Editor's Pick

Who will keep us safe?

24 February 2010, 18:00 PM
EDITORIAL
Shaheen Islam
AN unexpected burst of violence engulfed Dhaka a year ago. Of all the events in the past decade that have caused collective grief to this city and damaged its social fabric -- serial bomb blasts, violent strikes, logi-boitha, the Dhaka University student-military face-off -- this was the worst. Make no mistake about that. I will not -- I emphasise, not -- attempt to explore the root causes, deep conspiracies and national/international forces behind the BDR mutiny. Nor will I discuss the question that has joined the other great what ifs in our history: whether negotiations on the first day, instead of the military solution, were a mistake or not. I am sure the discerning reader will find enough in the media about those. Rather, even though it still feels too early to do anything other than grieve the 57 army officers and 18 civilians who died, I want to use this anniversary to think a bit about what it means to be safe in this city of ours. The trauma is still fresh for a lot of us. Even now, I find myself unable to grasp the magnitude of what happened that day and of the brutality inside Pilkhana. It all goes through my head as a series of very disturbing images -- the last of which is always that of people holding handkerchiefs to their noses as mass graves were unearthed. A senior blogger friend wrote it thus: never thought we would have to re-visit that spectacle in independent Bangladesh. Of course, instead of prompting the nation-wide soul-search to ask ourselves "What have we become," we quickly saw different interest groups use the event to target their favourite bête noire: AL and BNP blamed each other and each others' alleged international patrons; "communal fundamentalists" blamed "atheist intellectuals" and got blamed in turn; and the army blamed the media and, privately, the politicians. The only surprise was they also blamed their chief -- which, despite having the semblance of poetic justice, was unfair. But within those disturbing images, a few bright spots come to mind. There was the soldier who broke down in tears after seeing the graves. Seeing that picture on the front page was cathartic, and I am grateful to him for taking my own grief and crystallising it. Indeed, I felt a gratitude to our soldiers in a way I never had previously. They did their duty when their compatriots forgot ours. And on that day, crying on behalf of the nation was added to their list of duties. Then there were our firefighters and divers. Anyone who saw the images of those men go down the drains underneath Pilkhana or dig up those graves to unearth disfigured bodies could not help but notice how severely under-equipped they were for the task they were called on to perform. It was sad, but they did their duty and did so without complaint. One of the less exciting questions that needs to be asked in the aftermath is this: What does it mean to be safe and who keeps us safe? I would argue that the trials and tribulations of everyday life have a greater impact on our security than the larger geopolitical issues with which the term "security" is usually associated. I would argue that we do not spend enough on civil defence -- that is, on our fire-fighters, river police and, yes, our metropolitan police. These are the people who keep us safe on a daily basis. And I would argue that we do not put enough effort into easing the inevitable social frictions and stresses that will result in a densely populated country -- and an even denser city -- like ours. That last is terribly important and the most difficult to address. Every act of violence and murder in the city tears asunder the basic social contract that enables us to co-habit this little stretch of land between the Buriganga and the Turag. Without that contract, under which my neighbour and I try to settle our disagreements without violence, not even the best-funded police force will be able to keep us safe. The more I try to understand why the BDR jawans resorted to violence that day, the more I believe they simply learned from the rest of us. Every time a traffic police wields a stick on a rickshawala, every time a basket-carrying child is hit by a truck driver in Karwan Bazar, every murder committed for netri/madam or "the cause," every time we burn down our neighbour's home because they look different and live differently from us, every time a "domestic" is hit by the employers, every time the police tortures the remanded, we are pushing the envelope just a little bit more on the acceptable level of violence against our neighbours and citizens. Until, one day, it becomes acceptable to kill people we have fought side-by-side with in remote locations and tarnish a century-old heritage of service. And over what? Yeah, you guessed it -- money or, as it turned out, the rumour of it. But I suppose we can leave these concerns in limbo for another year and hope that, in the meantime, the different groups across all our social divides decide to mourn with the grieving families with dignity and silence. Instead, I fear we will not learn from Pilkhana, and many more unfounded accusations will fly and much more violence will ensue, serving no purpose but to increase the gulf between us.
Shaheen Islam is blogger who was born and raised in Dhaka.

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