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CROSS TALK

The visible and the invisible in Narayanganj

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
OSCAR Wilde once said that the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. That saying is turning on its head in Narayanganj, where seven men have been killed after abduction. The mystery has been made thicker ever since the emphasis on the visible shifted to the invisible. The widows are grieving and orphans are left to hug
the empty air. Meanwhile, a witch hunt is in progress for one man, who has conveniently vanished into the thin air.
What's really going on in Narayanganj? By now we know everything that we need to know about this particular fugitive of law except where to find him. We know he possessed as many as eleven licensed firearms. Pictures of a large cache of Phensedyl bottles have been circulated to the media to establish the notoriety of a very, very bad man. It's also alleged that he has been a fiendish father who killed his own son.
But is this monstrous man a scapegoat or a scoundrel in this particular instance of seven deaths? Yes, the firearm licenses given him have been revoked. What about the firearms in his possession? Have those been recovered as well? If not, for the life of us it's hard to understand how nullifying papers is actually going to matter when weapons are at full cock.
How in the world did he get so many licenses in the first place? Who authorised those licenses? Why was it justified to give one man so many guns firing which required him to have more hands than the multiplearmed Durga? Too many guns issued in one name were bound to end up in hired hands.
Luckily that didn't happen this one time. None of those guns has killed any one of the seven victims. Instead, all of them were strangled to death before their bellies were slit open to quicken their sinking in water. Why then is this one particular suspect getting so much attention? Why are the investigators vigorously going after him like Speedy Gonzalez, a Warner Brothers cartoon character, but slouching like Gonzalez's cousin slow-foot Pedro when they need to catch those three Rab men given the High Court order?
Science has a name for this phenomenon, and it's called pseudo neglect. For reasons that are not entirely clear, during some tasks humans have a tendency to devote more visual attention to the left side of the visual world than the right side. If we look at the political murders in the past, the lopsided brain was always at work.
What about the three sensational crimes that shocked this nation until seven bloated bodies floated in Shitalakhya River? The disappearances of BNP leader ChowdhuryAlam and Ilyas Ali and the gruesome murder of journalist couple Sagar and Runi remain unsolved despite prime minister's personal assurance to their families and to this nation. Thousands of others have disappeared and are still disappearing, some of the bodies littering the killing fields of this land.
It's odd that every time these crimes are discussed, the ruling party leaders and their sympathizers bring up the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family members on the fateful night of August 15, 1975 and the grenade attack of August 21,2004. Those were horrible crimes no doubt and some of the guilty have been punished already, others under prosecution. But do they have to sound so vengeful as if this government has been created for the sole purpose of settling its scores with BNP alone!
Agatha Christie writes that dogs are wise because they crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds before they rejoin the world being whole once more. The two large political parties in this country have never recovered from their wounds. Time and again they have been pushed to the corner by autocratic regimes and by each other. And, they have always returned to power to hurt their opponents more.
That's why the impulsive reaction of some ruling party leaders including the state minister for home was that the Narayanganj killing was an act of BNP men. In any civilised country the minister would have been asked to resign for his unbridled tongue. But that doesn't happen in this country because power rests on a daisy chain where conniving people are connected in a series and the manifest is as much of a vital link as the hidden.
This is where the spin comes. One, who has gone into hiding, is hiding for many who're out in the open. This technique proved effective every time as it always forced mystery to get more mysterious. The reason why the invisible has taken over the visible in Narayanganj is the same old story. The suspicious and the suspect are in cahoots. Everything else is giving us eyewash.
The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrull51@yahoo.com