Sadeq Khan
The political as well as business elite of this country appear to be either oblivious or amazingly cool about the nation’s impending debacle, signs of which are staring us in the face. Unemployment and underemployment of new entrants into the labour market have again burgeoned to a state of explosion. Our manpower exports have gone down. And most alarmingly, purchase orders for ready-made garments from USA and Europe are falling sharply.
The government has sought time to fulfill conditions for reinstatement of the GSP status of Bangladesh for the US market. The western market as a whole meanwhile will take the continuing US denial of GSP status to Bangladesh as a cue to drive hard bargains and somehow penalise the Bangladeshi exporter-manufacturer. Labour unrest has become chronic on one count or another.
Political cover for criminals
“Police power” being exclusively and excessively employed for “political” agenda of the ruling party, i.e. annihilation of non-conforming political activists to make room for a “loyal” opposition to emerge, shadow power of crime lords are ruling the roost. Indeed crime lords under political cover are calling shots everywhere in mofussil districts, where law and order has virtually broken down.
Young drug-addicts recruited as handymen by petty godfathers are raiding rural households in groups to impose “chanda” as protection money on one pretext or another, while their counterparts in the metropolis are staging armed-holdup of pedestrians and vehicular passengers alike for “chhintai” (thuggery). A pyramidal structure of informally organised crime has thus been spread out from the city streets, bazaars and industrial belts to remotest villages. The kingpin of organised crime in the country is the police, some of whose officers themselves participate in criminal ventures, while others receive proportionate rents and institutionally act as partners and protectors of crime lords.
Quite apart from the seething political crisis, the socio-economic impact the state of anarchy prevalent in Bangladesh cannot but be disastrous. But the elite do not seem to care. Some of them may be secure with escapist intent as they may have second homes in Malaysia or in Dubai or in Canada, Australia, U.K. or USA. Some may similarly have a son or daughter or an uncle or a distant cousin working abroad who may possibly sponsor their escape from our troubled homeland if and when things come to a pass. But what about those who do not have such escape routes? Even amongst the elite, including crony capitalists, that number is not small.
Souls sold to a davil
Some sceptics suggest that the power elite in this country and their cronies do not care, because for real or promised material gains including posting and perks of high office inside and outside Bangladesh, elite membership have sold their souls to a “devil”. That “devil”, so to say, happens to be the neighbouring big power who is now hell-bent on being counted as a global player. As such, Delhi has deployed faceless “RAW” agents to run Bangladesh for the incumbents and their cronies, telling the Dhaka elite to enjoy their “positions” of power without bothering about their duties. They may have also been assured safe homes and pensions across the border in case things go wrong.
Clearly that is a wild conjecture. If rule of law is perceived to have failed in this country, one should acknowledge that the administration is being run by articulated “rules of business”, albeit sometimes bent to suit the convenience of the office of power. Credence to the wild conjecture of the sceptics as aforesaid, however, gains ground when stories claiming that “RAW agents raced ahead of ISI to nab IM’s Pak operative Waqas in Dhaka” are broken in Indian newspapers. The Times of India in its April 15 issue ran that story as follows: “A small mistake on part of the ISI in preparing passport for Indian Mujahideen’s (IM) Pakistani operative Zia-ur Rehman alias Waqas landed him in the net of Indian agencies. Waqas had been hiding in Bangladesh and was supposed to leave for Pakistan via Nepal when he was apprehended by India’s external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).
According to sources in the security establishment, though there had been some information about the possibility of Waqas being in Bangladesh, Indian agencies were clueless about his exact location. However, their sustained interest in the ISI agent who had been loaned to IM made Waqas’s handlers in Pakistan’s spy agency worried that their asset had been exposed and needed to be brought home.
RAW’s master stroke
Accordingly, ISI got a passport made for Waqas. However, when he reached the airport, Bangladesh’s immigration officials discovered that there was no entry stamp on his passport. Even as they set out to detain him, the commotion attracted the attention of a RAW staffer who swiftly used his smart phone to photograph one of India’s biggest tormentors and relayed it to his superiors. RAW officers were thrilled when they saw that the six-feet man being held at Dhaka airport was their elusive quarry. What followed was an intense spy game in which Indian agents managed to spirit him away to India without leaving footprints.
How they managed to get him out of the airport and then to India remains unclear. But Waqas proved his utility by furnishing details of IM cells with whom he had collaborated and who would host him. The success was kept a closely guarded secret and Waqas was “encouraged” to do web chats with IM operatives, particularly Tehseen Akhtar “Monu”, without raising suspicion. Waqas’s monitors made him seek a meeting with Tehseen.
“Waqas was made to insist that the meeting should happen, as usual, at their known hideout in Nepal. As an unsuspecting Tehseen set out for Nepal, Indian agencies alerted their counterparts in the neighbouring country. Nepal Police, in a remarkable example of cross-border counter-terror cooperation, had the meeting point sealed as soon as Tehseen arrived. He was detained and later “pushed” into West Bengal to be “arrested” by Delhi Police.”
On April 16, in Dhaka State Minister for Home Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters in the Secretariat: “I know nothing yet about it. I read it in the newspapers. I’m looking into the matter. Asked whether RAW is authorised to make such an arrest in Bangladesh, Asaduzzaman said, “We’ve a prisoner exchange treaty with India but they’ve no authority to do this.”
The State Minister’s replies remind one of the Nazamat (Executive Power of the state) of Murshidabad Nawabs under British East India Company’s thumbs in the second half of the eighteenth century. What a farce!
Source: Weekly Holiday
Yes. What a farce???????