Editorial
An appreciable move
The government crackdown on suspected Islamic militants ought to have come a whole lot earlier. But now that that it has come, one can be certain that whole swathes of the population will feel somewhat relieved. The activities of the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh and Jamaatul Mujahideen have lately aroused serious concern among all sections of citizens, to a point where fears have been openly expressed about a process of political destabilisation ultimately setting in. Together with that have come the oft-repeated statements from government quarters, including the minister of state for home affairs, to the effect that such elements as Bangla Bhai are a figment of media imagination and that these elements do not exist. The welter of confusion that was created around the patently questionable activities of the JMJB took a peculiar turn when even the directive of the prime minister to arrest the leader of the outfit was clearly made a mockery of. Bangla Bhai has till today remained untraced. One hopes that he will not turn out to be a long term elusive figure.
The requirement at this stage, now that the JMJB and JM have been outlawed, is to follow through on the ban by keeping up the pressure on the militants. While not many people around the country think that the Islamists are a well-organised group and therefore an immediate risk to democratic politics, the bigger truth is that they have clearly been gathering increasing doses of courage in their campaign of promoting a radical brand of political Islam in this country. The ferocity with which the followers of Bangla Bhai have been working in the north-eastern region of the country, through such behaviour as amplifying on mikes the groans of men they happened to be subjecting to torture in the rural areas, has quite justifiably alarmed civil society. What added to the collective injury of the people is the fact that even some important people in the administration, especially the police, were seen to be complicit in the vigilante activities of the JMJB. It appears that in their zeal to have so-called extreme leftists tracked down and physically eliminated, elements in the civil and police administration were only too willing to appreciate the services offered by Bangla Bhai and his followers. Given such a background, it could not but be natural that severe consequences would follow. The government press note relating to the ban on the two militant outfits itself makes note of the consequences. The banned organisations, says the press note, have been engaging in killing, dacoity, bomb attacks, issuing threats and other subversive activities. One is here compelled to inquire why it took the government such a long time to acknowledge the threat when people and organisations all over Bangladesh knew much earlier what was going wrong. Had timely action been taken, much of the damage already done to the national image would not have come to pass.
Let the momentum towards ferreting out the militants, or alleged militants, proceed apace. The arrest of an academic of Rajshahi University on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities must now lead to a thorough investigation of the Ahle Hadith movement with which the academic is associated. In the overall sense, let the feeling not arise in people that the banning of the Jagrata Muslim Janata and Jamaatul Mujahideen as well as the arrest of Professor Asadullah Ghalib are meant only for short term public consumption, that indeed it will in the end amount to nothing. The situation in the country is too serious to allow us any such luxury of thought.
Masako’s little world
Crown Prince Naruhito has apologised for the complaint he earlier made on the treatment meted out to his wife. Briefly, Crown Princess Masako has been going through a load of stress, physically as well as psychologically, over her failure to produce a male so vital for the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the kind of surroundings in which the Japanese royal household has regularly operated, it was only natural that Masako Owada, as she used to be known before her marriage into royalty, would feel the constraints that come with stuffy formality. But then, one could ask: did she not volunteer to marry the Crown Prince? Yes, it did take Naruhito quite a while to have the lady agree to be part of his life. But when finally she did consent to be part of the royal household, she knew what she was getting into. It was, simply put, her way of becoming part of history.
But since the marriage, Princess Masako has gone through a miscarriage followed by the birth of a daughter — and much anguish besides. The strains have clearly been showing, judging by the way she has been going through medication. And yet life could have been different for her, for before her marriage she was on her way to the top of the Japanese diplomatic structure. As a young diplomat, Masako Owada had taken part in some very intense negotiations on behalf of her government (of course in a team) with governments in the West. It was at those negotiations that her diplomatic skills drew the attention of those around her. The general assumption was that she would sooner rather than later reach as high a perch as that of her father, who was then envoy to the United Nations. It was marriage that came in the way. And all Japanese face a situation today where their Crown Princess is not in a good frame of mind and body, the Crown Prince is jittery and yet properly contrite and, overall, the country is being forced to reconsider the whole question of succession to the throne through allowing females to wear the crown.
There is something of the fairy tale here. But in fairy tales people live happily ever after. Masako Owada has become sadder in her world of royal isolation. It is a pity.
EDITORSPEAK
Omissions coming home to roost
It is time to mend ways, and not push the country back into the pit of ignorance and bigotry or to
the cultist and idolatrous politics which Bangladesh had left far behind and from which the country
has been saved for the second time
There is much ado about a ‘seminar’ that is slated to be held on February 23 and 24 at the World Bank headquarters in Washington. The meet, known to have been initiated by a majority of the donors, including multilaterals like the United Nations, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, is billed to be ‘informal’. According to a World Bank text, the event ‘will help donors share ideas about how to support effectively as it (WB) moves to advance its important governance agenda’.
There is nothing palpably sinister about it, nor is anything hidden in the agenda. In the absence of the routine and obligatory Bangladesh Development Forum (BDF) meeting, chaired by the World Bank in the donee country’s capital, Dhaka, and usually held in the month of May each year in lieu of what used to be the Paris Aid Club meeting, the ‘informal seminar’ is not something out of the blue. The exclusion of the government from the proceedings, which caused the reactive ire of Finance Minister Saifur Rahman, is, however, something out of the ordinary. That, the WB will explain, cannot be helped in a somewhat changed context, we presume.
Presumptions and speculations will always be a part of such events when Bangladesh’s growth strategy and the rolling three-year plans are now being pegged on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), as required by the donors and the multilaterals, including the IMF. The latter provides for the Poverty Reduction Grant Facility (PRGF) to scale the fences and the bumps on the road to what has now come to be known as the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) — a United Nations coinage of development targets and the subject country’s required upward movement in percentage points. There are other conditions too, that are exogenous in nature, and on which Bangladesh stumbles now and then for reasons which are not always divine. But the PRSP, at least, is home-grown.
Given the ‘informal’ status of the word ‘seminar’, the latter being different from what is implied by the word ‘meeting’, one of the non-official authors of the PRSP, economist Hossain Zillur Rahman, will participate in the seminar and present his paper titled ‘Engaging in good governance: a search for entry points’. (Zillur’s participation is in his invitational capacity as the seminar’s global knowledge partner, to use a WB jargon, and not as one of the authors of the PRSP).
The informal seminar, therefore, will be more of an academic discourse, in which the government does not quite fit. Nor can it answer some of the more critical questions, which abound and point fingers at the spectre of political Islam by some, particularly the European Union (EU). Not all development partners, however, agree on the EU’s assessment, though governmental omissions and the Jamaat’s ideological and political inroads and strategic advance have raised eyebrows even here, and fuelled the anti-Bangladesh propaganda by the net-workers within and without the country, serving the agenda of somebody else in the neighbourhood to depict Bangladesh as a cocoon of Islamic terror.
Hence, Finance Minister M Saifur Rahman should not take it to heart that Bangladesh has been by-passed and that something is cooking. If something is really cooking, it pertains to the broth of net-worked campaign against the country and this government, and has reached an orchestrated crescendo centring on the ‘seminar’, particularly the perceived and, in some cases, real indulgence of, if not abetment of, the obscurantist fringe elements within and outside the government. Add to it the bomb- and the grenade-happy terror regime, besides the earlier instance of, say, a Houdini-style vanishing act involving the Chittagong arms smuggling case, and now the ‘crossfire’ deaths of alleged criminals in the hands of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). The government has a lot of explaining to do, apart from just making odious comparisons with the other countries or situations.
That being another matter, though of no less concern and protest within and without the country, including this newspapers, several things need to be stated in this regard without equivocation. One, the WB ‘seminar’ should be left alone and the government should stop fussing and fuming out of pride or prejudice. The outcome of the February 23-24 seminar in Washington is least likely to impair Bangladesh’s developmental prospects insofar as they are contingent upon external resources, and the caravan will pass despite the ‘dogs’ barking all around, as the proverb goes. (Our profound apologies to Oxford Analytica and the Straits Times of Singapore, among the most recent ones, after Elizabeth Griswold of the New York Times Magazine and Dan Morrison of the New York Post had gone to town on a hunt of the ‘Islamic militants’ ready to wage a holy war in thousands).
Two, there are causes of concern not only among the donors, but more importantly among the people in the country, about the pattern of the bomb-terror regime, now also targeting BRAC and the Grameen Bank, the status of the investigations and, in some cases, trials of the spectacular arms haul in Chittagong, the grenade attacks of August 21 and January 27, the bomb attacks in Khulna in the south-west also the bomb-scares in the north-west, the most untenable stories of ‘crossfire deaths’ amounting to extra-judicial killings, etc. The list goes on and on.
Administration and law and order are the non-transferable duties of a government, and crying wolf about India’s RAW does not help to address the concerns. The latter may hurt instead, as the wolf may really come one day and shatter the silence of the lambs.
Three, in the context of the power struggle and keeping the January 2007 polls in view — which the leader of opposition, Sheikh Hasina, would rather not touch if it would not come her way like manna from heaven, as had happened in 1996 — the orchestration of the campaigns at this time and the government not mending its ways can indeed give Bangladesh the worst name and hang it.
Even though the numbers in the not-too-distant polls continue to stay in favour of the incumbent, ‘adverse publicity can incrementally erode public support’ ‘under the gloom of Kibria’s assassination’ and because of the unremitting campaigns gaining ‘fresh traction with the frequent allegations that Bangladesh is on the verge of a Taliban-style revolution’. (M Rashiduzzaman, Holiday, February 18, ‘05). And in combating these campaigns at home and abroad, the government, at the political as well the administrative levels, has not only failed, but has further helped fuel them by its omissions, as in the case of Bangla Bhai, or even the latest sneak attempt at Islamising the Shaheed Minar’s secular rituals on February 21.
The Dhaka University Chhatra Dal, as the New Age report of February 23 goes, did not find anything odd in the strange episode of a recitation of the scriptures from the holy book. Neither SMA Faiz, Vice-Chancellor, Dhaka University (DU), nor Arefeen Siddique, president of the Dhaka University Teachers’ Association (DUTA), knew anything about it. What say you, Mr RAB? And who needs Jamaat or Bangla Bhai or even an Amini when the Chhatra Dal says so?
Four, and most important among all, is the fact that the WB ‘seminar’, and the questions raised on very valid grounds by the development partners, are nothing new. Saifur Rahman should feel rather happy that he will not have to answer all those questions as he did in Brussels. There is nothing sinister about the seminar, as far as our understanding goes. ‘Crossfire’ deaths will come to reference, and so will the yet unfledged Anti-Corruption Commission. And there are umpteen other issues which the development partners glean from this country’s free media. There is no harm in answering questions. It is known as accountability. It’s a pity that the minister finds it insulting to answer the donors. What if the people start asking too many questions?
It is time to mend ways, and not push the country back into the pit of ignorance and bigotry or to the cultist and idolatrous politics which Bangladesh had left far behind and from which the country has been saved for the second time.
Revivalism of either of the variants of politics of blind loyalty and supplication is anti-progress, anti-modernity, anti-development and anti-rights.
— Enayetullah Khan
Simultaneously published in New Age & Holiday
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