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We note with grave concern the excesses that have been and are being committed by the members of the law enforcing and security agencies. The recent instance of brutality meted out to a businessman in the city by elements of the Rapid Action Battalion is an act that should not have happened at all. But now that it has happened, it becomes important that swift and appropriate punishment be given to those responsible for the assault on Abu Bakar Sultan Bitan. It is, in light of the recent record that RAB has established for itself, a miracle that Bitan has had his life saved. With all the reports of people dying in ‘crossfires’ in recent months, it would not have been anything of a surprise if he had lost his life in a similar situation. But now that he has survived, albeit in a physically and psychologically devastated state, it becomes the responsibility of conscious citizens to ask that a full-blown inquiry be initiated into the circumstances that led to his maltreatment at the hands of RAB.
   It is quite clear that Bitan’s ‘crime’ was to protest the rough treatment that some RAB personnel happened to be inflicting on an elderly citizen a few days ago. That was enough to infuriate the RAB people, who then decided on the easy thing to do, which was to take the young man to their office and beat him up badly. By now, quite a good deal of commotion has been created in the country over such brutality. His family has filed a general diary with the police. The chief of RAB has promised an inquiry. We will expect that the probe will be done quickly and meaningfully. And we say that because the country is today asking a whole lot of questions about the methods which RAB has been employing in dealing with citizens. Obviously, the focus, now that RAB is making itself controversial through its actions, has shifted from crime busting to a preservation of human rights. That can be seen through the easy manner in which unsavoury people have often threatened people they disapprove of with ‘crossfire deaths’. Even some policemen have in recent weeks, in their bid to pull off some extortion operations, warned their victims that they will be dead in ‘crossfires’ if they do not give in to their demands. Overall, then, the picture is one of both the police and RAB now clearly taking the law in their own hands and not willing to consider the constitutional and other rights that people are expected to enjoy. That is a very bad omen and we as a society will be in deep trouble if someone in authority does not recognise the danger and does not move to prevent a deterioration in the situation. Indeed, conditions have come to such a pass that well-meaning citizens are worried about the young in their families every time they go out. The recent death of a young man named Masum after he was taken away by some plainclothes policemen and now the ferocious assault on Bitan by RAB inject a very high level of fear in citizens.
   In such circumstances of fear and foreboding, it should be for the Jatiyo Sangsad to initiate a debate on the situation. It must be made clear that like every institution of the state, it is imperative that such outfits as RAB, the police, et al, be made accountable to Parliament. If the JS fails to do what needs to be done, it will be plain to all that the citizens of Bangladesh are increasingly being pushed into a state of vulnerability. That is something we would not like to see happen.

Rahman, the thespian

With the death of the thespian Rahman, an era in film making in our part of the world passes into history. There was about Rahman a whole set of memories, a remembrance of how lyrical and instructive movies used to be in the late 1950s and through their golden period all through the 1960s. The lyrical came through the melody, the songs that evoked a powerful sense of romance in young men and women in the times we speak of. The instructive lay in the perception of movies in that bygone era as tales of social concerns, images of life as it took shape around us. It is such a reality that we will now miss with Rahman’s passing.
   Where Rahman’s contribution to film making, in Pakistan and then Bangladesh, is concerned, one cannot but reflect on the suavity and the superior quality of acting he brought into it. He was one of a breed in those days, an era that was definitely dominated by the likes of Uttam Kumar in neighbouring West Bengal. But what one surely did not miss was that with people like Rahman around in East Pakistan, movies in terms of quality came rather close to those produced in Calcutta. Story lines, music and direction all combined to present people with a wholesome offering on celluloid. Rahman added substance to the package, through the quiet urbanity he brought to his roles in such movies as E-desh Tomar Amar, Rajdhanir Bookey and Harano Shoor. But he was not, and this he shared with so many other Bengalis in the film world, content to confine himself in the genre of Bangla movies. That he was equally adept in playing roles in Urdu films was demonstrated full well in movies like Talash and Chanda. These movies, with their Bengali cast all using Urdu as the language of the stories in them, made waves in what used to be West Pakistan. Rahman simply went on from one success to another. Films such as Darshan, Kangan and Jahan Baaje Shehnai only brought out newer shades of artistry in him.
   We pay our tribute to the gentle soul that was Rahman. His misfortune, through losing a leg, did not hold him back from carrying on. And he never stopped smiling. We will miss his soul-touching acting; and we will remember that smile.

A grenade attack on an Awami League rally at Bangabandhu Avenue in Dhaka on August 21, 2004 killed at least 22, including Ivy Rahman, a central leader of the main opposition party, and critically injured scores of others. The local news media went into an overdrive over the next few days. While conspiracy theories dominated the reports, photographs of blood and gore splashed across the front page of almost all the leading news dailies. The print and electronic media appeared hell bent on outdoing each other in printing or airing photographs or live footage that were gruesome and extremely disturbing even for the strongest of hearts. Similar has been the case with the attack on the Pahela Baishakh celebrations at the Ramna Batamul on April 14, 2001 that killed 10 people or the Paltan Maidan rally of the Communist Party of Bangladesh on January 20, 2001 that killed seven or the Udichi function in Jessore on March 6, 1999 that killed 10. The assumption, it seemed, was that the monstrosity of the attack could not have been aptly portrayed without the photographs or video clips. The readers or the viewers did not seem to mind either although the assumption pointed to a collective numbness of senses.
   A series of four separate bomb attacks on London’s underground and bus networks killed at least 52 people and injured 700 others on July 7, 2005. The upper deck of a double-decker was ripped open in one of the explosions. The other three took place in an underground railway tunnel near Moorgate on the edge of the London’s commercial district, near King’s Cross and at Edgware Road station. The goriest photograph on the bombings that came up through international wire services, British newspapers and news channels such as CNN and BBC was a man leading a wounded woman, her face covered in a white piece of cloth, away from one of the explosion sites. No photographs or video footages of blood and gore splashed across the road or underground railway tunnel made it to the front pages of any newspaper or to the bulletin on any of the news channels. No photographer, television crew tried to sneak into the hospitals and come up with ‘breaking’ photographs or video footage of the wounded, writhing and screaming in pain on the operation table. Was it poor journalism or just journalism with a human face?
   The London Metropolitan Police made the explosion sites off-limit to the public. The mangled double-decker was hidden from the public view with long, white drapes. Police investigators, intelligence agents, forensic experts, doctors and what have you went about their work, unobstructed and uninterrupted by the over-enthusiasm of the mass and the media. It was evident that every single soul where the line was and why it should not be crossed. No-one raised any question of administrative foul play or infringement of the fundamental rights to free flow of information. Was it unawareness of fundamental rights or just well-tempered understanding of individual and collective responsibility?
   Did the absence of gory photographs or video footages or gruesome graphic details of victims screaming with their limbs torn off by the explosion, either in print or electronic media, hinder anyone in any way realise the monstrosity of the attack? Were the Londoners or the Britons in particular and the Europeans in general not outraged by the orgy of killing? The whole of Europe, barring Russia, paused in silence for two minutes to mourn the victims of the London bombings. People in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world, including Bangladesh, in a silent but eloquent way expressed their shock and condemnation of 7/7 atrocities. The outpouring of emotion was neither orchestrated nor triggered by any movement, as we, the Bangladeshis, are wont to. Two days after the blast the Agence France-Press despatched a series of photographs of the public mourning. One of the photographs showed a little girl handing a policewoman a bouquet to place it on the site of one of the explosions on her behalf. Even she knew where she was not allowed to go and, therefore, should not go.
   It must have seemed unreal to most of us in Bangladesh. No political bickering, no blame game, no innuendo. The fun magazine of a leading Bangla-language daily summed it up aptly. Neither the Labours nor the Conservatives came up with any innuendo that their rival political camp had masterminded the attack, wrote the magazine on an obvious sarcastic note. There was no hartal, no vandalism, nothing… the Britons have not learned anything from the Bangladeshis, it concluded. They have indeed a lot to learn, especially how to be divisive in adversity, how to politicise pure human emotions, how to be indifferent to death and destruction.
   The August 21, 2004 attack on the Awami League rally or the January 27, 2005 explosion in another AL public gathering in Habiganj, which killed former finance minister Shah AMS Kibria and four others, readily triggered political debate on who had masterminded the carnage before the public had the chance to express their outrage. Public property was vandalised in protest against the deaths and destructions the people in general had condemned. However, they were never allowed the time or the space to mark their protest against the orgy of killing as the politicians had taken over. The subsequent blame game, political innuendo once again left little room for the public to say or demonstrate how they felt. The order seems to be that only the politicians and political activists, not the people, have the right to mourn, condemn and slate any incident of death and destruction.
   Such a deterrent seems to have worked. People no longer seem interested to come out on the streets in silent harmony to protest against loss of lives in acts of violence, political and otherwise. Meanwhile, a sustained downslide of law and order has made murders and maiming as regular a daily feature as sunrise and sunset. Unknowingly, the news media has contributed to further numbing collective sensitivity with overdoses of gruesome photographs and gory details of whatever crime that takes place. On any newspaper any day, one finds reports of murder, rape, maiming and whatever violent crime one can think of. As the law enforcement wing of the government seems to have reconciled with its repeated failure to curb crime, the people appear to have resigned to a collective indifference. The report of a murder does not seem to bother them anymore, unless it is illustrated by the bloodstained or bullet-riddled or butchered dead body.
   In 2002 the abduction and subsequent murder of a schoolboy created quite a stir in the news media. The decomposed and decapitated body of the schoolboy was found 50-odd days after his abduction. One or two newspapers did not stop at reporting on the grisly incident but ran blown-up photographs of the pieces of the body. At about the same time, the double murder at Sutrapur in Old Town took place. Again, some enthusiastic newspapers ran photographs of the decapitated corpses. Now, it seems the people have become more immune to reports of such monstrosities. They hear, read about and talk of the grisly murders and then they forget. The incidents do not etch any lasting memory or trigger any public outpouring of outrage. Every death and destruction, it seems, has killed our collective sensitivity bit by bit.
   As for the observation of the fun magazine, the Britons have indeed learned nothing from us. They continue to be human beings. Somehow, we have ceased to be.
   The writer is news editor, New Age