When you sit back and reflect on the people, you certainly realise the invigorating role they have with good regularity played in the making of Bangladesh's history. Be it 1952 or 1969 or 1971, it has been the people who have caused the convulsions that would soon transform themselves into revolutions. They were the ones who forced a corrupt Muslim League government from office in 1954; and in 1969, they ran Ayub Khan and his cohorts out of town. By 1971, the people were ready to send the state of Pakistan packing, and they did.

That is history, for you, for me, for all our children. You might as well remind yourself that it was the people who confronted the winds and the storms head on, eventually to give themselves a country they called -- and still call -- a people's republic. Nothing in life or in politics can be more pleasing than being part of a state which owes its fundamentals to the people who constitute it.

In a people's republic, you have every right, based as it is on every and all moral considerations, to inform yourself that the people matter. That is where theory comes in. The practice of it, as you have recently had cause to know, is quite something else. When the police forced citizens to stay put on a particular road the other day, compelled them not to move at all or, in other words, told them to freeze in that American way of saying it, we realised yet once more how the people have progressively dwindled as a social force in this country.

The chief adviser of the caretaker government, said the law enforcers, was on his way from home to his office and so the road needed to be empty, absolutely foolproof. Not even the footbridges could be climbed. That attitude made hundreds of Higher Secondary Certificate examinees burst into tears, for they would be late for their examinations, on the other side of the road. Their parents remonstrated with the police. As always, those policemen appeared keener on ensuring an empty road for a VVIP than on encouraging the young to move on and into their examination halls.

There is something of humiliation that is regularly being heaped on the people. If you have been to the airport here, to welcome a family member home or to bid him farewell, you will recall with a squeezing kind of pain the many and varied ways in which the people of Bangladesh are put in their places. Thousands of eyes peer through iron bars in the hope that a departing brother or an arriving father will be spotted from that long distance between the terminal building and the road.

There are the ubiquitous Ansar men whose clear responsibility appears to be to push people (and it does not matter to which class or category they belong) rudely out of the way. Rudeness is the grammar they employ in their language. At Zia airport, then, you come squarely up against symbols of everything that has been going wrong for the society you are so much a part of.

It is not like this at other airports around the world, for in those places it is the people who remain recipients of dignity. Over there, the police will not force you off a vehicle at the approach to the airport even if you are accompanying your son to the departure area. Your peripatetic spouse may have several pieces of luggage she needs help with. So? That stubborn law enforcer will enforce the law; one that you did not know existed, because it has just been put in place.

Owing to rumours that a former prime minister will leave the country, and so will her family, through that very airport, you must stay away from that airport. You as a citizen have ceased to matter. How much more laughable can things get?

You go into a coffee parlour in Banani for drinks and then re-emerge to discover that your chauffeur has been pushed into a distant alley only because a just departed prime minister will be using that road any moment now. If that is what a former head of government can do to you, imagine how much more a prime minister in office can do?

The people have, by and large, been at the receiving end of all that is negative and nerve-wracking in this land. The street you are wont to pass through everyday on your way to and back from work is suddenly cordoned off, in that certain sense of the meaning, by a neighbour keen on replacing his parental two-storied home with a money-spinning apartment complex. And he has done that through dumping his construction materials along more than two-thirds of the street.

One man, it should be obvious to you, has opted to treat everyone else with cavalier disdain. As an individual, you are able to do nothing that will roll back this misery. On a collective level, you are likely not to be offered the cooperation of your community in dealing with that bad citizen who has appropriated a big chunk of a public road for himself, at least for some months.

There are other forms of insult we the people go through from day to terrible day in this land the constitution says is ours. Try recollecting the many times in which Bangladesh Biman has given a bad deal to the people of this country. Changes in flight schedules are not always brought to the notice of passengers. It becomes your job to call up flight inquiry, to be stunned into knowing that your flight is delayed by a goodly chunk of hours.

There is a problem with civility here. When a minister, a minister of state and their families can commandeer seats on an aircraft, thereby evicting the genuine holders of those seats, and come home with nary a thought to the misery they have put all those good people to, you are appalled. You do not have to be, for that is merely one of the ways in which the people are made to bite the dust day after day.

It is, again, the people who become a huddled, frightened mass on the streets of the city once the police swing into action against political agitators. They club the agitators, and then haul many of these people, almost all of whom are innocent pedestrians caught in the crossfire, off to prison. It is the scarred, pained faces of their wives and children, all their hopes reduced to the minimal, that you spot at the prison gates the next morning, and for many mornings after.

It is the tired, frightened and sweaty profiles of poor rickshawpullers you see outside a fenced in area where their three-wheeled vehicles have been brought in because, as the law enforcers say, their licences are invalid or forged. There is surely a case for the law here.

But where has the humanity in it gone missing? But, then again, when in a sovereign state of a hundred and forty million people you set aside roads that you pretentiously call VIP roads, you ought not to expect the humane to come into the behaviour of those who should have behaved better.

The people, ladies and gentlemen, bear every pain with admirable fortitude. There is a resilience in them that keeps them going through all the charlatanism and pretension around them. But must such demonstrations of patient suffering be taken advantage of, through the days and the months and the years?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.