But Bangla Bhai, the darling of the Rajshahi police and the local politicos alike, returned to reference with a bang, first in a gala world-wide premiere of sorts in the New York Times magazine of January 10, 2005, and then in a counter mob-justice administered to three of the Bangla Bhai legionnaires in a lynching. Both are true and gory, albeit somewhat fictionalised in the first case of a New York-based writer, Eliza Griswold, and fateful in the second case of lynching. The fiction in Griswold’s case, however, is not so much about Bangla Bhai, but about what she, as a writer and not as a reporter, described as the theatre of ‘The next Islamic revolution’. 26/01/2005
The Bangla Bhai fallout ENAYETULLAH KHAN Bangla Bhai, the Jagrata Muslim Janata vigilante, was the main villain of the news-stories on these pages and broadly in the mainstream Bangladesh media in April-May, as also in the successive months of 2004. The militant zealots had literally taken the law in their own hands in Bagmara and the neighbouring rural backyard of Rajshahi in north-western Bangladesh and were administering the so-called vigilante justice to those whom they branded as terrorists belonging to some outlawed nominal underground parties like the Purba Banglar Communist Party and Janajuddha. The informal reign of terror of the JMJ, led by Bangla Bhai alias Azizur Rahman, brooked no bar, and the torture chambers that he and his followers set up across the region left the victims either maimed or dead. The Rajshahi police administration, both at the local and the divisional levels, did not only look the other way, but literally stood in attention to the zealots’ command. Some of them, recognisably responsible by the stripes of their ranks, have been on record defending Bangla Bhai, and even ridiculing the critics in the regional and the metropolitan press. The audacity and the criminality of those officials, understandably and suitably emboldened by the local political masters (conjecture ours), were so unbounded that they even dared defy a prime ministerial order to rein in the JMJ vigilantes under the appropriate section of the Code of Criminal procedure, unless otherwise the latter were required to be restrained by any law for preventive detention (the kind of law that we don’t support but which exists nevertheless). A news item on these pages appeared on May 23 to the aforesaid effect on the basis of an utterance by the prime minister in a one-to-one conversation with me. The finance minister, M Saifur Rahman, was on record corroborating the order of Bangla Bhai’s arrest only about a week later. (Haris Choudhury, the political secretary (1) to the prime minister, also iterated the same in his press briefings last year.) The abettors of Bangla Bhai in the Rajshahi administration or in the ruling circles, having either legislative or local party authority, or being among the BNP or its coalition partners, got away with their partnership with vigilante criminality in a slippage of sorts among other drastic events. They are the Sylhet shrine bombing that killed a few and was a close shave for the British high commissioner, Anwar Choudhury, in what could have been a fatal or disabling injury, and the magic precedent of the Chittagong arms seizure, a real-life thriller made of the stuff of Ludlum or Clancy. The Bangla Bhai issue was finally pushed out of the stage by the August 21 grenade horror. But Bangla Bhai, the darling of the Rajshahi police and the local politicos alike, returned to reference with a bang, first in a gala world-wide premiere of sorts in the New York Times magazine of January 10, 2005, and then in a counter mob-justice administered to three of the Bangla Bhai legionnaires in a lynching. Both are true and gory, albeit somewhat fictionalised in the first case of a New York-based writer, Eliza Griswold, and fateful in the second case of lynching. The fiction in Griswold’s case, however, is not so much about Bangla Bhai, but about what she, as a writer and not as a reporter, described as the theatre of ‘The next Islamic revolution’. Griswold, therefore, mixed up the Bangla Bhai issue with what was a poor fable about poet Shamsur Rahman, who in the NYT magazine writer’s picturesque words, is ‘birdlike and wears his hair in a fluffy white pageboy’. To give the setting a somewhat mystical coat of allegory, Dante’s Inferno was suitably sitting on the ‘writing desk’ along with ‘a bottle of black currant soda’. ‘Inferno’ yes, but the latter kind of beverage was perhaps virtual imagery in literary crafting, though not real in Dhaka. No one is going to buy the Shamsur Rahman tale. The Bangla Bhai explosion in the NYT magazine and the counter mob-justice that was inherent in the indulgences to Bangla Bhai vigilantism, only prove what is not excusable in governance. Add to it the anti-Ahmadiya zealotry against a miniscule population of the same Islamic faith. It is on this page on December 8, 2004 that I, in person, tore apart the Taliban and Osama demonology in a contemporary Bangla daily, that has chronicled the fables of arms training in a series of articles in August, 2004, that had so mindlessly chronicled fables of arms training to ‘Islamic militants’ a la Osama bin Laden. Those reports still continue to fuel an anti-Bangladesh campaign in the external media and the internet. But this time my question is on behalf of all forward-looking Bangladeshi citizens: Why has Bangla Bhai been allowed to go scot-free and thereby blemish the entire nation? And who is to blame? For the political class in and out of power, bigots are handy to advance partisan interests. For the country in this new millennium, they should not even be touched with a twenty-foot barge pole. http://newagebd.com/front.html#e __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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