Honeymoon about to be over?
THREE weeks on, the Pilkhana carnage continues to be the staple of discourse in drawing rooms, the city's diplomatic cocktail circuit and across the country's formal or informal gatherings. In the meantime, the nation is suffering from nervousness and unease characterised by paranoid anxiety. Throughout our existence as a nation, the breathtaking frequency of violence in the country would have us believe that we live on the top of a volcano, without knowing whether it will erupt. Before we can adapt to one sad reality it is overtaken by another. Barely out of the horror of the liberation war, we faced the ugly reality of the Bangabandhu's assassination. The wound thus inflicted on the national psyche never healed. It rather festered, as the unfortunate tradition carried on.
Yet, the Pilkhana tragedy is a watershed event. Unlike the earlier upheavals, which all took place in a flux amid coups and counter-coups, the BDR revolt came when a heavily-mandated government is in place, and was enacted only a few kilometres away from the seat of the government and the Armed Forces Headquarters
-- almost under the noses of the ubiquitous state authorities. Never before had a single event forced so many eyebrows to rise, and so many people to rethink the whole gamut of our security.
Quick on the heels of the Pilkhan a tragedy, the helicopter crash in which two army officers died couldn't but jolt the nation afresh. It brought in its wake more mourning, more tears and uneasy caution, which all seem to have combined to make the country look like a state under siege. Added to this are the woes of everyday life -- power shortage, inadequate water supply, chaotic traffic, pollution, to name only a few. The way the tragedies of national proportion -- the latest being the Basundhara fire -- are unfolding in quick succession leaves us baffled and dumbfounded, and raises the inevitable question: Is anyone in charge? The gloom has thickened with the beefing-up of security around the Parliament and the cancellation of the independence day parade. It's almost like the country is at war with itself!
Our problems have been exacerbated by a wobbly economy further enfeebled by global recession, with foreign remittances substantially reduced and the labour and RMG market terribly circumscribed. The return of our labourers in droves from the Arab countries was already dampening the mood. Now the Malaysian government's cancellation of 55,000 work visas has come as a bolt from the blue. With the mainstay of our economy hit hard, our financial planners are contemplating legitimisation of black money once again.
The mess that our economy was dragged into by the past regimes is not going to go so easily, and the newly elected AL government has managed to shoot itself in the foot a couple of times already. As a bailout measure is on the cards, the all-smiles finance minister has hinted at the utilisation of the undeclared black money -- by legalising it of course. He may be new in this business, but the system he inherited is not. If anybody thought that the inheritance from the past could be done away with, then he certainly lived in a fool's paradise. For an impoverished and internally plundered country there is no better alternative, and the policies adopted earlier will inescapably apply now, whether Sheikh Hasian's Digital Bangladesh or Vision 2021 remain intact or not.
But, at the moment, the most crucial issue she faces is her equation with the military. Even if a relationship was painstakingly crafted between the AL and the military in special circumstances it is obviously under stress following the prime minister's way of handling the BDR crisis. How she repairs it by addressing the military's grievances while safeguarding her own constitutional authority will be keenly observed. Last but not the least in her garland of albatrosses are the seemingly simple foreign policy issues. The increasingly shrinking labour market does not auger well for the success of our foreign policy, which is a vehicle for promoting our economic interests. Already there are indications that there is an accelerating decline in the protection of our economic interests.
Vital time is ticking away, and the cosy period of post swearing-in honeymoon is fast fading. Is the honeymoon about to be over then?
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