Villager-BGB face-off !

We are saddened by two BGB men's death in a road mishap that took place on Friday at Phulbari on the Dinajpur-Dhaka highway.   The motorcycle that the ill-fated BGB jawans were riding collided head-on with a truck speeding towards them from the opposite direction leading to the tragedy.  Unfortunately, the killer truck's driver and his assistant could flee the scene 'unchallenged'. This led to clashes between enraged BGB men and local people, so informed the commanding officer of the service's Phulbari battalion headquarter. As a result 13 villagers were injured, three of whom bore bullet wounds.

While condoling the premature deaths of two BGB men and sympathizing with their colleagues' sense of shock, what we fail to understand is the impulsive manner in which jawans from the battalion HQs came down on the locals, beating them with truncheon, even damaging their business sheds and properties.

At the same time, one cannot support the wild and rowdy behaviour of the local people, especially their disrupting traffic flow for hours on an important highway.

Needless to say, the crisis created over the road mishap could entirely be avoided, if only the issue of nabbing the driver and his assistant and holding a probe into the accident was left to the police. Evidently, in this case the BGB men overstepped by taking law into their own hands. Such behaviour is out of sync with its image as a disciplined force.