Editorial
Riding roughshod over people's wish
Minister's brazen show of power
The minister for labour and employment from Narsinhgdi revealed how unfriendly politics can be. There is very little else one can describe it as other than bankruptcy of politics given the reported manner in which the minister visited his constituency and held a public meeting there, that too almost a year after his last visit.
Will we be remiss to ask when a minister, who is also an elected representative of the people, has to take help of law enforcing agencies to visit the people that had elected him to the parliament, can really claim to be on a high moral ground or to be his people's representative? What picture of politics can one form in one's mind when the mayor of the town, an elected person himself, is allegedly beaten up by the police and hospitalised and then taken home and literally detained in his house along with his family members during the visit of the minister?
Reportedly, the people of the district town, most of them sympathetic to, and supporters of, the late Mayor Lokman Hossain and his brother the current mayor, were apparently resistant to the idea of the minister visiting Narsinhgdi. Their perception is that the minister may have had a hand in the death of the ex-mayor. And their resentment was further whipped up by the non-inclusion of many of those mentioned in the FIR, in the final charge sheet. And to rub the wrong way, at least one of the persons named in the charge sheet was found sharing the dais with the minister at the public meeting.
While we do not wish to remark on the comment of the minister that he saw a third party complicity in the late mayor's killing but what we find unable to accept is riding roughshod over the sentiments of the people. Time has come to abjure this kind of politics.
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