In a free country, we are a hostage nation.
There are the pernicious elements which conceal our onions, hoard them, and will only release them if we are ready to cough up loads of money for them. And thus do we become prey to the predatory instincts of men ready to trade on our misfortunes, people who have no qualms in raising onion prices from Tk40 to Tk100 to Tk240 per kilogram.
There is no force that can break up the syndicates which commit this criminality. And so it is that we have progressively dwindled into being a hostage nation.
In the holy month of Ramadan, there are all the exhortations by the powerful and the influential to traders. Do not raise prices in the holy season, say these men and women of power to those ready to profit on people’s miseries. They nod, they promise to remember faith and God.
And then they break the promise, they push God aside, even as they speak of the sanctity of the season. Prices do go up, not inconsequentially but enormously. It is we, the simple and struggling and humble and huddling masses of this sovereign country, who go through the grinder.
But does anyone care?
Those hard to get onions have made us weep, in figurative and real terms. And yet the unscrupulous traders who have them burrowed away will not relent. There is nothing the state can do about it, nothing that will instill the fear of the law in them. Yes, plane-loads of onions fly in from lands overseas. Those onions cost a fortune for the state. That still does not bring those hostage takers to heel. That still does not shame the men who dream of building their castles through an abuse of onions. Our onions are their passage to unashamed prosperity.
And as you contemplate the means of freeing yourself of your hostage condition, you are hit by the news that transport workers in parts of the country have taken it upon themselves to halt long-haul public transport services. They are furious that a new transport law prescribing the limits beyond which drivers and transport owners cannot go is in place.
It is all a familiar scene, part of a pattern we have known. In a land where serving ministers in the past, in combination with their roles as trade unionists, have fuelled bus strikes, it is only natural that their dark legacy will perpetuate itself.
It is a reminder of those horrific moments when trucks clogged the roads, until a mayor of purpose arrived, went through a hail of brickbats before compelling the mobs behind that violence to retreat. That mayor is now in his grave. How we wish he were yet in our midst.
And so there are all the hostages -- and we speak of ourselves -- to the sinister activities of these hostage-takers. A college aspirant cannot appear at her admission examination; an office worker is stranded; a family in need of medical treatment for one of its own knows not how to wriggle out of a difficult situation. Those buses will not move unless the law is bent, unless the authorities capitulate, unless morality bites the dust.
The hostages crowd the streets in sheer helplessness. There are the free-flowing tears of citizens who do not know the path out of these woodlands where malaise reigns.
We are taken for a ride, through the seasons, in this people’s republic. The men who engage in scandals around market shares remain beyond the pale of the law. The men who borrow hefty loans from state-owned banks, who amass black money, who gain the notoriety of defaulters do not pay the price for their sins.
In a society where they should answer to the law, to the elected representatives of the people, nothing happens. We remain hostages to their depredations, even as we observe in disbelief the law pursuing the impecunious farmer who cannot repay on schedule the minuscule loan he has taken out from a bank.
In the unjust society we are part of, we look behind our shoulders in fear of new dangers that just might overwhelm us. As we grieve over those elusive onions, we know the mafia is out there, lurking in the bushes, for the opportunity of hoarding salt in the expectation of a further spate of robbery.
They will love nothing more than to rub salt in our already open wounds. They drool over the looming possibilities of seeing those thirty-five taka packets of edible salt leap to being hundred and Tk35 packets. Profiteering gleams in their eyes. Greed beats in their hearts. Fear rises anew in our souls.
Yes, we are a hostage nation -- hostage to roadblocks rapidly erected to protest an accident, hostage to doctors’ refusal to work when complaints are made about the callousness of treatment of patients, hostage to leaks of question papers set for school, college and university education, hostage to unadulterated land-grabbing, to a purloining of streams and lakes and rivers.
Little by little, we withdraw into the miserable darkness of our decrepit huts.
Little by little, dishonesty clothes itself in the raiment of respectability.
Little by little, our once spirited optimism drowns in an expansive quicksand of despair and defeat.
Little by little, our self-esteem goes, our confidence in our future goes.
The future is being commandeered by all that malevolently happy crowd of onion and salt hoarders and bank loan defaulters and money launderers. We the hostages seek the company of the distant stars, to search for our lost poetry. Through the nightmare of the present, we go picking up the dreams which shaped our past.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
