Editorial
Crime: The Insidious Destroyer
Our political leaders have acquired a passion for keeping their antennae high on the diatribe of each other and very low indeed on the field-situation and public disenchantment with it. So engrossed are they in running each other down or personally vilifying and undercutting one another that during most of their waking hours they are basically blowing some hot air around. Resultantly, they are getting very little time to introspect and meditate. So, they are missing out on that crucial slot for an objective fermentation of ideas that would have helped them change their course for the better, for the positive and for the desirable.
What is even worse is that they are hell-bent upon turning their negative words into deeds by letting off roars of all kinds: "marathon hartals as never before" versus "resistance come what may." This is exacting a heavy price by not allowing the atmosphere to acquire a minimal congeniality needed for the keenly-awaited political dialogue to take off.
With such compulsive obsessions getting the better of their best judgement they remain absolutely blind-folded to the stark reality that something menacing is happening beyond their immediate world. Crimes have started making a minced meat of the vitals of the society, polity, institutions and the value system as a whole without our politicians realising how much so.
In their volume, tentacular spread and pernicious effect crimes have outstripped all previous records. So much so that the processes of democracy, administration, economy, development, education, service-delivery are gravely threatened by their ever increasing incidence and morbidity. The political ground is shifting underneath us not so much as a direct result of the political unrest as due to the crowding out of the otherwise pressing law and order agenda from our list of priorities.
In our context, political criminality and social criminality have become indistinguishable from each other. And, as if to make the situation much worse for us, they are reinforcing each other in a way so very typical of us. When everything is seen through the political prism partisan ghosts are bound to be seen all around. So it is not just a political threat or a social threat, it is, in fact, assuming the veritable character of a lawlessness and ungovernable situation in which no government, AL or BNP, can hope to find it easy to function.
Why do we think we are teetering at the edge of survival? The reason why we feel so is because crime is an insidious destroyer. It denudes from within and burrows a whole system into a state of atrophy. Crime is such canker in the body-politic that it can be likened, in a manner of speaking, to the AIDS scourge in the African continent where most civilised institutions seem now threatened by its rapid-fire proliferation.
So, let's say this to our politicians as full-throatedly as we are capable of: For God's sake, do not look at crime as a partisan issue but treat it as a political and social question touching on the very survivability of the system our Constitution stands for.
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