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Deteriorating law and order : Can't it be improved?

MOHAMMAD ISMAIL
FACTORS responsible for worsening law and order situation in Bangladesh are many. The most important and dominant one at present is, perhaps, the rising terrorism. Terrorism-related media reports have been a common phenomenon for quite sometime. The terrorist activities are now spreading fast all over the country. All the past governments repeatedly expressed their concerns over terrorism. They expressed their strong determination for curbing down terrorism, too. The present government is not an exception to this. But the scourge is yet to be curbed.
We would perhaps be unkind to the governments if we always cast doubt about their sincerity in this respect. It would rather be nice of us if we tend to believe that for some genuine reasons they could not succeed in their attempts. In that event one may ask: what are the factors that have refrained them from achieving the desired suc-
cesses? To get the answer, the factors responsible for growth of terrorism and other related issues need to be properly analyzed.
Non-democratic political societies with poor economies are breeding centers for growth of terrorism. Non-observance of democratic norms by the political parties makes their leaders dependent on henchmen for supporting their interests within and outside the party leadership. The responsibilities of the henchmen are to protect the interest of the mentors mainly through suppressing their opponents. Usually these henchmen are politically motivated emotional youngsters. In exchange of their supports, they ask for some benefits. With mentors in power, they become more demanding and try to extract more benefits for them. In the process, they begin to grow unruly too. The mentors, however, can neither meet up all of their demands nor can they distant them considering their services and necessity.
In such situations, they start influencing authorities so that some undue benefits accrued to them.
Very often they succeed too. Then comes the issue of accruing financial benefits capitalizing on their relationship with the political bosses and their own muscle-power. During this process, opposing groups often come face to face and get inevitably involved in serious tussles. To strengthen themselves, these groups often recruit some professional criminals at this stage. More or less this is how terrorism originates and spreads. The areas of operation of these groups expand gradually. The one-time henchmen of the political leaders in this way become full-fledged terrorists. Many other non-political criminals join them subsequently to serve their own purposes making the terrorist groups bigger and more violent.
Can such terrorism be curbed down only by the law enforcing agencies? As has been seen from the above that terrorism develops primarily due to political cronyism while ordinary crimes develop due to economic crisis and other social imbalances. Under certain circumstances, the terrors care the members of law enforcing agencies a
hoot while the ordinary criminals are usually afraid of them. Whenever terrorists are about to be hit by the members of law enforcing agencies, they take shelter of their political mentors. The latter cannot but protect their henchmen-terrorists. Willingly or unwillingly, they are to ask the law enforcing agency members to go slow. Most of agency members for obvious reasons find it inconvenient to go against the wishes of such bosses. And for that reason the terrorists very often remain untouched.
The law-enforcing agencies can control ordinary crimes, if they so wish, but they cannot effectively control terrorism unless they get political support. They can play supplementary role here. The political support invariably means support from the politicians in general, not politicians of the ruling party alone. The whole issue hinges on this. Interestingly, the ruling parties in Bangladesh have always been found to seek support of the opposition political parties for curbing terrorism down but ironically they do not seemingly want terror-
ists backed by them to be controlled. They have rather been found to be interested in seeing the opposition-backed terrorists silenced leaving theirs untouched.
The law enforcing agencies find it highly difficult to treat the terrorists in two different ways not on moral ground but of fear that opposition parties might take the matter seriously in the event of their coming to power. This is why the attempts of successive governments for curbing down terrorism never succeeded.
Then is it not possible for the governments to curb down terrorism at all? Perhaps, yes. But under democratic system, 'yes' only if the ruling party determinedly wants it. Unless it is so, every exercise will be merely eyewash. In fact, it has repeatedly been happening in Bangladesh for quite a long time. For curbing down terrorism, the ruling party shall have to start initiating action simultaneously against terrorists supported both by it and the opposition parties as well. But the crude reality is that a party with no democratic practice within itself
cannot exist without its terroristsupporters. Even smaller parties with democratic practices, if exist at all, need to have some terroristsupporters to protect themselves from the terrorists of the major ones run by non-democratic practices.
By this time, the readers may have understood where lies the fault and where the shoe pinches. The present day terrorism of Bangladesh, like that in many other developing counties, originated primarily from the absence of democratic practices amongst the major political parties. Electing party leaders, taking party decisions and executing them through democratic processes would certainly reduce party leaders' dependency on the hench-men-terrorists. This would allow the leaders to work freely resulting in the fact that they would not be under obligation to support the illegal and immoral activities carried out by the terrorist-supporters. Thus terrorist activities would ultimately decline.
Perhaps, any citizen with ordinary prudence would not doubt that the politicians do not understand this. If so, then why do they not do
that? Here there are some problems for the politicians. The major ones are difficulties in introducing democratic norms in the party activities and the lack of confidence of the political parties on each other. Is there any guarantee that the opposition parties would follow the ruling party if it starts disbanding its terror-ist-groups? Should or can the ruling party trust that the opposition parties would not use their terroristsupporters in wining elections if its terrorist-groups are disbanded? To get rid of this situation, the parties need to start practicing democracies amongst themselves and initiate dialogues amongst the political parties with a view to creating congenial political environment for a terrorism free society.
It is now the political parties who are to decide whether they like to behave properly or not; whether they like to curb down terrorism or not. Without introducing democratic practices within party, the situation will not improve. Neutral and efficient law enforcing agencies can only improve the situation a little bit. However, passing of a bill for regu-
lating party activities, inter-party relationship etc. may help in introducing democratic practices in political parties, which will have strong and positive effect on curbing down terrorism.
It is now high time for the politicians to democratise their party activities. This is not all that shall have to be done for curbing down terrorism but this is the first and foremost one. If done, terrorism is then bound to be curbed down to a major extent. Other steps would be supplemental. If, however, it is not done, then terrorism would be intensified further. Street killings, rape, hijacking would be order of the day. Democratic-minded people of the country certainly do not like it. At the same time, they cannot afford the luxury of suffering so much for the benefit of the so-called leaders who apparently do not appear to care for them at all. May the common people of the country hope that all concerned would come to sense and behave properly!