Image and reality

Enough. What exactly, one wonders, will it take before people in this country sit up and take note of the bitter and brutal armed struggle, between locals on one side, and law enforcement authorities and ruling alliance activists on the other, that has consumed Kansat (in Chapainawabganj some 250 kms north-west of Dhaka) for the past three months.

The conflict, that has been simmering since late January, exploded again on April 6 when four people were killed in clashes between local demonstrators and ruling alliance activists who had attacked them, and carried on into April 12 when a police attack on demonstrators left six more dead.

The ruling alliance government appears to have been so focused in recent months on resuscitating its image outside the country that it has seen fit to abandon even the rudiments of decent governance.

If there can be any more revealing picture of a government out of touch with its citizenry than the events in Bangladesh of the past week or so, I can't think of one.

On the one hand, the government is still basking in the glow of the adulatory Time magazine cover story; on the other, it has presided over the descent of almost an entire upazila into chaos and anarchy.

Let us recap. The current debacle started innocuously enough at the end of last year when local villagers in Kansat formed themselves into the Palli Bidyut Unnayan Sangram Committee to petition the authorities for uninterrupted power supply, complaining that the local electricity authority was charging them Tk 10 per month as "rent" for electricity meters and that they were having to pay as much as Tk 120 a month minimum charge for sub-standard or non-existent service.

This minor matter could easily have been dealt with had the authorities taken the time to meet with the leaders of the PBUSC and given their legitimate grievances a hearing. Instead, after repeated contemptuous dismissals of their petitioning, the committee began to hold small and then large-scale demonstrations to press their demands.

The official response was police firing on demonstrators who had laid siege to the local electricity authority on January 4 that killed two, and the subsequent arrest of the three leaders of the committee.

Three weeks later a second agitation to protest the arrests and enforce the committee's demands was held, in which roads and highways were blocked and the local electricity authority was barricaded, and which turned into a pitched battle between law enforcement authorities and the demonstrators.

Six police vehicles were set on fire by the demonstrators in clashes with the law enforcers that ended with over a hundred injured and eight dead.

Tensions have been simmering ever since. On April 6, four people were killed and over a hundred inured when another demonstration held by the committee was attacked by ruling alliance activists.

The committee responded by calling an indefinite hartal and took action to put up barricades and sever road communications throughout the upazila, leading to more or less continual pitched battle between the demonstrators and police since then.

Section 144 was imposed on April 9. This was the prelude to massive collective punishment of the villages involved in the movement on the part of the law enforcers, who indiscriminately raided villages, broke into, looted, ransacked, and burned houses, and viciously beat up scores of locals, including women and children.

Six more locals were killed by the law enforcers during their midnight raid of April 9 on some dozen villages, bringing the total killed since the movement began to twenty.

Is it too much to ask what exactly is going on here and how is it that the authorities can have let the situation deteriorate to its present pass?

This continuing saga is in many ways a neat encapsulation of this administration's failings and failures.

The first failure is the administration's failure to either generate sufficient electricity or to provide anything approaching a steady and secure supply of power. The main reason for the former is massive corruption in the power sector and the astronomical kick-backs that have to be paid to influential power brokers close to the ruling alliance senior leadership in order to set up and operate a power plant.

The kick-backs demanded by the power brokers are so extortionate as to make it an uneconomic venture to invest in the sector, with the result that virtually no new power generation capacity has been added in the past four and a half years.

The second failure is the petty corruption at the local level that imposes a "rental charge" for use of electricity meter and a minimum monthly charge for subscribers even though the service provided is either intermittent at best or more often non-existent.

The third failure is the high-handedness of the authorities who arrogantly dismiss the legitimate demands of electricity subscribers, who understandably are chagrined at having to pay extortionate monthly charges for lousy service (or no service), and the inability of the citizenry to petition peacefully for change and receive any kind of a hearing from the authorities.

There is simply no mechanism for successfully petitioning the authorities, and thus no accountability built into the system.

The fourth failure is the order that appears to have been given to law enforcement authorities, who have apparently been authorized to impose collective punishment on the villages concerned, and to indiscriminately raid, loot, and burn villages, more like brigands and bandits than police personnel tasked with restoring peace and security.

This fourth failure is compounded by a fifth: the unleashing of ruling alliance activists on the demonstrators in a sickening display of semi-official vigilantism.

At every step of the way, the government has acted with a combination of arrogance, barbarism, and incompetence that almost beggars belief. The continued mishandling of the escalating crisis by the administration has now created the present anarchy.

This is not to absolve the demonstrators from their responsibility for the death and destruction that has occurred as a result of their violent agitation, and there is certainly blame on both sides.

But by far the lion's share of the blame must go to the authorities who refused to give the PBUSC a hearing and authorized the subsequent crack-downs. Let us not forget that the law enforcement personnel have been armed with guns and tear-gas, whereas the villagers have been either unarmed or have faced them with weapons such as sticks and machetes, and that there can be zero justification for midnight raids by law enforcement to burn, loot, and ransack.

But the point is that had the situation been handled with a modicum of good sense or sensitivity from the start, then things would never have come to such a pass.

Meanwhile, the government has apparently been busy engineering a propaganda campaign to make it look good in the eyes of the international community.

Here's a piece of advice for the government: if you want to maintain a good image, it helps not to shoot down people who are demonstrating for electricity.

Nothing captures the moral bankruptcy and simple cluelessness of the government better than the juxtaposition of these two episodes.

The carnage and continuing violence in Kansat is even more problematic for the government than appears at first glance. The locality has long been a BNP strong-hold, and many of those now taking up arms against the authorities are long-time party supporters.

The anger that is boiling over against the government cannot be blamed on the media or opposition provocateurs. It is very real, has been stoked by the government's very real failures, is far from dissipated, and all indications are that it will only get worse in the coming months.

Nor is this the only example of civil disobedience against ruling alliance misrule in recent months. In other parts of the north and north-west, farmers have rioted as a result of the government's inability to provide them with power, fuel, and fertilizer in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost, and have broken into fertilizer depots and barricaded trucks on the highway.

The public anger towards the government for its four and a half years of misrule is quite genuine, and the government would do well to understand this simple ground reality rather than to continue to believe blindly in its own propaganda.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.