You would excuse the state minister for home affairs, Lutfozzaman Babar, for feeling a sense of déjàvu on his trip to the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday. The dressing down he gets from the prime minister every time a bomb or two goes off in the country is getting to feature quite regularly in his schedule nowadays.You would also excuse him for taking the prime minister’s oft-repeated rebuke entirely in his stride — a case of ‘in one ear and out the other’, perhaps. Because even after so many bomb blasts since that first scolding he got, and more crucially after so much blackening of the government’s image nationally and the country’s internationally, he remains, even if ostensibly so, the man in charge of the home ministry.
Prime minister Khaleda Zia’s kid-glove handling of Babar is symptomatic of the lethargy and benign indulgence that pervade her style of discharging the duty of governance. But as the country has suffered a succession of Islamist terrorist attacks, and with it repeated loss of credibility in a world where the hunt for Islamists and their breeding grounds is topmost on the lone superpower’s agenda, it is perhaps high time that more is demanded from her administration than simple lip service. For starters, it is time to demand of the prime minister an explanation for Babar, a man of little if any credentials to fill the job even before his glaring failure to deliver once given the reins of law enforcement is taken into account, still remaining the state minister for home.
Her empty words of admonition of Babar aside, Khaleda has done nothing of worth to prove wrong the widely held belief that her inability to ‘touch’ Babar is because he enjoys the blessings of the BNP’s all-powerful kith-and-kin brigade who couldn’t care less because easy money and the dream of inheriting power have become the end-all and do-all. Until the prime minister breaks out of her regal languor and throws her weight around, the public is left with no option but to believe as truth the innuendoes that the Young Turks’ grip on the apparatus of power that she presides over is strong enough for her to abdicate her obligation of governance so that kinfolk can scramble for the ruins that are left behind.
But, it would seem, it is not only the younglings’ gluttony for all things material and monetary that Khaleda is held ransom by. The events of the last few weeks suggest that the prime minister is also held to ransom by her party’s greed for power that is manifested in its machinations to ensure an immediate return to it. Hence her blind eye towards repeated intimation, most often by her government’s own intelligence bodies, that the spread of the Islamist militancy that threatens our democratic polity today was not without patronisation from not one but two of the BNP’s alliance partners, and some leaders of the BNP as well. None of them got the boot they deserved. Such is the power of notoriety.
In her first reference to the August 17 multiple blasts in a public speech — delivered in Jatiya Sangsad on September 8, 22 days too late — the prime minister claimed that the blasts were choreographed by quarters with a political agenda hidden behind the veil of Islamist terrorism. She couldn’t have been more correct. But while Khaleda, as ever, was alluding to the Awami League’s involvement in the blasts, news out of the Joint Interrogation Cell as well as magistrates’ courts recording confessions suggest that the political quarters linked to the Islamists were much closer to the BNP’s home.
Here, perhaps, is the scope for a further, more crucial demand: that the prime minister deal with Islamist terror not just militarily, as her administration is doing now, but also politically — a cleansing of elements with militant links within her alliance partners inclusive. Thus far, the prime minister has shown no signs that she is willing to confront either the Islamic Oikya Jote or the Jamaat-e-Islami for their alleged links with Islamist militancy. While there was always a question of terror-friendliness hanging over the former, emerging evidence increasingly suggests that the scale on which militants are operating in the country has been made possible by the latter’s patronage.
The Jamaat, of course, carries with it the legacy of both the killer regime of collaboration in 1971 and the decades-long murderous excesses of its student front that has only recently decided to take on a slightly more gentrified look. In fact, calculating as they have proven to be, it would not be a surprise to anyone if Jamaat’s own currently gentrified state proves a mere camouflage for getting a stake in state power. The suggestions of militant links could yet be manifestations of their true colours.
Whether Jamaat decides to shed the disguise any time soon or not, the question is if Khaleda Zia is ready to risk her alliance partner catapulting a so-called Islamic revolution while riding on her back. As it stands now, she seems either oblivious to the threat, or comfortable with the calculation that the vote bank the Jamaat pulls in for now far outweighs the threat it poses to the democratic polity in the long run. But she should be advised that the Jamaat threat is a matter that will weigh heavily on the minds of her electorate come election time, especially if terrorist acts continue at will from now till then.