Outlaw attack in Natore

Police stations and camps in the outlying districts, as it is, remain vulnerable with extremely limited manpower and a low equipment base. And if such a high dignitary as the prime minister should visit a place in the current state of security alert, even that much of low surveillance and enforcement capacity at the local police stations would be partially diverted to reinforce security arrangements for the PM. Perhaps this has to be done, because local personnel are better acquainted with local conditions; that is exactly the reason why the regulation manpower strength and arsenal at every police station must be increased. This is a lesson the authorities can draw from the latest attack on the police outpost at Singra upazila.

But there is a bigger moral of the story, and that must sink in our mind to take things into grip. This brand of rabid violence and defiance of authority taking the name of a radical group called Sarbahara smacked of a reappearance syndrome with implications that must not be lost on us. It is to counter the radical groups clandestinely and violently operating in the south-western region that the JMB was said to have been nurtured by the administration at one time and there lay its genesis, according to serious observers.

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With the JMB growing as a Frankenstein and the government being called upon to administratively deal with them (how successfully they are coping with it is perhaps another matter), the other kind of extremism of the so-called left revolutionary mould has taken advantage of the government's distracted attention to be resurfacing like they did on Wednesday.

Another danger in the confusing scenario is you can't readily tell one extremist group from another. Surely, the government can't lie low and its job seems doubly cut out.