, is a
glaring instance of failure on the part of the security agencies. Like Ilyas
Ali, a former BNP lawmaker abducted three years ago by individuals whose
identities remain unknown, Ahmed was reportedly picked up weeks ago by a
group of men in the middle of the night, and has been missing since. Ali
never came back. And Ahmed’s whereabouts are still not known. The police and
other security agencies of the government have said Ahmed was not seized by
them, a claim dismissed by his family and party. But the agencies have not been
able to locate the missing politician either. It didn’t help that Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina chose to be flippant about Ahmed’s
disappearance in the parliament.
The nation’s unhappiness has spread, affecting more and more
spheres of life. In the past couple of months, students sitting for their school-leaving
examinations have been under tremendous psychological strain because the BNP
agitation meant their exam dates were constantly shifted around. All appeals to
the party to halt its strike and allow students to complete their examinations
went in vain. Leading BNP figure and former minister Hafizuddin Ahmed even
retorted angrily that the political movement came before everything else.
The functionaries of the Awami League-led government are not
to be left behind. Information Minister Hasanul Haque Inu, who leads a faction
of the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (JSD), has made it clear that the place for
Khaleda Zia is not negotiations with the government but in prison. Last month,
in what was described as a news conference but in which she declined
to take questions, Khaleda Zia laid all the blame for the current crisis on the
Awami League. There was no expression of contrition over the death of nearly
140 citizens in petrol bomb attacks across the country, triggered by the BNP’s
programme of blockade and hartals. On the sidelines, former military ruler
Hussain Muhammad Ershad has injected fresh, though unintended humour, into the
political scene. Allah, he has told the country, would like to see his Jatiyo
Party back in power.
All said and done, there is an overwhelming sense of
insecurity among citizens. The police remain woefully inadequate when it comes
to investigating crime or taking suspects into custody. The government falls
back, every time a crime occurs, on cliché: no criminals will be spared and
justice will be done. Brave words, hardly followed by effective action. Add to
that the widespread perception that security forces happily harass opposition
activists but look the other way when crimes are committed by elements linked
to the ruling party.
As if that were not enough, a minister of state, Pramod
Mankin, advises the country’s indigenous population to act and think like
Bengalis. It is a throwback to 1972, when Bangladesh’s newly formulated
constitution declined to give space to its non-Bengali population. At the time,
the country’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had made it known that all
citizens of Bangladesh were henceforth to be known as Bengalis. The
ramifications were to be terrible in places like the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
Bangladesh is a sad place today. Its institutions remain
weak, its education system is endlessly battered, its economy is under assault
from politicians determined to wrest back power from their enemies, its
law-enforcement agencies do not perform to public satisfaction. Society has
split right down the middle, along political lines. In this chaos, religious
bigotry rears its ugly head, again and again. It is an existential crisis that
Bangladesh faces today.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-sadness-in-bangladesh/99/
See also