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| Bangladesh | |
| Rantings of our leaders | |
| 2013-03-21 | |
The two camps may use up all the expletives at their command and all the invectives they can master to throw at their opponents (they like to think them as enemies), but that will not be able to deliver us, the unfortunate people, caught in the ruling party's hammer and the opposition's tong, from the mire that we are trying desperately to get out of. We are disappointed. Disappointed because of the fact that we have come to such a pass that has made us divided down the middle, quite unnecessarily too, and the enemies of the country, who benefit from the truncation of the homogeneity that we had been blessed with at birth, are doing everything to see the gaps widen. It is even more disappointing because the leaders have not been able to rise beyond partisan interest to see beyond their nose and anticipate the danger that is staring the country in the face. The senseless manner in which the country had been virtually shut down for the greater part of the month of March shows how self-destructive the Bengalis can be. Much as the government may like to show that life had been normal during the days of hartal, it was anything but. The latest round of shutdowns was called by the BNP to protest the arrest of their party leaders after its head office was stormed by the police on March 11, and each day that the country remained shut down, it was put back by more than a billion taka. Citing AL's 173 days hartal when it was in opposition does neither ennoble its cause nor justify the means of the BNP. Whatever the merit of their case may be, the opposition cannot hold the people to ransom for an exclusive partisan cause. What if the demand is not met; will the poor people be made to suffer for the game the two parties are playing? Those who live by the day, those who must work everyday of the week to ensure that they have something to eat every day, at least once, have been the worst sufferers. If politics is for the people, what examples are the politicians setting for their progeny when they see a rickshaw van put to fire and the poor rickshaw puller entreating the vandals to spare the only means of his livelihood? Not that we did not see violence during hartal in the past, but what we have seen recently, deliberately targeting of people like the three doctors the afternoon before the day of hartal, are acts that go beyond definition of social or political violence. These are acts of terrorism and must be addressed as such. And journalists have not been spared either. If this is the meaning and manifestation of politics, then that politics we can do without, and the people must come together to make this kind of politics irrelevant. The opposition is now fixed on a single demand, fall of the government. When has any democratically elected government been brought down by street agitation? The last time we saw it happen was when a pseudo-democratic government was toppled in December 1990, but that needed the coalescence of all the political parties across the ideological and political divide. It seems that the BNP has lost its focus, it having to modify the reason for its agitation programmes. Whatever happened to its call for a caretaker arrangement for the next election? And this is where the AL must display its political farsightedness. Mixed signals have emerged form the party on the issue of AL-BNP dialogue, and on the issue of the modality of the next election. But the AL must realise that hiding behind the Supreme Court's ruling and insisting on the 15th Amendment, done in a hurry and even disregarding the views of many senior AL leaders, as the predicating factor for the next election, will not help resolve the crisis. | |
| Posted by:Fred |