Thin line between piety and perfidy

For example, we may deliver a speech at a public meeting or talk to the media in the secretariat on the villainous activity of market syndicates, and then join a luncheon with some black-marketers at Hotel Sonargaon. While we talk of virtues and morals to our children at home, we may so very easily hold back the upward movement of an important file on the release of pension money of some poor, grade-two employees.

We may also sit on a file concerning allotment of a government quarter against a female employee who happens to be a widow with four children. We may quickly respond to a call for donation for a mosque or a school, and then go to office to send heroin to Britain or some other country.

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The line continues to get thinner by the day. Then again, a poor patient may die untreated on the road in front of a posh clinic. Why so? Because the renowned surgeon of the country would not remove his tumor until he sees the money on his table. While the tumor devours the poor man, the thin line becomes invisible in the twilight.

But the scary news for the saner citizens is that the line has totally disappeared for a section of young men and their leaders who are preaching piety as a profession one moment and are hurling bombs at innocent citizens with the intent to kill the next. Can anything be more perfidious than taking the life of innocent human beings?

Well, the young people in question do not think so. These are the religious rogues. They and their leaders are doing such heinous acts with the skewed notion that by doing so they would one day fulfill their agenda --establish Allah's rule (whatever that may mean) in Bangladesh.

These people have had their initiation at the hands of some half-literate religious bigots and have been programmed to do anything at their command. Under the banner of some organisations (the names of which sound quite foreign and frightening) they have secretively but surely made inroads deep inside our society. They have used various madrasahs and mosques as their base for recruitment and training, and they did it all so effortlessly under the nose of the administration.

After the arrest of the top JMB leaders, the nation heaved a sigh of relief thinking that the country had been saved from the evil clutches of the local and foreign conspirators and that the Talebanic tartars have been done away with. But lo and behold!

Many more of those menacing-looking guys keep coming out of their rat-holes!

The recent haul of a big group of militants undergoing training in some remote part of a forest under Mymensingh district tells us that we have not seen the back of the die-hard militants in this country. Far from that, now we hear of more secretive organisations with equally bone-chilling names working at the grassroots level. Their leaders look more like the bandits of India's notorious Chambal forest than a person who would evoke holiness in our minds. To be candid, some of them look like close cousins of Rasputin in his heyday!

What remains unanswered is where do these outfits get funds and who are providing them legal, administrative and network support within the country? Shall we be able to progress amply to reach the ranks of other developed countries of Asia if we fail to uproot them? To be honest, these obscurantist elements want to take us back to the medieval times through establishing their own brand of rule.

But, aren't these people the offspring of ruthless, illiterate dogmatists who had wreaked havoc in human society throughout the centuries in a bid to seize state power? And haven't they always bungled very badly when it came to establishing order and cohesion in society? We find solace in the historical fact that these elements have been thrown into the dustbin of human civilisation again and again.

Therefore, the burning question of the day is: how long will it take to uproot the militants who are audacious enough to disregard the very tenets of our constitution -- secularism, democracy, and social equality. They have no business upsetting the social order that the majority of the people are happy with. The very fact that they would find no space in a democratic set up is evident in the secretive way they have been carrying out their operations. But enough is enough. The nation wants to see the capital punishment of the ringleaders of JMB is carried out so that it finally scares off the smaller fries. Let these medieval entities be given the modern treatment they deserve. Let them be deleted from the nation's hard drive permanently.

Shahnoor Wahid is a Senior Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.