The Rats and the People

The Daily Star is caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, it has to make the right noises about the killers of Sheikh Mujib to please the ruling party and its thugs. Besides, the editor and his cohorts are sympathetic to the Awami League, if not actually Awami Leaguers themselves.

On the other hand, Mahfuz Anam and his wife have to please the European donors as well, and Europe is against the death penalty. The Star dare not say openly that the death penalty should have been commuted to life imprisonment. The office will be raided the next day by armed thugs of the ruling party and by every intellectual in Bangladesh.

This example clearly shows the hypocrisy of our ruling elite: they seek the approval of foreigners, but subscribe to local prejudices. They pretend to be liberal, when they are anything but. They support two tyrannies, the House of Mujib and the House of Zia, all in the name of democracy and the people.
All they want is to advance their careers and make their moolah, and sound a bit like their European masters.

They are like those rats that were given contradictory pleasure-pain stimuli simultaneously: they showed clear neurotic symptoms. Our scatophagous elite receive double stimuli, one from abroad and one from here; only they are not neurotic. They are perfectly sane: totally unscrupulous, but perfectly sane.

However, it has been a pathetic – or perhaps ennobling - spectacle that the execution of the assassins of the beloved 'Father of the Nation", Bangabandhu, has been greeted by not an atom of enthusiasm on the part of the people who are supposed to love him so: all excitement and anticipation have been concentrated in the bloodthirsty, intellectual elite. As Lawrence Ziring pointed out, Bangladesh will never represent Bangladeshis. The former have no affinity with the latter, and no more apodictic display has been in evidence than the apathy of the people to the 'celebrated' and 'long-awaited' executions, celebrated and long-awaited by a bigoted microscopic minority we miscall 'the nation'.

Let me never forget

Evil returns, recurs and rises anew. How could I forget?

Five jihadis have been executed in Bangladesh for their bravery in 1975. I was paralysed by this injustice until I realised that this is how jihadis are meant to die. Islam is clear on the subject of evil: "If you find evil, fight it; if you can't fight it, speak against it; if you can't speak against it, hate it". This is jihad.

We must accept that evil endures, but we must not let it prevail. Evil has returned after 30 years, and, no doubt, it too will cease in the fullness of time. But there will be new evils to conquer, for the soul of men and women is darker than the darkest subterranean grotto.

Throughout the world today, jihadis are being killed, tortured, maimed….But they never relent. Millions of children have died in Iraq, yet their murderers are respected and our NGO people take awards from them and feel honoured to be honoured by them. Thus they sanction evil: but they will not prevail. The baubles of the world are worth less than a child's trinket: yet these are the things men and women seek: the honour of the dishonourable, the esteem of the contemptible, the recognition of the infamous, the adulation of the atrocious.

Evil is our daily companion, our constant adversary. I hope I never forget.