Editorial
A display of blatant disregard for poor
Some news items have the singular ability to humiliate and shame its readers. The report, front-paged in the March 30 issue of New Age, on the arrest and imprisonment of a man, who is 97 years old, and another, who is physically challenged, on the charge of begging is one such news item. It makes the readers ashamed at the very thought that they are the citizens of a state whose government is blatantly biased to the elite and whose legal regime is inherently indifferent to the misery of the poor and the downtrodden. The report also speaks volumes as to how inequitable and discriminatory our society, especially the ruling class, has become.
The two men were arrested by the Shahbagh police and arraigned under section 81 of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police Ordinance, which says: ‘Whoever in any street or public place begs or applies for alms, or exposes or exhibits any sores, wounds, bodily ailment or deformity with the object of exciting charity or obtaining alms shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one month.’ The 97-year-old Jumman Ali was arrested near the Supreme Court building and arraigned as a beggar although he later claimed that he was not and that the police had made him claim as such. The 30-year-old Safu, who walks on crutches, was arrested from a footpath on the road the president was scheduled to cross on his way to Dhaka University, as the police thought he would be a nuisance and eyesore for the head of the state.
We wonder what the reaction of the two would have been had they been sentenced to a longer prison term – delight or despair. We tend to believe it would have been the former; after all, inside the prison, they would get three meals a day, a proposition which is becoming increasingly difficult to afford for more and more people with every passing day. It is hard to believe that any sane person, unless driven to utmost poverty and bereft of employment opportunities, will ever become a beggar by choice. But what is harder to believe is that the state could be so insensitive to the very people who have become what they are today simply because of its own failure.
This incident reflects the government and the judiciary’s brazen bias towards the fortunate and affluent. The magistrate who has handed down the ‘exemplary’ punishment to the hapless two for creating ‘nuisance’ on the street may have worked well within the purview of law and the arresting police officers may also have not breached any legal provision; however, they have surely put on display their indifference to humanity and disregard for human dignity.
With every passing day, the legal system’s inherent bias against the downtrodden is becoming more and more obvious. A state, which approves and, for that matter, applauds the ruling class’s begging to the affluent nations, just cannot treat, or should we say punish, the marginalised for committing the same ‘crime’. If Jumman and Safu are to be imprisoned for begging, so should the begging bureaucrats and policymakers. Otherwise, it would just be duplicity of the highest order.
Waxing populism to CHT peace treaty
We welcome the government’s decision to lift the embargo on mobile telephony in the three districts of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. According to recent announcements, the districts would also see establishment of judge’s courts. This will surely increase means of communication among people living in those areas and improve the dispensation of justice. However, chief adviser to the military-controlled interim government, Fakhruddin Ahmed, adopted a rather populist approach indicating that there were no problems with the CHT peace treaty that the government had brokered with the indigenous peoples of that region more than 10 years ago but refrained from making any announcements about when or how the treaty would be implemented.
We believe there are problems with the peace treaty on at least two counts that contradict the constitution. Firstly, the treaty stipulates that a separate voters’ roll would be prepared for the peoples of the hill tracts, although the constitution stipulates that there will be a single voters’ roll for the entire country. Secondly, the treaty stipulates criteria for one’s eligibility to become a voter depending on one’s acquisition of land in that area in a specified timeframe and manner. The constitution, however, does not in any way require land ownership as a prerequisite to become a voter and in fact this is contrary to the spirit of the constitution as well.
The constitution and the treaty in question, therefore, cannot coexist in a legitimate fashion under the prevailing laws of the land. Therefore, full implementation of the treaty would not be possible without amending the constitution. To state the matter the other way round, the current constitution would not allow implementation of the treaty. However, there are numerous provisions in the treaty that do not contradict the constitution and could well be implemented without delay. Unfortunately, none of the past governments, neither the one that brokered the deal nor the one that followed, have taken any steps to implement them.
It would be expected of the interim government that it adopts immediate measures and take corresponding actions that ensure due implementation of the treaty. There should also be corresponding national policies that facilitate the transition and eventually strive to enhance the quality of life, and status of citizens’ rights in the hill tracts that remain unfulfilled largely due to oppression and neglect of successive ruling governments.
Beggars’ arrest beggars belief
The growing number of beggars, visible in the metropolitan cities and small townships, is the direct consequence of the governmental failure to manage the national economy properly. And if the government continues to fail to effectively manage the national economy towards a pro-people direction, and there is hardly any sign of success yet, the number of beggars in the cities, the towns and the villages would continue to grow. And, if the government continues to pursue the policy of jailing the beggars, it may have to declare the larger part of the country, if not the entire one, a national prison, writes Nurul Kabir
IF LITERALLY going by the law, even if the law is anti-people, is called rule of law, the military-propelled government of Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed has, indeed, established ‘rule of law’ in the country! His police on Saturday reportedly arrested two persons, one a hapless nonagenarian and the other a physically challenged man in his thirties, from a Dhaka street on charge of begging. Produced in court the same day, a metropolitan magistrate awarded the two poor fellows with three-day jail terms, albeit under the law of the land. The law – Dhaka Metropolitan Police Ordinance – finds begging in the streets a social nuisance, which is a ‘punishable offence’. The police, apparently out to remove social nuisance, reportedly under the dictates of ‘higher authorities’, did not take time to catch them. Besides their higher authorities’ instruction to arrest anyone begging, or hawking, in the city crossings, the police had an additional reason: The ‘president was scheduled to go to Dhaka University by the road’. Right. The presidential eyes, after all, cannot be allowed to be irritated by the ugly scene of two poor men begging around, and that too on a VIP road! So the lawmen found it to be both their legal responsibility and aesthetic duty to remove them from the sight of the head of the state.
The metropolitan magistrate, on the other hand, went by the statute book just literally, without at all being judicious in the application of the legal provisions concerned, which are, however, inherently anti-poor. He perhaps found the provisions of the ordinance something divine and police version/view of the allegations against the two hapless men no less than a revelation from heaven! If this is what is called justice, the magistrate is free to claim that he has rather done a great job in establishing rule of law – a slogan the incumbents hardly misses to chant on any occasion!
The 97-year-old man, Jumman Ali, however, told New Age on the court premises that he was not a beggar; rather he was on his ‘way to the [nearby] Ramna Park pond’, where a large number of homeless poor take their bath. But the policemen did not pay heed to the words of the poor, and therefore powerless, nonagenarian. The magistrate also failed, in the process of examinations and cross-examinations in the courtroom, to extract the truth about the poor victim from the police’s arbitrary allegation. It does not matter! After all, the executive and the judiciary branches of the state have these days been acting in perfect harmony, with the parliament remaining absolutely missing, under the direct supervision of a military-controlled authoritarian regime!
However, the magistrate, eager to uphold his ‘rule of law’ would have done better had he kept in mind that the state of emergency has kept suspended, for more than a year now, the fundamental rights of the citizens guaranteed by the constitution, without the restoration of which the idea of rule of low is a joke. The policemen, on the other hand, should have kept in mind that the members of the country’s ruling elite are bigger beggars than the jailed poor men. Notably, the managers of the state, elected or unelected, have routinely been begging money from the affluent nations every year for formulating the national budget, despite a growing opinion even among a significant section of our mainstream economists that the country does not need foreign aid, provided the policymakers properly plan to utilise our resources, human, natural and otherwise. But the policymakers have always failed to plan properly from a nationalist perspective, and thus have always planned to fail us – the nation. In the national budget for the 2006-07 financial year, the policymakers planned to get Tk 2,508 crore in foreign grants, while the amount of targeted foreign grants for the 2007-2008 financial year was almost double – Tk 4,255 crore. If the poor foodless, homeless beggars are to serve jail terms for creating nuisance on our city streets, then what punishment is due to the rich policymakers for begging in the big capital cities of the world, and that too by humiliating the entire nation?
However, if the government continues to remove ‘nuisance’ like poor beggars from the streets of the metropolitan towns, and if no social-political forces come forward to favour the incumbents with an agenda to remove them from power sometime soon, the government is likely to face a serious situation, particularly in terms of accommodating the beggars in the existing prisons that are already extremely overcrowded by thousands of political leaders and activists, industrialists and traders, so on and so forth. The reason is simple: The number of beggars has visibly increased significantly since the takeover of power by the military-propelled government of Fakhruddin Ahmed – thanks to the destruction of livelihood of thousands of the poor by the incumbents in their initial weeks in the name of anti-corruption drives on the one hand and absolute failure to create employment opportunities on the other – not to mention that the government has rendered thousands of others jobless by way of retrenchments from the public sectors.
Besides, the government has miserably failed to contain the soaring prices of essential commodities, while the rate of inflation has doubled since it took over in January 2007. Notably, the inflation was 5.94 per cent in January 2007, but the rate rose to 11.21 in November that year, 11.59 the next month and it was 11.43 in January 2008. ‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens,’ observed one of the most famous economists of the last century, John Maynard Keynes. The government of the day has, however, publicly confiscated ‘an important part of the wealth’ of our people by way of ‘continuing the process of inflation’, and thus forcing thousands of poor people to lose whatever little wealth they acquired under the elected regimes of the past. Subsequently, a large section of the poor have now been struggling hard just too keep their body and soul together, with their budget cuts on protein intakes, medical care, child education and so on, while many others, hit hard by the anti-corruption drive and subsequent unemployment, coupled with increasing price hike, have been forced to take up begging as the means of livelihood. The growing number of beggars, visible in the metropolitan cities and small townships, is the direct consequence of the governmental failure to manage the national economy properly. And if the government continues to fail to effectively manage the national economy towards a pro-people direction, and there is hardly any sign of success yet, the number of beggars in the cities, the towns and the villages would continue to grow. And, if the government continues to pursue the policy of jailing the beggars, it may have to declare the larger part of the country, if not the entire one, a national prison. This is neither desirable, nor is it practicable.
The best option, therefore, is that the legal but immoral provision seeking to arrest the innocent poor goes immediately and the government formulates its economic policies right to display a little human sensitivity towards the dignity of the people at large. Before the change, the incumbents should try, at the least, to ask the policemen not to be very enthusiastic about soothing the eyes of the president and other VIPs, and pursue the magistrates to apply law a little judiciously.
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