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All in the name of the people ...
PAKISTAN-TIME political lexicon contained a blood-hungry slogan: Hum khun se holi khelenge (we will play holi with blood). Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy's response was elemental as a champion of democracy. He would say: "We will fight will ballot." But the walkway to the ballot is the thorniest of problems today -thanks to a degenerate evolution of political culture.
Fast-forward to Bangladesh version: Let God's children have third degree burns cooped up in an enclosed transport (in fact, altogether 76 were burnt including 13 children and 3 physically disabled). As one human being anguished with bone-chilling pain of another we have the self-same
studying or working abroad, complained some of the respondents, so they could care less about education in the country going to dogs. They are neither bothered about the rising prices that can only hurt the public.
The trouble with hartal, particularly the long duration type, is that it offers a happy hunting ground for saboteurs and people with extremist agenda. Increasingly, two features have been noticeable in the long-drawn out hartals. First, it has had a throwaway jehadi temper geared to resisting and repudiating war crimes trial. These are the handmaidens of Jamaat-Shibir elements and those pressing for theological agenda on the sides. Secondly, Dhaka being heavily policed, hartal violence has spread out of the capital city into the countryside. Uprooting railway lines, torching trains and vehicles, and barricading roads along the inter-district routes are some of the new dangerous facets of the hartal backlash.
Sheikh Hasina repeatedly says, her struggle is for restoring voter rights
agony of the victims. But sadly in passing
as we are not the ones to endure the loss, they are - how barbaric have we become that even sympathy and compassion have become partisan.
On the back of 10-day hartal in 19 days with 26 lives felled, more than one thousand wounded and transactional loss of at least Tk. 1,500 crore per day, the nation is helplessly looking on the terrible prospect of 'Street,
which have been lost to unelected governments. Nobody in principle can have any quarrel with that, but for peaceful transfer of power, there is no alternative to free, fair, credible and inclusive election.
The painful experience with political gridlocks over any bone of contention, no matter how it came under the teeth of both parties is that it's in the streets that intractable political problems had got resolved. And, a parliament, howsoever ill-born, gave a seal of
more street violence, to hell with a discussion path heralding a participator credible election'!
The cruelest joke of all is that a hartal is called in the name of the people but it is the public who bear the brunt of it all, including law enforcers on duty. But yes, the collateral damages do not spare the AL nor the BNP as some of their local leaders and followers are felled by the lethal salvos from the political thugs and extremists.
Hartal is pre-designated as 'peaceful' but the caller has no control of the proceedings. A proforma statement would be made by the organisers during and at the end of hartal thanking the people in glowing terms for their'spontaneous cooperation' (read, disgust and hatred!).
The snippets of public perception we have been able to gather during hartals are that these are called from the comfort zone of party offices with little sensitivity to the public pulse. The protagonists have their children
approval to it. If this dangerous precedent has to be changed as it should be, the political parties in their best wisdom should do everything in their power to foster a new culture of conflict resolution.
The drama and theatrics surrounding the cabinet resignation to pave the way for a so-called all party government tend to skirt the real issue at hand. This entails arriving at common modalities of forming a poll-time government.
The motto on both sides of the aisle still stubbornly reads: 'My rights or I bite.' As irrelevant and wasteful dynamism in politics grows like in the case of'horsepower in modern automobiles steadily rising as the congestion of traffic steadily lowers the speed of you car, is it to be considered progress'? quipped Sydney J. Harris, a famous American journalist.
The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: husain.imam@thedailystar.ne