WHAT has happened in Boraigram in Natore is not just a tragedy or an outrage. It is an abomination, a clear hint of the depths to which politics in Bangladesh may have sunk. The bad mauling of Boraigram Upazilla chairman Sanaullah Noor Babu by Awami League activists and his subsequent death are once more a warning to the government that unless it can get matters under control through putting a leash on its supporters, we could be headed for some grave times ahead. In the light of what has occurred in Boraigram, there can be no scope to argue about who did what on Friday. There can be no philosophising and absolutely no room for a laid-back dissection of politics. The plain and simple truth is that an individual, a citizen, was brutally waylaid by more than fifty workers of the ruling party and simply beaten to death in medieval fashion. No one came forward to help him. The police, standing close by, watched it all with little thought to performing their duties. That Babu lay on the road for an hour after the beating, that it needed his wife to come and take him to hospital speaks of the steep decline of our value system.

It was a peaceful procession the ruling party men pounced upon. Even a number of journalists of electronic and print media while at work were manhandled. Two cameras were seized from them to prevent them from keeping a record of the macabre happening. We have been told, almost in defence of the attackers, that the BNP procession led by Babu came under attack because it had failed to heed the warning of local businessmen not to carry out its protest on Friday. Are we supposed to believe that such warnings, once they are not listened to, will lead to the kind of tragedy that has now happened? Observe too the unabashed attempt on the part of a local Awami League leader to dismiss any notion of his party workers' involvement in the whole gory episode. He tells the country that no Awami League leaders were present on the scene when the attack on Babu took place. Who is he trying to fool? He and others like him may not have been there physically, but those that were all belong to his party. To suggest that Babu's death did not have anything to do with the role of a party opposed to his is a brazen attempt to pull the wool over a nation's eyes.

The incident in Boraigram does a whole lot more than cause shivers in us about the rapid collapse of mores and values in our society. It leaves the administration looking pathetic and the party in power incapable of freeing itself from the grip of its own unruly young. Whether the tragic happening spirals into a whole new period of chaotic politics remains to be seen. To prevent that from happening, the government must institute an independent probe and immediately go after each and everyone involved in Babu's killing. It must demonstrate to the country that it is, for once, not guided by political partisanship and that it has the courage and the will to punish the criminal elements lurking within it. There is something more the authorities must do: take every policeman who failed to carry out his duty of keeping law and order in Boraigram to task. Such employees of the republic are a disgrace.

We wait to see decisive, effective action.