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Wrong time to be complacent
THE Bangladesh police chiefs recent statement that crime control activities have been on a satisfactory level may have surprised many. And to justify his statement he even went on to say that the string of murders in Narayanganj, Feni, Laxmipur and Noakhali were some 'stray incidents’ and that one should not conclude from those that the state of law and order has deteriorated.
So, the wave of killings from Narayanganj to Feni to Laxmipur to Noakhali were mere 'stray incidents' and hence those should not be an indication of deteriorating law and order! If some were surprised by the first part of the police chiefs remark, it should now be their turn to be shocked.
Are these two innocent-sounding words, 'stray incidents,' so powerful that they can rob those blood-curdling murders of their potential for leaving a negative impact on the state of law and order? But since it was the police chief who was speaking, the remark was certainly not part of a joke.
True, when the whole issue is about controlling crime and when the success rate of combating it is overwhelmingly high, one can ignore a few cases of crime, the occurrence of which could not be prevented or the perpetrators of which remained beyond the reach of the law. In such a case, any statement claiming that the law and order is under control can hardly be refuted. But can one honestly say that the situation now prevailing on the crime front is 'satisfactory'? Would it be fair to call the incidence of all those ghastly killings within a span of few weeks 'stray' or sporadic? Was the overall crime picture really so agreeable as the IGP would have us believe, especially at that particular time when he was giving his opinion?
The subject of law and order is no rocket science that is inaccessible to common man, nor does information about it require hard research to come by. Even the man in the street will be able to give you a gross picture of the goings-on around, and you can well guess that his version of the reality won't be so hunky-dory as our law enforcement authority would like to portray. The print and the electronic media in their daily reports are dishing out hard information round the clock on the crime situation. So, there is no reason to think members of the public are in the dark about what is going on in the country.
A leading Bangla daily's front page report of last Saturday tells us that Laxmipur alone has been the scene of 34 murders over the past five months and a half. And most of those killings resulted from gunfights between different terrorist gangs. Quoting a former general secretary of the local lawyers' association, the report further says that the number of such terrorist gangs ranges from 20 to 22 in that district. How can one be so complacent about the overall state of law and order, when only a single district of the country is infested with so much violence and terror?Human rights bodies, who painstakingly collect media reports on crime, document those and release their reports from time to time, do also provide us regularly with the overall picture on crime in the country. But not a single such report in recent memory did corroborate the police chiefs version of the reality. The latest study by the human rights watchdog Ain O Salish Kenfdra (ASK) tells us that this year 16 people have been victims of enforced disappearance and of them seven have been found dead. Over the same period, a total of 53 people were victims of kidnapping.
It is hardly surprising that in an instant reaction to the police chiefs perception of the reality, some rights body leaders have criticised him severely. It was really a wrong time for the police boss to have expressed such satisfaction over the law and order situation. But for whatever reason, whether for pleasing the political bosses or for boosting the low morale of his police department, it must have sounded like a cruel joke to families whose members have fallen victim to those gruesome killings
Laxmipur is, as everyone knows, a crime-prone district. But was not that also enough reason for the police to put in additional effort for bringing order and sanity in that area?
Evidently, nothing substantial has been done so far to that end. Small wonder that the situation like in Laxmipur has started to proliferate all over the country. When we are discussing the newspaper report on Laxmipur, the plot over the grisly murder of Phulgazi upazila chairman in Feni is thickening with accusing fingers now being pointed at a powerful lawmaker of the area. Exactly in the same way, the hand of politics is becoming more and more visible in the horrifying Narayanganj multiple murders of April 27 that had benumbed the entire nation. Whether the culprits immediately behind those killings are professional killers, or youth or student cadres of a political party, or members of a law-enforcement agency in increasing number of cases, it is becoming evident that they are just doing the bidding of their political masters.
When crime is thus getting politicised, or politics getting criminalised, one can understand the helplessness of the servants of the Republic working for enforcement of law. But even at such times, the public expects professionalism from the highest placed law-enforcement officials of the state.
The writer Is Editor, Science & Life, TheDailyStar. E-mail: sfalim.ds@gmail .com