Time for healing

We can never say enough to condemn their cruelty, the lack of consideration with which they lobbed those bombs into a tightly packed crowd. They knew fully well that the splinters were going to rip through the bodies of men and women who had huddled in their zest for political belief. In a way this was like an ethnic cleansing, an attempt to wipe out a political party along with its top leadership.

It was wishful thinking as far as history would vouch, for genocide and cleansing never solved anything. Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevich and the likes of them have tried and failed. They all killed ruthlessly in their overriding confidence to shape the world after their own choice. But in the end they all proved wrong, because this world is not to be tailored to order, but evolves in all its diversities.

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English writer and nonconformist preacher John Bunyan writes in The Pilgrim's Progress: "Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven." Those who died in Saturday's bomb blast, specially those innocent men and women who did not belong to the party echelons. These people neither held positions of power nor enjoyed the perks of public office, but came to that rally nevertheless because they rightly or wrongly believed in an idyllic future, and they vanished into hell at the gates of heaven.

Who knows who did it to them? Perhaps some zealots, some madcaps, some hired hoodlums who must have been told it was right to drop the bombs. Nobody saw them, nobody caught them, the apparitions of anarchy, the predatory arachnids, who crawled buildings and then vanished before anybody could trace them. Some people claimed the bombs were hurled from the top of buildings surrounding the venue of the rally. Others claimed they saw those bombs coming from the crowd.

It is no longer a question of politics, no longer a question of this ideology or that ideology. It is the question of a nation losing its sanity. We can play the same blame game until our faces turn blue -- the Indians did it, the BNP did it, the Awami League did it, the Americans did it, and the fundamentalists did it. But the truth is that those who did it are amongst us, our own people in all likelihood, that those people were mindless enough to throw grenades in a thick crowd to tear up human beings like rag dolls.

If anybody has noticed, each bomb blast in the country is raising the level of our capacity to cope with horror, and that capacity has been expanding our capacity to imprecate further horror. We are suddenly comfortable with disfiguration of the human body. We have become suicidal collectively, if not individually, sort of antithetic to the suicide bomber of the Middle East, who blows up himself to destroy many. But he at least keeps his dignity intact even when his body goes up in pieces. He leaves behind videotape or something to reveal his identity and the pronounced purpose of taking so many lives with him.

Our bombers do the opposite; they vanish after they destroy many. They are the safeside bombers, who hit and run, who have no qualms for their cowardly acts, who hide from the harm they do to others, flee from the fury of their own ferocity. Even in our inordinate capacity for cruelty, we are dishonest and eclectic, unwilling to talk, unwilling to divulge our identity or justification for our atrocities. There was a lesser-known American novelist named Mary McCarthy, who cautioned that in violence we forget who we are. Indeed we have forgotten who we are in our penchant for violence and we have engaged in a sameside guerilla warfare, which makes us our own enemies.

This is also a sign of psychosis, a systematic process of producing psychopaths who go out on killing spree. These are people who do not conform to the standards of civilisation, who are deranged and cannot, as the English science fiction writer Brian Aldiss suggests, "Keep violence in the mind where it belongs." But then a certain amount of violence is unavoidable because that is the nature of politics. Max Weber explains that the state is a relation of men dominating men, which is supported by means of legitimate violence. So people will confront each other, disagree, argue, vilify, conspire, fight, lie, cheat, scream, and shout in vindication of Jean-Paul Sartre's famed expression that man is a useless passion.

But last week that passion came in loud explosions, when some men adopted the unwholesome agenda to dominate other men by means of elimination. One eyewitness described to me that the street between rows of buildings filled up with gutted bodies and the air was heavy with shrieks of pain as if coming out of a thousand hells. The witness also said that the sheer horror of what he saw had convinced him that the human beings were infinitely helpless before the power of hatred.

It was a stern warning for all of us last Saturday, whether we believe in this party or that party, that the power of hatred was spreading. And that power is immensely multiplied by modern inventions, which put the force of a multitude in the hands of a few. In 1666, the Great Fire of London broke out from the king's bakery in Pudding Lane, burning more than 13,000 houses and making one-sixth of the city's population homeless. Within an hour the Mayor of London Sir Thomas Bloodworth had been woken up, who did not appear very concerned by the news, and declared that the fire could be easily put out if it were spit on.

The upshot of this story is that, when ignored, a spark will soon turn into conflagration. If we are thinking that the bombs are just a political ploy, which come handy to stir up issues and eliminate the enemies, that it could be done away with once it was no longer politically exigent, then we are making a great mistake. That goes for the ruling party, the opposition, and the rest of us as well.

When our leaders will gather in the coming weeks, we hope they will realise that this nation needs healing more than anything else, that it is time not to change the government, but to reconcile the differences that divide this country. Because that is where the bombers come, crawling our streets like despicable vermin. They are born in the cracks of our hearts, where hatred grows, breathing and living in the hissing fumes rising from our terrible rage.

If people fell on one side last week, people might fall on the other side next time, because hatred leads to vengeance, which perpetuates the cycle of violence. In so much as we are shocked by what happened, we also need to shake out of this cycle. It is not the time for retaliation but the time for reconciliation, because the flames are rising all around us. For God's sake, we must not believe that if we still spit on each other, the fire will go out.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.