M. Shahidul Islam
Our politicians are into high stake gambling. The onus is on the government for its miserable failure in governance as well as in ensuring peace and security to the people. The political uncertainties aside, the economy too is bleeding profusely with downward spirals in productivity and international trading.
The entire nation is now a killing field. The attack on March 31 at the Gulshan office of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is not an incident to be treated cavalierly. As shots were fired aiming at an office where the Leader of the Opposition was anchored, an exhaustive investigation must unearth the underlying causes, identify the assailants, and bring them to justice.
This is not a trivial matter due to the Opposition Leader enjoying paraphernalia of security, including from Special Security Force (SSF). Besides, there are plain-clothed police who maintain a perimeter security of the premise wherever the Opposition Leader stays. It is bound to evoke one’s curiosity as to why the assassins were not chased by the security personnel after they fired shots aiming the BNP office and sped away on three motorbikes.
If the attackers fled southbound toward Gulshan 2 and melted with the city crowd, one could deduce that the ‘doctrine of impossibility’ had facilitated the attackers’ fleeing. The fact that the attackers fled northward and had hit the Baridhara DOHS and the highly secured engineering brigade of the army is bound to give birth to many queries about their antecedents and capabilities.
A crime’s genesis should be traced from the motive of the criminals as well as from the likely suspects daring to indulge in such acts of criminality against an individual or an institution. The timing of the attack is another factor that can help investigators to fashion various scenarios to extrapolate likely clues.
That night, the Opposition Leader sat with her partners from the 18 party alliances and declared to observe a nation-wide strike on April 2. The decision came only hours after the Islamic Chatra Shibir declared to observe a nation-wide strike the same day, demanding unconditional release of its central President, Delwar Hossain, who was arrested at noon that day from Dhaka’s Shamoli area by plain-clothed security personnel.
The coalescence of the decisions of the Shibir leaders and the 18 party alliance members is something that seems to have prompted this sudden attack on the venue from where the decision was taken in the presence of the Opposition Leader. And, the aim of the attack was not to scare the Opposition Leader, as many might suspect. It was a quickly-devised calculated attack to kill Khaleda Zia, as further analysis of events reveals.
According to her close aides, Mrs. Zia was about to leave her office at 11.15 pm, but was delayed by some last minute chores which sprang out suddenly. The attackers knew the exact timing of her venture out of the first floor of the compound- where her office is located- to the ground floor where she would board onto her car, the gate would fling open, and, the car would leave the compound.
Other than raiding the office with predominance of force, this is the only opportunity for any sniper-typed assassins to launch an attack on Khaleda Zia at her Gulshan office. The timing was propitious as few of the bustling crowd and the vehicles of the area usually stay afloat after 10.30 in the posh neighbourhood.
One might wonder why the attackers should fire shots when, upon coming near the gates at 11.15 pm, the gate was found closed and the target was not visible?
The answer is simple. The attackers knew no one would chase them due to their perceived or assured immunity, and, firing few shots at the building itself would achieve a limited aim by sending a message that someone was damn angry on her and would not hesitate to see her vanish from the universe.
Such a scenario would seem far-fetched if the prevailing political situation did not confirm certain fundamental objectives of the ruling party. One can surmise with some degree of certainty that the government is not only oblivious to sit for a dialogue with the opposition to resolve the festering crisis, it has arrested and brought concocted charges against hundreds of BNP leaders who are likely candidates in the next general election.
This particular move is indicative of a sure sign of the government’s determination to hold an election without much competition from the opposition. With respect to the Jamat-I-Islami (JI), not only most of their leaders are in jail – and the senior most are being tried for alleged war crimes – there is a scheme at work to proscribe the party all together.
If allowed to succeed, this autocratic scheme would destroy any semblance of democracy in the country, leaving the AL the only party to do whatever it likes.
Make no mistake that the eventual outcome of such a scheme is irreversible harm to the nation, its polity, and its sovereignty. If one must presume that the armed forces may be used as the government’s bulwark for clinging onto power with an ‘imperfect election’, one must also take it for guaranteed that the backlashes from the population will be precise, pin-pointed, and devastatingly overwhelming.
This is because not only this nation never compromised on the issue of democratic governance, hundreds of lives have been sacrificed in recent months to establish a kind of democracy that will be representative, inclusively participatory, and, politically and legally precise.
Such a necessity has become unavoidable for two major factors that have been haunting the nation for years. The first factor is that the nation is on the brink of a civil war, if not already in it, and, the second factor is that the last election was politically and legally imprecise due to the polls having taken place long after the constitutionally stipulated deadline expired.
We must remind and reiterate that a government elected by such an imprecise method must refrain from thinking it can get away with everything it had planned to cling onto power indefinitely. It’s a swim against high tide that’s drowning the regime and the nation together.
Source: Weekly Holiday
