Hartal is a public outrage

It was not on the public mind at all that the hartal syndrome could return with such vengeance. It was the farthest from their thoughts that a call for hartal would be foisted on them following what passed off generally peacefully on Wednesday as a Dhaka centred dawn-to-dusk shut down. The extended call is even worse than the original one; for, while the call for last hartal was confined to the capital that for Saturday is countrywide.

Yes, we are in full sympathy with the anger and anguish of the opposition over continuing lethal assaults on its leaders and inadequate government response to the situation topped off by investigation failures of the police to bring the culprits to book.

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The day preceding the intended hartal is a Friday and at the other end is the Buddha Purnima holiday, so that there is a three-day vacation palmed off with scant regard for the HSC examinees, daily wage earners' plight and losses in manhours, productivity and national earnings, not to speak of the missing emergency medical attention to the seriously ill.

This is not just a meaningless hartal the opposition is calling for but also one that is in essence counter-productive as well even looked at from their self-interest point of view. Whatever public sympathy the opposition has drawn and there has been a groundswell -- in the wake of the dastardly murder of lawyer and AL leader Khorshed Alam Bachchu, is bound to be eroded by the repeat hartal call. The latter comes as a stock AL demand for the government's resignation because of its 'failure to run the country' which actually dilutes the focus on the public demand for trial and punishment of the killers of Khorshed and other opposition leaders. Election is where the people would like them to test their popularity vis-a-vis the BNP rather than punishing the public with frequent hartals. Tactically, hartal is impolitic in another sense which is this: a loss of public image for the opposition is a gain for the ruling BNP-led coalition.