Rage after Hartal
What was this nation doing on Tuesday? In the towns and cities and specially in its most hectic patch - the capital city, the nation kept indoors. Dhaka was a near-dead city that day. Why? Well, the nation at large was held a hostage by some designing clerics and self-appointed defenders of the faith. They dared the nation to come out and take on the stigma that it does not feel outraged by the blasphemous poster incident in Israel-occupied Palestinian city Al-Khalil. The nation did not take the challenge. For it had already, by a unanimous resolution of the national parliament, condemned the misdemeanour - as has not been done either by that most militant Islamic state of Iran or by the KSA. The design has come out clear - to use our love for Islam and for our Prophet to come back into political focus from the wilderness they have been roaming about for long.
Has this political ploy paid? No, the call was unpopular in the first place. The political motivation was made the more transparent when BNP lent it support without taking any time to examine the merit of the thing. Far from yielding dividends to the zealots, the strong national support to BNP got a good jolt. When the strike came and went without any resistance whatsoever from any quarter the nation experienced a silent rage - more dangerous than one that is vented - over being used or abused - in a very mean game. This will boomerang on whatever pull is left with the fundamentalist zealots and even the BNP will be hurt.
Calling the strike foolish - not one Muslim state went for such action - will be diluting its true nature. By one stroke these elements - most of them anti-Liberation War activists - have grievously eroded strike as an ultimate democratic weapon of the wronged ones and abused religion robbing it in whatever measure of the heavenly hue it has in the hearts of those that try to follow the siratul mustaquim. BNP, but for whom this walkover couldn't have been so clean, would be well-advised, for the good of its own health, to desist from playing a second string to rejects of Bangladesh's politics.
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