The day the government shut down the city

The brutality of the crack-down was eclipsed only by the arrogance of the official response and the hypocrisy behind its political calculus.

For the past four and a half years, we have heard speech after speech made by ruling party officials on the iniquity and injustice of calling hartals, and how they heap nothing but more trouble on the heads of the toiling masses and show that the opposition is more interested in scoring political points than in the public good.

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This critique of course glosses over the inconvenient fact that during its years in opposition the BNP actually called and enforced more hartals than have been enforced against it in government.

It also blithely disregards the fact that the opposition is not permitted any space within parliament to express dissent.

Nevertheless, for all these caveats, the government argument against hartals has the virtue of being more or less correct, and the government when it complains of hartals as a political tactic does have a point.

I am opposed to hartals as well, and have argued against them in these pages many times.

But now we have seen that the government has no objection to shutting down the city when it is in its own narrow political interest to do so.

Gone were the paeans to the rights of the toiling masses who were unable to get to work or ply their trade due to the fact that all main arterial thoroughfares were barricaded, gone were the earnest laments for the economic cost that came with essentially shutting down the capital city.

Incidentally, in the two and half years since I returned to Dhaka, I have never once been kept out of the streets and prevented from reaching my office by a hartal.

But what the opposition could not accomplish, the government was able to do, and it was not until the early afternoon on Wednesday that I was able to navigate my way past the elaborate network of road-blocks that had been set up, even though the route from my house to my office takes me nowhere near the PMO.

The blatant hypocrisy that was on display on Wednesday pretty much obliterates any principled anti-hartal argument that can be made on the part of the government.

This is a mistake. In doing so, the government has handed the opposition the best weapon it could possibly have going into the election season.

The opposition has made the decision that in the coming six months it will take the route of agitational politics in order to put pressure on the government and to project its own strength and resolve.

The one potential drawback to this tactic is that it runs the risk of appearing obstructionist and that the public is in general opposed to hartals.

Now, however it is open season for hartals, and the government does not have a leg to stand on in terms of complaining about the negative repercussions for the economy and the public.

In fact, how has the opposition responded to Wednesday's lock-down?

Why, by calling a hartal for Sunday, of course! Why am I not surprised?

And the public, with the memory of Wednesday's government lock-down fresh in its mind, will compare the rather lesser inconvenience that it suffers during the upcoming hartal, and conclude that perhaps hartals are not such a bad thing after all.

The next question that needs to be asked, surely, is why the government was so heavy-handed in its response.

It is, of course, fruitless to appeal to this government in the basis of morality or of respect for fundamental rights, but one would imagine that a government whose unpopularity seems to be increasing by the day would not wish to alienate the fifteen million citizens of the capital if it could avoid it.

The government is facing tough times with even tougher ones ahead. For the general public, the continued rise in the price of essentials and the power crisis have been the most striking features of the ruling alliance's current tenure.

The high command is worried that it is losing support and that factionalism and cronyism and corruption will continue to eat into the alliance's electoral prospects.

So one would have thought that it would make sense for the government to not continue to alienate public opinion at every turn. To not shoot people demonstrating for electricity and set fire to their houses, for instance.

Nor to impose Section 144 on a 20 square km area around the PMO and clog up the entire city.

But, no. This administration is tone deaf to public opinion and so out of touch with the electorate that it clearly believes that it will bear only a nominal electoral cost for its actions and that this is well worth it in order to thwart the opposition.

Interestingly enough, this arrogant calculation may well be correct. But what does it tell us about a government, that it is more interested in quashing dissent of any kind and of projecting its strength on the street than in the well-being of its citizens.

Nothing good, I fear.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.