& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

Pain falls, drop by drop

Syed Badrul Ahsan
THERE was a fundamental decency in Nurul Islam. And it was there because of the dignity, the sense of self-esteem, which defined his personality. He was a politician in the very real sense of the meaning, which is as much as to say that he was a reminder of the values we once lived by. As one of the foremost of spokesmen for the toiling classes, he was second to none. There was the authoritative about him. There was nothing of the authoritarian you could spot in his long career in the political circuit. He was a bold individual to whom the idea of power was essentially the idea of trust. Politics, in that very broad way of looking at it, was a responsibility that brought the state and its citizens together, through the formulation of social welfare programmes and then pushing them on to fulfillment. It was never about seeking or winning office.
That was the overall principle on which Nurul Islam, as president of the Gonotontri Party and as working classes' activist, conducted his life and his career. And that principle led him, in the as yet unforeseen tragic final phase of his life, into making himself part of the secular political grouping which aimed to bring about qualitative change in Bangladesh’s politics. As a nominee of the grand alliance for the Jatiya Sangsad at the December 2008 general elections, he was clearly headed for victory. He was part of a band of men and women who meant to recover and restore the respect for politics that had been lost over the years. In Nurul Islam, you saw a personification of that goal. He would have injected energy, through an employment of intellect, into parliamentary politics. He would, like so many others of his kind, have informed the world beyond our frontiers of our ability and our readiness to remember the ideals that once had led us to freedom. He would, in
coruscating manner, have been our window of sophistication to the world. He was a good man; and we looked forward to his triumph, the better to take us a little closer to the heights we had for decades tried scaling.
And it was at that precise point that he was cut down. It was a fire in his home that took, first, the life of his young son and then, in barely thirty-six hours, his own. That was a year ago. Even as the nation prepared to usher in a fresh new era in democratic governance, even as citizens peered into what they believed was a new dawn, Nurul Islam died in a blaze that no one has been able to explain to our satisfaction. Yes, there have been all the guesswork and all the putative attempts at arriving at the truth. Inquiries have been undertaken and investigations have been launched to unearth the mystery', as many would like to call it, behind Islam's death and that of his son. The tragedy, like so many other sadnesses we have been con-
fronted with in this unfortunate country, is that precious little headway has been made in digging into the roots of the deaths. Various thoughts, some outlandish and others untenable, have been proffered to explain, or explain away, the tragedy. A wire in the room caught fire; something went wrong with the refrigerator. But that locking of the room from outside? Was that not a sign of sabotage, of murder premeditated, of conspiracy at work? These are questions the investigating agencies have not answered or have chosen to ignore. That Nurul Islam had telephonic threats coming his way in the days immediately before that fire burned him and burned a dream into ashes has not been looked into.
A year on, therefore, life goes on, for those who choose not to care, as it always has. Only Nurul Islam and his son have gone missing, individuals today remembered merely as casualties in a tragic occurrence caused by 'mysterious' circumstances. That is not decency. It is
Nurul Islam
not any enhancement of our reputation as a people we come by when we choose to push Nurul Islam and his politics into
the wilderness that is our voluntary succumbing to amnesia.
A year on, and despite the conscious attempt to forget, despite the urge for life to go on in the usual scheme of things, we wait for justice to be done, to be seen to be done, in the case of a dead, once energizing Nurul Islam versus a society gone insensitive, a bureaucracy rendered meaningless through inaction. Nurul Islam, because of the values he symbolized, remains our claim on all the good we have kept believing in, despite all those stumbles along the way.
And that is reason why we need to know who took the life out of him. out of his child. Until we do. pain wall fall, drop by drop, on us all — until it becomes overwhelming. Until it consumes us. Nurul Islam's perturbed spirit needs to rest.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, Pie Daly Star E-mail bahsantareq@yahoo co uk