A Nation of Rescuers?
As some of the alleged accused of the most shameful act of repression on a young lady on the thirty-first December night on the Dhaka University campus are being apprehended by the police they have amusingly started to come up with a defence that it was they who rushed to rescue the lady from attacks on her chastity perpetrated by someone else. Further, mothers of some such accused students have gone to the length of giving statements to the press that whereas the nation feels proud of the courage and sense of alertness of their sons as exhibited in their attempt to save the lady on the thirty-first night from the clutches of the criminals it is stunning that some vested and vicious circles have manipulated the incident so as to victimise their brave sons with the ulterior motive of shielding the real culprits.
The outcry against such an infamous incident has been quite great and wide. Different sections have cried shame on it and strongly demanded exemplary actions against the culprits. The PM herself bitterly condemned and expressed concern at the incident and ordered the Home Ministry to go for stern action. The Home Minister sharply reacted with an assurance of arresting and punishing the culprits. Meanwhile a handful of youngmen have been arrested and interrogated by the police.
There was a section of men who have opined that in the prevalent situation of law and order deterioration and corroding moral values the victim lady might not have gone to the campus to celebrate the occasion at so dead hour of night for her own safety. Another circle has forthwith protested this view saying that there should be no discrimination against the ladies in matter of sharing celebration in whatever odd hour it is held. They argue that to keep the ladies indoors on security reasons is a gross gender-discriminating mindset denying due rights to the female.
Whereas this time thirty-first night celebrations passed off rather peacefully without any reported incident of extreme, wild youthful exuberance in trouble-prone, vulnerable, sensitive posh spots of the metropolitan capital, it is extremely sad that a lady was sexually attacked, before the very nose of the law-enforcing agencies and hundreds of onlookers, by a band of youngmen including the students on the campus of Dhaka University known as the Oxford of the East.
Though in fact in recent time even the sacred precincts of universities have reeked off lavish acts of student's licentiousness. The affairs of the students of Jahangirnagar University repressing women students on the campus practically benumbed the whole nation. The divulgence of the news of a student of that university celebrating 'a century of rapes' on fellow university girls put down our heads millions of time.
However boisterous be the claim of the alleged accused to their role as rescuers of the victim lady the old proverb goes: "The wearer best knows where the shoe pinches". She has clearly deposed that all the accused listed by the police had violated her.
Whose shame it is that the police who stood near the place of occurrence remained unmoved despite pathetic entreaties of the male associates of the victim lady to rescue her from the attacks of the ruffians. Yes, the police woke up to recover the victim only when it was quite late after enough of harm was done to the hapless lady.
The whole thing may have gone totally suppressed (it is learnt that the victim lady too begged for suppression of the incident for fear of so-called social repercussions) but for the newsmen who brought out photographs on their national dailies that clearly identified full face of a handful of criminals who swooped on the lady obviously to molest her. This is only one of the few reported incidents of this kind. Majority of the likes peter out unreported and unknown. Had these come to light, list of the feigned rescuers would have gone miles lengthier.
As a matter of fact there is no dearth of self-styled rescuers in our various spheres of political, social, economic, educational, healthcare etc activities. Below is outlined some examples.
The political arena is crammed with so-called rescuers. Every now and then the opposition political parties routinely call hartals and carry on rampage and terrorist activities to enforce them (hartals). They call hartals in the name of rescuing the country from government's repression on the people and surrendering to the heels of a neighbour that tantamounts to the loss of sovereignty.
Conversely, the ruling party has also ingeniously invented to bring out battle-equipped peace processions on the road in a bid to rescue the country from the acts of vandalism of the hartal-caller terrorists.
When one talks of Bengalee nationalism or secularism the fundamentalists may rattle up their swords and point these on him in a vein that the cause of Islam will never be better championed than by lynching him (infidel in their vocabulary).
What one finds in the educational sector of Bangladesh? Kindergartens, private English medium schools and colleges, private medical and engineering colleges, private universities etc have cropped up as flourishing commercial enterprises in the name of rescuing the nation from the poverty of updated, well-managed academies in different tiers of education.
The health sector presents a none-too-happy picture. Private clinics, diagnostic centres have menacingly mushroomed to supplant rickety government hospitals and investigating cells and to provide medical facilities to the people at high rates and on sizzling rents. These also claim to have rescued the nation from languishing under almost non-existent health services of the state.
Regarding the bureaucratic tangle the less spoken the better. The bureaucrats are, in general, master of filibustering projects, in acceptance and implementation, as and when these fail to ensure their personal interests by throwing them into labyrinth of process and formalities calling those exercises as mandatory for the sake of full, far-flung considerations by the experts in a guise to rescue the government, and for that matter the people, from the hazard and loss of taking hastily considered schemes.
So on and so forth. Austria once branded the Serbians as "a nation of assassins" when heir-apparent to the Austrian throne was murdered in Serbia. Long have come upon us condemnations like "a nation of beggars", "a country of bottomless basket" etc. These are all coined by the donor countries. Can't we ourselves now put on our coat a badge of self-proclaimed honour inscribing "a nation of rescuers".
The writer is retired principal, Govt Mohila College, Pabna.
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