M. Shahidul Islam
Politics is a spurious science tainted by human mistakes and oversights. That is why good leaders often seem to have the prescience to smell what may be in the offing in the political horizon. They twig and tilt directions to deflect dangers while the demagogues ignore the telltale signs at their own peril and put themselves and their people in the most irreversible, un-endurable course of pain and suffering.
Our leaders in power had done precious little so far to deflect what seems like a civil war in the offing. A civil war is defined by a brewing or ongoing insurgency against the security forces of a nation by estranged groups seeking redress to any perceived or real wrongdoing against them by the state apparatuses.
Victims have an address
Notwithstanding whoever is behind the spectre of secret killings occurring routinely in the country, the victims have a common denomination. They’re the loyalists of the regime, or perceived as such. Simply put: the victims have an address while the killers remain at large.
For instance, the writers and bloggers belong to a specific political group, possess the indoctrination of a kind that is in distinct collusion with the religion and the life style of the majority, and, they‘re at odds with the nationalist-Islamist forces belonging to the other camp.
Moreover, the Gono Jagoron Moncho (GJM), which this particular group had used as its debut platform, came into being with fund and patronizing from the incumbent regime and its intelligence outfits. This is no secret. That the GJM has estranged with the incumbent government is a matter of political expediency which the government chose to adopt in order to showcase its pro-Islamic image. Then again, human frailty made a mess out of this idealistic stance; a horrible one, indeed.
Look how the AL government had cleansed every veritable democratic right of the people off the constitution through the 15th amendment, in the name of reverting to the 1972 constitution, but kept Islam intact as the state religion, which is the fundamental antithesis of that post-independent.
Why should one shy away now from suspecting the same regime for playing too many dirty political games to stay and consolidate its power? As well, how strong is its credential with respect to fostering democracy and rule of law?
Dabbling with democracy entails exhaustive political discourse and dialogue. Dialogue has resonance with the mass although it seems in dissonance with the scheme of the regime in power.
Dialogue and derision
The call for a national dialogue, not for the first time though, by the main opposition party, the BNP—which is not represented in the parliament due to the wholesale abstention of the 20-party compact under its lead from the January 2014 cosmetic election—-has been rebuffed and derided by the Prime Minister in the most visceral and venomous terms. This allowed the ongoing crisis to degenerate further into what is being witnessed: orgies of murders, mayhem and mendacity.
The language chosen and the vocabularies used by the PM to negate the BNP leader’s proposition for a national dialogue is utterly abhorrent and below the standard expected of a prime minister commandeering a nation of 160 million strong. She said the BNP leader ‘emits odour of burnt bodies. Sitting with her for a dialogue is neither befitting nor necessary.’
Befitting it may not be, but necessary it is. The lack of discourse and interaction between the major political parties, coupled with the tightening of political space for the opposition and the other dissenters, and, the mass arrest of over a 1,000 more once again on top of about 50,000 already rotting in prison for too long, had resulted into the thrust of an onslaught on the writers and publishers shifting toward the security forces.
Hence, what’s being witnessed wonders none. In the days preceding, a police outpost in Dhaka’s Ashulia suburb was attacked, killing a cop; followed by two attacks on Monday in Dhaka and Rajshahi, killing two sub-inspectors of police by rampaging vehicles of suspicious origin. Within hours of the latest incidents, a machete-wielding, errand youth struck an on-duty military police at the Kafrul entrance of Dhaka cantonment. This was an attack on the bastion of the nation’s power and the symbol of its sovereignty.
Shifting focus of attacks
For never before had such an attack on the military garrison occurred in peacetime, not in Bangladesh. And, the pattern emanating from such attacks is a pretty glowing one: the law enforcers, including the army, are under the sharp razor of the attackers, whoever they may be.
Anxieties popped, compounded and percolated when the commissioner of Dhaka metropolitan police issued a formal comment soon after the cantonment attack, blaming the BNP-Jamat duo for the attack; with a circuitous and cunning paraphrasing that, “Those who killed people by burning are the same ones who conducted the attack on the army.” The army, on its part, simply said: “We’re investigating.”
This is another major facet of a rotten society where police tries to dictate everything, everywhere. How could a police officer know within minutes who committed the crime in the entrance of what’s supposed to be a military fortress is a pointer that must be pursued to get to the bottom of a festering crisis whittling the nation to the binge of a civil war.
Then again, in this police state, nothing is impossible. Many whisper that a section of the law enforcers are involved in fomenting this crisis further, at the behest of an external power that be. For every civil war has another common denomination: it festers under dictatorship. The 15th amendment to the constitution turned Bangladesh into a single person dictatorial nation.
Yet, people by nature not being herds of animal to be shepherded around by dictatorial dictats, they’re unwilling to succumb to pressures to help an oligarchy to enjoy the plum of the society; illegally, indefinitely and arbitrarily.
Neighbouring Myanmar had an election in 1990, won by the National League for Democracy (NLD). A dictatorial military ruler did not allow the NLD to assume power in 1992. 25 years on, the same NLD had won the election again and the incumbent military regime under a civilian façade has committed to honour the wishes of the people this time.
Democracy and dictatorship
India is another neighbor of Bangladesh which practices democracy and uses it as a shield to save an otherwise unsustainable nation from disintegrating under the centrifugal pulling of a myriad of ethno-linguistic minorities seeking independence from Delhi.
Forgotten past
Democracy has a solution which is immutable, and, which the AL embraced to get on a par with the Pakistani rulers in the 1960s and 70s. That lesson has long been lost in the mires of impious dream to cling onto power until ‘death had parteketh the throne and the queen.’
What a mirage the government is chasing? In history, only the wise and the savvy were seen using the past as a guide for the future. The AL has proved to be an exception to that cliché, so far. One of the main tribulations of Bangladesh lies in the fact that, no sooner the nation emerged as an independent one by using that quest- for- democracy-prescription, then the same AL strangulated it and proffered one party dictatorship in the mid-1970s.
That led this party to bleed, bemoan and brace for a doomed wandering in the oblivion for more than two decades, re-emerging into the political radar in the 1990s; only after having apologized and promising not to deviate from the mundane, conventional wishes of the people any more.
But old habits die hard and, the promise proved to be a sleight of hand, a translucent hoodwink. It was also an embellishment to buy time, until this derailed party could accumulate enough power to change the country’s constitution by winning two-third majority in the parliament. And, as was obvious, democracy and the rule of law fell victim to such constitutional impropriety. It’s now on death bed; gasping for a whiff of fresh breath.
Source: Weekly Holiday
