Ironical yet deplorable

It sounded like a cruel joke for some 150 million people of the country when BNP Vice Chairperson Selima Rahman stood on a stool inside the gate of Khaleda Zia's office and complained to journalists that Khaleda has been starving for the last five days.

The reason being police are not allowing food for Khaleda's staff and she has to share her grub with them.

Selima Rahman did not feel any kind of embarrassment to narrate the plight of her leader. And this clearly shows how insensitive BNP's leadership is.

Needless to say, it is rather gross on the part of the government to have “cut” food supply to Khaleda Zia's office. It is difficult to guess what the government seeks to gain by an act so childish.  

But then again, before talking about how her leader is faring in her office, Selima Rahman should have thought about how the countrymen are doing amid the continued blockade and hartal for the last 43 days. All the newspapers and TV channels have been reporting how people, deprived of their livelihood, are suffering.

Dhaka is not an ideal place to feel the effect of hartal or blockade. The real impact is felt outside the capital where all economic activities come to a grinding halt when a hartal is called. The BNP leader should have thought how a CNG-run three-wheeler driver is doing with his family, whether a bus driver's family is going without food, and how hundreds of thousands of daily bread earners are faring.

Had the BNP's blockade been fully successful and had our brave truckers not risked their lives to supply food to Dhaka city, over 10 million Dhaka city dwellers would have been starving now. Children would have died for lack of baby food.

Not that we are not suffering now. Already prices have gone up for every commodity. Economy is on the verge of collapse and it will take a very long time for it to come back to the previous level if things become normal even from today.

Meantime, to make its political ambition come true and its blockade successful, the BNP has been doing everything remorselessly, including throwing petrol bombs on trucks carrying daily essentials and burning people.  It seems they are hell-bent on making the blockade a success and thus make the people starve.

We recall here one single heart-wrenching story of a man named Tara Mia who wanted to escape certain starvation as jobs fizzled out because of blockade and hartal. He took his family on a bus to travel to Dhaka. On the way, the bus was bombed and the whole family burned. His wife and a 12-year-old son died.

This has become a routine thing for BNP's blockade and this is exactly why Selima Rahman's statement about Khaleda going short on food sounds so cruel and crude.