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Reception of PM at airport

Please set a new tradition by cancelling such events
30 September 2010, 18:00 PM
EDITORIAL
WE congratulate Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on her successful trip to UN during which she received an award for Bangladesh's attaining an MDG goal of reducing child mortality rate. She was praised by US President Obama and took the opportunity of meeting some world leaders having had useful exchanges of ideas with them. Her trip has certainly brightened the image of Bangladesh. While we are greatly appreciative of the outcome of her trip to the UN, and her reception was reflective of the sense of achievement our people shared, yet we cannot but help wonder whether she realises what pain and trouble the city-dwellers went through due to traffic hold-ups that caused immense suffering to the commuters. She may not have been informed of this by people around her so that we deemed it necessary to bring it to her notice. The day (Wednesday) the PM returned, for instance, was not a holiday, but another normal working day. So, as usual people were busy doing their day-to-day chores. But the activists of the ruling party hogged one of the main arterial roads of the city, the New Airport Road, with their processions up to the Hazrat Shah Jalal [R] Airport. That caused to freeze the traffic on the road to the chagrin of the hundreds of commuters and other road users who were left stranded for hours together. As a result, what could be an event of joy for everyone turned into its opposite to many. Were the organisers of the reception aware that by their callousness and insensitivity towards the people in the buses, taxis, ambulances and cars, they deprived them of their right to pass through the road normally and thereby alienate them? What further mortified many on the following day was the media report on the plight of 50 residential students of a Dhaka University dormitory as they were driven from their hostel by the leaders and activists of the ruling party and forced to live under the open sky for the whole night. Why? Because they failed to join the reception march! We are constrained to say that the whole approach is apt to send a wrong signal about the government's or, for that matter, the ruling party's attitude towards citizens. So, sooner the realisation dawns on them that whatever they do is being watched and judged by the man in the street, the better. It is time the government officials and ruling party leaders and activists carefully observed how in other democracies they organise events of similar nature, especially those that relate to the return home of head of the government or of the state from foreign visits. And to spare the commuters, they may think of an alternative arrangement for according such receptions, say, at a separate venue dedicated for the purpose.

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