This ruthless extremism must be stopped!

The bicycle ridden suicide bomber's bloody massacre of himself and his compatriots on a morbid ideological diet at Netrakona is a proof of how unrelenting militant missions can get. Given the ingenuity going into the methods of attack with surefire deadliness, the apprehension of more to come cannot be ruled out. More so, when all this is happening apparently despite unprecedented security precautions taken by the government, the media's reeling off of warning signals, the public being on self-alert, the arrested militants making tell-tale confessions, and the whole nation being vociferous in its expression of outrage.

What are we to conclude from this absurd suicidal free-for-all and the outwitting nature of their operations? The overarching fact is the Frankenstein syndrome that is erupting in various forms. On the one hand, within the BNP there have been ministers and MPs named by their detractors to have been indulgent to extremist elements and their mentors. As if that was not enough, Jamaat's links to JMB, the outlawed outfit, spoken of by various sources raised the Frankenstein from within the ruling coalition. It can only be exorcised by an impregnable political will of the government itself.

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The second contributory factor is that while small fries have been hauled up, the big masterminds are at large calling the shots from behind with complete impunity topped off by an improvising flair. Some of them got let off as soon as they were tracked down. So long as the factors of masterminding, institutional backing and financial support base are not eliminated, the bombings will continue. After all this, we wonder how can there be the easy availability of explosive materials at the market-place as reported?

There is one view that a country's reputation for a low level surveillance has a way of inviting the misadventure of trying techniques inspired and imported by extremist think-tanks abroad. We have to delve deep into the hypothesis.

It is our firm belief that religious fanatics with dark agenda are getting a field-day, because the two major political forces -- BNP and Awami League -- are incorrigibly confrontational to each other. Nothing short of at least workable one-agenda unity between them can defeat militancy which is a threat to our very survival.