Anatomy of a self-created crisis

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Unless there are methods in madness, the distinction between the mad and the lunatic gets blurred.  Victims of crime cry for justice, not cacophony. This is rule number one. Rule number two is: Better outcome must always be primed by better input.
For rules have outcome. A nation not willing to be governed by the rule of law can only expect lawlessness; more and more of it as days pass by. Each of the successive incidents is more ferocious than the previous one; bound to be, by necessity, and, of necessity. That’s the law of the nature too, aberrations notwithstanding.

Lax in learning
Exceptions are rarity, and, Bangladesh’s crisis of lawlessness is self-made. No wonder it’s recoiling badly. This nation has been too lax in learning how good governance translates into graduated prosperity; how participatory democracy makes everyone a stakeholder and less aggrieved; how treating all citizens as equal withers bickering, divisiveness and internecine blood shedding.
In the global media, image of Bangladesh is no more a “moderate Islamic nation.” With the latest incidents of murder added to the growing chronicle, global observers are derisively branding Bangladesh as a nation ‘incapable of running its own house in an orderly manner.’
One newspaper said “Bangladesh has an ‘unelected’ parliament and bunches of unruly Islamic zealots capable of overpowering the security forces.” This may seem far-fetched, but it’s not as improbable as many of us think, not any more.
Watch closely to see how, since January 2014 — when the incumbent regime extended its tenure in power by another five years without obtaining any credible mandate of the people—one after another secret killing has been roiling the national life. In a global village, these murder and mayhem splashed surging waves of repulsion and rapacious commentaries.
The descent to anarchy and the concomitant desperation is too vivid now. The grief-struck father of murdered publisher Dipon, professor AKM Fazlul Hoque, is not even interested to file a General Diary with the police; aware that police will do nothing, and had done nothing when five other bloggers were murdered in a succession of similarly horrid events since early 2014.

Quest for correlation
To say these incidents are not related to the illegitimacy of a regime that clings onto power by force is to negate the fact that radical Islamists did not conduct similar acts in the years 2009-2013. For any researcher, quest for seeking a positive correlation between the legitimacy of the regime and the acceleration of targeted killings shall be a priority. As expected, lawlessness became the norm once the hierarchy in the command structure collapsed; no devolution of power carried out; and, the constitution lying in a state of limbo while the parliamentary accountability rendered all but moot.
Looking a bit further back one finds that, what is being harvested now has been sowed in the conspiratorial process initiated since late 2006 when election did not take place within the stipulated 90 days interregnum.
If the death of all politics is what the ruling AL wanted, as they did in 1974, they got it too. Politics once again had died prematurely in the hands of the ruling oligarchs.
Can someone from the government answer few questions? When was the last time the nation witnessed a debate on crucial matters in the national parliament? Isn’t the phantom opposition an integral part of the treasury, with ministers inducted from the so called opposition into the ruling cabinet? On what legal basis the election in 2007 was deferred indefinitely by showing a thumb to constitutional dictates? Was not that a design to whisk someone to power with a two-third majority to change the constitution and turn the nation into a virtual one-person fiefdom? Externally, who reaped the benefit of it?
This nation is now bereft of any provision to hold a referendum on any crucial matter. Nor there’s any decision making mechanism that can by-pass the consent of the Prime Minister. This one person show, cemented by the 15th amendment to the constitution, has shoved aside all else into the periphery.

Sabotage from within?
To perpetuate that destructive scheme, another election in 2014 took place without the participation of the main opposition parties and more bulldozing of the remnants of the opposition leaders and activists into smithereens continued unabated.
As well, the nation had sliced itself at the seams; the ruling coterie claiming all else are anti-liberation elements and must be crushed with the authoritative forces available under its disposition.
For too long, the security apparatuses had digested the same mantra and acted accordingly to blame everything on the opposition BNP-Jamat compact which has no representation in the lame duck, dysfunctional parliament, anyway.
That too had squandered its utility. Now, Imran H Sarkar, a maverick youth leader steering a jaundiced Gono Jagoron Moncho, says, “A section of the security forces is involved in the murder of so many bloggers.”
If that be the case, how shall one evaluate the evolving scenario amidst such an apprehension of mishap making and sabotaging by the very law enforcers, as Imran H. Sarkar and many other believe.  Juxtaposed with what the information minister Hasanul Hoq Inu said, that, “I myself feel unsafe. Everybody is unsafe,” a fireball seems to be rushing toward the nation from the galaxy upward.
Yet, a political regime must sport brave face even minutes before getting chucked away. Waist- deep sunk in the orgies of desperation ruling the roost, the home minister has no wavering in claiming, “There’s nothing wrong with the law and order situation. Such incidents occur even in France, the USA, and Australia.”
Of course they do. Partly because those nations have sent forces to fight with political Islamists in far away battle fields. Partly because, according to experts, ‘the Islamists feel disfranchised in a global order that they say discriminates against them and their countries.

Coordinated attack
Bangladesh is otherwise immune from such vulnerabilities; yet, political Islam has slowly overtaken the discourse of this nation due to a single person being at the helm of all affairs of the state, unaccountable, and, seemingly unfazed. The very legality of that person and, the team thereof, is questionable to national and international observers alike. This is the main window of vulnerability.
Along with publisher Dipon, publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul, writer Ranadipam Basu and, blogger Tareque Rahim were hacked at Tutul’s office in Lalmatia the same day, almost at the same time. The efficiency and the impeccability of the planning of the killers displayed some inkling of the kind of maturity and precise coordination they were capable of mastering. As well, they’d managed to dispatch within less than an hour a statement with the claim of responsibility to selective media outlets.
We shall not shy away from calling them ‘the ubiquitous evils’ daring to muzzle the flow of free thinking in our society; be they people within the government or whatever terrorist outfit one calls them.  But we’re surprised to see that the glistened daggers of those evils are bigger and sharper that the ones wielded by the authorities, and, they (the evils) had descended into the battle field more prepared than one would have imagined.
Aggrieved professor Abul Kashen Fazlul Hoque is aware of that reality. He’s also aware that the crisis is hinged in the illegitimate, abhorrent, unacceptable political nuances percolating and flowing within the nation’s inner veins. He lost his son, but seeks no justice. The only thing he wants is the fixing of a political rot that had derailed since early 2007 into something too dangerous to digest anymore.  For him the betterment of the nation is more important than cosmetic arrest and trial of some selective suspects, based on their antecedent as opposition workers, which has been the trend so far.

Blaming others
Diplomats watching this fast deterioration of Bangladesh’s political and social ambiance still implore the government, with lucid wordings and vocables, to do more, as if things are still manageable. “Like the murders of Niloy Chakrabarti, Washikur Rahman, Ananta Bijoy Das and Avijit Roy earlier this year, these heinous acts underscore the importance of our governments’ joint efforts to counter violent extremism,” the US Embassy said in a statement.
The regime of Sheikh Hasina is least willing to take the USA on board to undertake such a multilateral effort. She has the talisman of a saint and the auguries of a fortune teller. Within hours of any crime’s commission, she straightly blames the BNP-Jamat. This time too, she did the same thing, allowing the real culprits to stay safe.
Besides, many in the government and its loyal media accuse the USA and some of its allies of fomenting the crisis while the USA, as the statement above shows, maintains a saintly calmness hard to decipher from demeanours alone. The indolence of the global community is as dangerous as the incapacitation of Bangladesh’s incumbent political regime that is evidently lost in a whirlpool of indecisiveness.
In this convoluted, confusing and condescending climate, Bangladesh’s transformative face is showing to the world the most disheveling cloak to hide an excruciating pain; a pain that is killing the nation, its people and the vibrancy of a civilization that’d withstood too many upheavals in the past, but feels too numb to decide what to do now.

Source: Weekly Holiday