One picture spoke thousand words

THE bomb attack on a parliament member last week was a cowardly act of violence. But what made it truly alarming was the choice of the target. Although a dozen others have been wounded in the blast, the man on whose life the attempt was made is the scion of a blood-soaked family, a citadel of our national politics.
No less alarming is the list of suspects who have been rounded up. One is the brother of a renegade army major, who was instrumental in the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family in 1975. The other suspect is the daughter of a fugitive army colonel whose name is amongst the masterminds of that August night. Three days ago, the police arrested two sons of another convicted killer awaiting death sentence.
As it looks, it may have happened like a sequel to a blood feud. May be it's just a coincidence. May be it's also correlation. History is rife with examples when feuds run in the family, from sibling to sibling, from parent to children.
The odd one in this convoluted conflict is the four-month-old infant in her mother's lap. She doesn't yet have an opposite number in this rivalry. She is too young and innocent to inhale the deadly fumes of madness that has consumed two generations of her ancestors.
But this baby has turned into an icon of contradiction. Neither a casualty nor a culprit in this visceral strife, she has become its cause célèbre, her innocence being in striking contrast with the grim nature of the gruesome crime. She has become the poster baby of this ugly tragedy, the brand ambassador of its grinding horror.
Her mother and maternal grandfather may be suspected to have had a hand in the attack on the parliament member. But this little one has performed her own sleight of hand. From the pictures showing her nestled in mother's arm, flashed to newspapers and on television screens across the country, she reached out to people and touched their hearts. She drummed up a great deal of sympathy for her vulnerable condition.
Not to deny that the brother of a brother and the children of their fathers could be in cahoots with their elders. It's possible that they conspired to hurl that bomb, each in his or her way, perhaps she by planning and he by action, perhaps by other means unbeknown to us. But the pictures of that baby girl clinging to her mother have been dissonant with all of these assumptions.
Instead, those pictures made an anticlimactic statement. Only four-months into the world, these pictures showed her caught in the acrimony of adults like chilies crushed between pestle and mortar. Yes, the police may have allowed a maid or some policewomen to look after the baby while the mother was being interrogated. But the pictures have beguiled people. They conjured the epiphany of common suffering shared between mother and child.
That has created a perception issue in the public mind. Could it have been avoided or done in a different way? Could the mother have been placed under house arrest and interrogated in her living room? Would that have made any difference in terms of extraction of information or confession from her? Would that have in any manner compromised the investigation?
These questions are relevant because punishment bears greater responsibility than crime. It has to walk the tightrope of justice, doing the right thing in tandem with doing it right. For example, early this month a large contingent of American bands signed an open letter to the US Congress. They requested declassification of government records concerning how music was utilised during interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention centre.
What happened there? Alongside the techniques of torture such as water boarding, stripping and other means of intimidation, music was played for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter eardrums. Musicians are angry because their music was utilised to make prisoners feel hopeless while exploiting their psychological, moral and sociological weaknesses.
It means even interrogation has its melody, failing which it becomes torture. In the pictures of a mother holding her baby, that melody was fractured. Those pictures projected the image of a distressed mother more than that of a deadly suspect. The mother looked hopeless, more concerned to protect the baby than to face her interrogators.
Those who attacked the young lawmaker may have done it with a vengeance. They may have done it under an illusion that fresh wounds should heal festering ones. But a picture is worth a thousand words. One infant has done more damage than all the grownups taken together. In her quiet innocence, she has spoken more eloquently that it's possible to take revenge without so much as lifting a finger.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
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