The tribalism we have fallen into
WE are in real danger of mutating into a medieval society. That is the disturbing thought which comes our way from Debidwar in Comilla. A so-called fatwa has led to a woman and a man being humiliated through a crack of the whip no fewer than three hundred and three times. And those who perpetrated the deed, or the misdeed, have informed us that the two victims, Piara Begum and Mamun Mia, were whipped because they had indulged in anti-social activity. The nature of the activity has not been spelt out. But that does not really matter.
What matters is the fact that there yet remain, in this country, elements all too ready and willing to take us back to the Dark Ages through their convoluted interpretation of religious edicts. You think here of places like Taliban-influenced Afghanistan and fanatic-occupied portions of Pakistan. You condemn everything wrong that has been going on in those two unfortunate places on the face of the earth. And yet those very sinister happenings are coming to pass in your own country.
And the fatwa is not the only thing that worries us. Take a look around your circumstances and you will know. An upazila education official has the temerity to cause huge anguish to a teacher through giving her a bad tongue-lashing. You wonder what might have gone wrong with education in the case of this official. Those old values, that particular sense of them which instilled into us the thought that all individuals must be respected, that every man and every woman is to be treated with dignity, has gone missing for many of us.
The education officer here is not alone. There are hundreds of others like him all across the country. Think of the men who have been creeping towards those lakes in Gulshan, Banani and Baridhara in the wicked expectation that they can lay claim to chunks of them. And, indeed, they have made a goodly part of the lakes vanish under the weight of brick and sand they have brought in, to tell us that it had all been theirs from the beginning. You almost feel, in a twisted way, that those lakes must have been earmarked for these modern-day predators in biblical times. These were the promised lakes, say these robber barons. Moses, leading his people toward the Promised Land, would surely not have known what was coming centuries down the line.
There are all the rivers, which have been receding from our vision over the years. And that again can be explained. If lakes can be commandeered by a greedy bunch of men, rivers can equally be stolen by an even greedier cabal of robbers in the guise of socially prominent people. Back in the 1960s, as you wound your way through the developing urban population centres of Kalabagan and Kathalbagan, you felt a keen sense of outrage at the thievery homeowners had resorted to in these areas. Take a walk there. You will be appalled at the robust manner in which space marked out for streets and roads was gobbled up by these putatively honest men of the 1960s.
And the trend they set in motion clearly has gone on. These days you bump into developers, businessmen, retired government officials and so many others who have felt little or no shame in laying claim to property not theirs. You ask, in that moment of desperation, what government has been doing about these monumental wrongs being perpetrated every livelong day in society. And then you realise that many within the quiet shade of government have themselves been participants in the thievery. Think here of the venal elements in such organisations as the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha.
Does it not bother you that good, honest people are a dying breed in Bangladesh today? You watch all those politicians pontificate to you on those ubiquitous talk shows on television. And then, with a jolt as it were, you remember that some of these politicians have been trying for years, as owners of private transport establishments, to push BRTC buses to the roadside and possibly into the nearby ditches in order for their own buses to capture the market.
You watch in horror that long beeline of former bureaucrats, those you and I could not approach in their days of glory (for power gave them a halo not ours to break through), now trying to reinvent themselves as politicians and so extending their not so munificent shadow over our future. You hear almost everyone speaking about democracy and the concurrent need to sustain it through transparency and accountability; and yet many of these proponents of pluralism have yet to learn what it means to be tolerant, to listen to the other person's point of view. Democracy is a process of competing thoughts. It is never an exercise in the evolution of the inimical. Or the provocative.
It just might be that tribalism in its worst manifestation has been pushing our basic decency overboard. How else would you explain those fires and gutted industries in Ashulia? And those macabre faces behind it all?
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