The post-election (or selection) 12-month caesuras of 2014 was the cauldron where unabashed hatred and miasma were brewed only to spill over by the sheer lack of political wisdom on the part of the one-person-rule of Sheikh Hasina Wazed.
Yes, BNP too, is ruled by one person’s wishes and whims, and it made and continues to make serious political mistakes.
This, however, does negate their continued 30+% popular support. Buoyed by winning a flawed election, Sheikh Hasina just cannot wish the opponent away.
And with the headwind of public mood, as evidenced by the local elections of the previous year, she also cannot offer a fair and interim election in which her boat is almost certain to sink.
So, she took the hawkish stand to tame the political enemy by brute force, underneath which a sense of moral guilt and/or uneasiness is easily palpable. She is showering the military and other law enforcement outfits with all they want … unaware of the power of the people – her ultimate master!
However rotten it may be, Khaleda Zia needed a little space to manoeuvre. When pressed against the wall, a dog will bite. So it happened, and now we live in the dark dungeons of the Khaleda-Hasina paradigm. It is now a fight unto the finish for the two leaders. No, it is not a fight between the ranks and file of the Awami League and the BNP – they socialise, they intermarry, and they are not all hatemongers.
In her zeal to fight the melee, supposedly unleashed by Khaleda Zia’s unwilling utterance of “oborodh” when she herself was “oboruddho” by the silly acts of some very silly police-politicians on the silly presumption of “security.” Sheikh Hasina has ordered her gun-bearing outfits to do all they can without worrying about any legal consequence.
She has the equivalent of what her father had (in totally politicised police, BGB, and RAB). Well, she is also borrowing a chapter from the dark days of Khaleda’s regime when she granted indemnity to military thugs, whereby Operation Clean Heart was morphed into Operation Heart Attack.
The other day, four senior ministers of the Hasina-regime had a meeting with the who’s who of Bangladeshi media. No, they were not there to intimidate. They were there to lay the facts on the table to show things are all hunky dory in the land of AL.
By the way, which country do they really live in? Do their kids go to school in Bangladesh? Do they ride on public buses? Do they get their health check-ups in Bangladeshi hospitals?
Nope. But they surely have visited the burn unit in DMCH, along with their big entourage including a few television cameras …
No, things are not hunky dory. The lives of the little people are in ruins. State power is helpless and cannot provide security to its people. And this reminds this scribe of another dark age of our history, when the state was in tatters and melee was the norm.
Yes, after the death of Shashanka, the sociopolitical construct of Bengal (from the late eighth to the early eighth century) was in chaos. Harshavardhana of Kannauj, Shashanka’s perpetual nemesis, took a big bite while the rest was wrested by Bhaskar Varman, king of Kamrup.
Without an overarching power (of Hobbes’ Leviathan), the petty chieftains were running amok. Rule of law vanished. The rich and powerful were preying on the poor and weak. Taranath, the astute Tibetan monk coined the word “mathshannya” (a moral parallel of large fish eating small fish) to describe this state of total entropy. This was during the period 600 and early 700AD.
Now fast forward more than a millennium to the first month of 2015. Two unwise persons, driven largely by personal animosity for each other, are the prime movers. And their minions and the elites of the civil and arms-bearing outfits, abetted by a self-serving genre of business-bureaucrat nexus, are running amok and gobbling up the little fish, I mean, the poor and the powerless … its déjà vu all over again …
But wait – out of the ruins and melee came Gopala, the first elected king of Bengal.
