The blame game

The first is that, contrary to the government's repeated statements that the threat of extremism is all a creation of the media and the opposition and our external enemies to discredit the administration, it is now evident that religious extremists are a serious threat to the country.

The serial bomb blasts have demonstrated that the extremists exist, and are better trained and organised, and have a more extensive and disciplined network, than anyone could have imagined.

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The second consensus seems to be that the time has come for the government and the opposition to stop playing the blame game and pointing fingers at one another, and to unite to confront the threat.

There has been much tut-tutting in editorial pages and drawing rooms about the irresponsibility of the two sides hurling accusations and counter-accusations at each other, and how the need of the hour is to present a united front against the terrorists.

This is all well and good, so far as it goes. There is no doubt that right now it is important for the moderates on both sides of the aisle to unite to face down the extremist threat.

But it should be noted for the record that there is a contradiction between these two positions that is hard to reconcile.

If it is true that there really are extremists operating freely throughout the country and that they pose a mortal threat to democracy, and it is also true that the government has time and again denied their very existence and put little or no effort into bringing them to book, then any moral equivalence drawn between the government and the opposition on this issue is not really tenable.

If one party has been screaming blue murder about the existence of extremists, and the other has been covering its ears and accusing its political opponents of telling malicious lies, it should be pretty clear which party is more culpable when extremists are found to actually exist.

The fashionable thing is to say that we should not point fingers and to blame both the government and the opposition equally for the polarisation in the body politic and the divide between the two sides.

But the uncomfortable truth is that when it comes to turning a blind eye to the rise of extremism there is no question that the ruling alliance is more at fault than the opposition.

There may be precious little to choose between the two sides on any number of issues, but their response to extremism is not one of them.

Let me count the ways in which the government is more culpable than the opposition when it comes to the rise of religious extremism.

The first point is that the recent terrorist attack happened on this government's watch.

Apologists for the government argue that similar things have happened during previous governments. Nice try. If it were merely a question of the occasional bomb blast here and there, then it is true that such things occurred during previous administrations too.

But there has been an unprecedented escalation of terrorist attacks during the tenure of the current government -- from the attack on the AL rally last year that killed 22, to the assassination of two opposition MPs, to the blasts of August 17 -- none of which have any analog in the recent history of the country.

So it is simply factually incorrect to argue that what we are seeing now is no different than what we saw when the opposition was in power.

Second, a big part of the current problem is that the government has for a long time contemptuously and mendaciously dismissed accounts of extremism in the country as fabrications by the media and the opposition.

The opposition -- for all its faults -- has never tried to argue that there are no extremists in the country.

Then let us look at the investigations into the August 21 attack and the supposed crack-down on the JMB on February 23 this year.

Is it too much to suggest that had correct action been taken by the authorities in the aftermath of August 21 and had the crack-down on the JMB in February been genuine, that the extremists might not have been able to pull off last week's blasts.

The government has, by its inaction, permitted the extremists to continue to train, organise, and carry out operations with impunity. That this government has not been serious about bringing the extremists to justice is beyond dispute and should be obvious to all.

So it is easy to see -- for those not blinded by partisanship -- that when it comes to culpability for religious extremism there is no equivalence between the government and the opposition.

Unfortunately, in this country too many people are blinded by partisanship, and many who are not appear to be motivated by some sort of reflexive need to apportion blame equally, and not take one side or the other, even when the facts clearly indicate that such even-handedness misses the point.

The reason I bring this up is that it is important to apportion blame accurately if we are to really come to grips with how we have got to where we are, and are to put together a workable strategy to move forward and deal with the extremists.

The extremists have apparently spent decades patiently setting the ground work and preparing for their revolution, and all the while our capacity to even comprehend what has been going on, let alone to strike back, has remained minimal.

This is a formidable enemy that we are facing, and we still seem to be groping in the dark. The question we need to be asking ourselves is how the extremists have been able to advance their agenda so effectively over the years, and what the implications of this might be in terms of formulating a strategy to defeat them.

Let us say that we can divide the country up into the extremists and their supporters on one side, and those who oppose the extremists on the other. Obviously, those who oppose the extremists are in the majority by far. But if that is the case, then why have we not been able to stamp out the extremists, and how is it that they were able to stage an attack of such audacity?

The simple reason is that the anti-extremist forces in the country are bitterly divided and it is this division that the extremists have exploited to entrench themselves around the country.

The fault line in Bangladeshi politics should be between the extremists on one side and the anti-extremists on the other, but many of the people who should have joined hands against the extremists long ago did not do so, and the main reason for this is that they could not bring themselves to join hands with the opposition.

The real problem in this country and the reason that the extremists have been allowed so much leeway to ply their trade is that too many people are too invested in their anti-opposition mind-set to comprehend where the true threat lies.

The need of the hour is for the moderates to band together and take a stand against the extremists. There are many more of us than there are of them and if we stand together then we can defeat them.

But the problem in doing so is that some people will have to admit that the opposition has been right all along and the government has been wrong -- and too many government supporters would rather sew their lips shut than admit this.

This is the moment of truth for the government and its supporters. It is still unclear whether they are ready to admit that the extremists are more of a danger to the country than the opposition.

The ruling alliance has been playing a dangerous game with the extremists for a long time, under the theory that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Now the danger of what they have been doing all these years has become apparent to everyone, the question is whether they would rather continue running the risk of turning the country into a Taliban state than admit their error and correct their course.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.