Worries about the state of the nation assail us every livelong moment these days. Those images of our citizens going out in their tens of thousands to their villages leave us disturbed. How many of them will sooner rather than later come to be infected by the coronavirus? And how many among them will succumb to it even as they dance and skip their way home to celebrate Eid?
These are questions which rear their heads in light of the increasingly improved testing methods that have been identifying new cases of people infected with the malady. The numbers, as we have them from the government, of people ailing and dying from the virus are going up day by day. Pushing our thoughts into deeper darkness is the realization that the national economy could well begin creaking, and soon.
With as many as 18 stimulus packages coming from the government, one broods on how much longer the state can take this pressure on itself if the coronavirus goes on hovering over the country and over the world for an unimaginable length of time.
Our banks are in a parlous state. Our industries are trying to keep afloat, just. Our educational institutions, all the way from primary school to university, will soon reach a condition where their students might not be able to pay fees and teachers might not be privy to salaries. But that is infinitely of comparatively less worry than the woes that have begun to eat away at the patience of those much poorer than so many others.
You only need to cast a glance at the reports of garment factory workers demanding, before the gates of their workplaces, the wages they have not been paid by the owners for months. It is a shame that the industrial police have had to step in to pacify these hapless men and women by convincing the smug owners of the factories to promise a clearing of the workers’ wages. Pseudo-capitalism can be humbled only by the loud protests of the poor.
We are grateful that our doctors, nurses, and other health workers have been putting their lives on the line in doing all they can to save the lives of those laid low by the coronavirus. We celebrate their devotion to duty. But we are left terribly depressed, and angry, when there are doctors who have little compunction in refusing to treat those afflicted with the virus from fear that they too will be infected.
When a woman rushes from one hospital to another, when the father of a young doctor is refused admission in hospitals and eventually has the life going out of him, we worry about the presence around us of men with an all-consuming love of self and no soul. They are not embarrassed, but we are embarrassed at their absence of embarrassment.
The coronavirus has been bringing out some of the best in us. The young stand ready to come to the aid of those in lockdown. Families have drawn closer at home, for they need to keep alive through being there for each other. In the villages, youths have fanned out to assist those in need through initiating relief programs. That is human conscience at work. But then, there are too the unconscionable acts of men whose reputation has been none too good. When media organizations imperiously inform a large clutch of their employees that they need not come to their workplaces anymore, it is the manifest evil in these men that comes alive.
Media owners who spend barrels of money organizing pretentious seminars and frequently travelling abroad do not pay their employees on time. And now the coronavirus has come as a boon for them: They have sacked their long-serving, dedicated employees. Where is the law that will haul them to justice to answer for their transgressions? Why must their organizations live while their poor workers are pushed out of their jobs?
That is our worry. That is our shame. The shame is as intense as the morbidity which strikes us at the news of misappropriations of food for the desperately poor. When it is the well-fed relatives and loyalists of local politicians who insinuate themselves on the list of the poverty-stricken, who put in an identical mobile phone number on the list as their points of contact, we know of the lowliness and wretchedness these people have always flaunted without any thought to their self-esteem.
The authorities inform us that that single mobile phone number penned into the poverty list by so many was carelessness, was indeed a mistake, will be corrected. That is another instance of shame for you and me, for we realize the law will not touch these men or the man around whom their parasitic nature thrives.
The worn-out, flimsy message is sent our way every day: No one tampering with relief earmarked for the poor will go unpunished. That message will be appreciated when those perpetrators of theft, those merchants of highway robbery are punished, speedily, and in full view of the country. Until then, we wait and we watch. When life has turned into a horror story for every single citizen -- teachers, doctors, policemen, businessmen, students, and workers have perished before this coronavirus onslaught -- when nightmares have replaced dreams, when our futures look about to recede into our past, these thieves make a mockery of us all.
Democracy does not permit such brazenness on the part of the corrupt. Pluralist politics takes a bad beating when asking for answers to questions becomes a crime, when journalists are led away to prison in handcuffs because they sought to present their points of view to their readers. In a democracy, freedom of speech ought not to be a cliché, to be mouthed at regular intervals. It ought to be part of life, defended alike by citizens and by the powers that be. It must not be the prerogative of the powerful few, to be weaponized in coercing the honest and helpless many into groveling submission.
Our worries do not end. They tell us these abnormal conditions are the new normal. Meanwhile, the world is fast becoming an increasingly bigger, darker cemetery for all of us. Death stalks us. It is outside the door. It lurks in the room.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.