All-powerful to be Impotent

The death of high-ranking bureaucrat in the hands of muggers last week made headlines across the country. Nikunja Bihari Devnath was stabbed within the earshot of drowsy policemen in an uncanny dissimilarity with the fate of Badhan who was stripped under the nose of watchful policemen a few days earlier. This week another woman has been assaulted in Eskaton while getting inside her car. Depending on which newspaper story to believe, the luckless victim suffered between stripping and molestation in the presence of her husband. To speak of a society in the same breath with these gross examples of perfidious crimes amounts to an oxymoron.

Let us remind ourselves for argument's sake what society is all about. It is a highly structured system of human organization for large-scale community living that normally furnishes protection, continuity, security, and a national identity for its members. Now how does one describe a society where most members must live in the fear of a few depraved ones? Without having to point fingers at any regime, how are our streets and neighbourhoods, even homes, any safer than jungles infested with dangerous animals?

According to Edward Gibbon, "History... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." In that sense, the history of this nation has registered a great deal of follies and misfortunes inscribed in blood. And if we have killed the father of this nation, the four national leaders, a charismatic president, and countless army and airforce officers, it is because we have enshrined expediency in the hallowed regions of our subconscious minds. The dynamics of that expediency is rooted in compulsive need, which indulged in greed, which in turn indulged in corruption, which against indulged in compromise. Crime is only the natural culmination of that chain reaction when reckless inclinations coalesced into a philosophy of life and justified ends with means.

Alfred North Whitehead argued that morality was what the majority happened to like, and immorality was what they disliked. Between our liking for convenience and disliking for confrontation, our resilience for opportunism and revulsion for opprobrium and our remission of eclectic righteousness and remonstrance against impudent rancor, morality is lost in the wilderness of conflicting impulses. As regimes changed, cabinets expanded and shrank, autocrats fell and democrats rose, paramounts ceded place to populists, crime relentlessly thrived in the festering wounds of our social ligaments.

It is interesting to ask what we mean by morality today in a society where there are more big names in crimes than in anything else. If Ershad Shikdar, Siraj, Laltu and many other dons and dragons of the underworld configure the moral shorelines of our time, then it is littered with horrendous stories of how ruthlessly one could kill one's opponents and consort with women other than their views. Perhaps perversion and promiscuity are the paragons of propensities, which embellish power and prestige in a society that has lost its anchor.

Even worse these propensities patronize prejudices which preponderate privilege in the political circuitry. All of the top terrors have friends in high places to protect them in exchange of money and muscles. Samuel Johnson bewailed that politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. The biggest communality between crime and politics is that everything is acceptable in both so long as one rises in the world. And that rising has become an obsession, which has trickled down to ordinary levels making opportunism the driving force of a mugger who lurks in the street for innocent victims.

If morality is conformity to the rules of the right conduct, the murder of Nikunja Bihari Devnath or stripping of Badhan conforms to what rules of what conduct? In both instances one can sense a desperate bid on the part of the wrongdoers to get what they wanted. In 1989, a 28-year-old jogger was hunted down, beaten, and raped in New York's Central Park by a gang of teenagers. When arrested, the teenagers joked, rapped and sang. One of them even told the investigators that what he had done with his friends was "fun". In fact, the young men who kill, rape and show violent tendencies in our society are miniature forms of the big names in crime who killed in any way they wanted and grabbed women like objects off the shelves of a supermarket. What could be more "fun" to get what one wants with the confidence that one can get away with what one does?

Once again, that shows what a dangerous concoction it can be when crime and politics mix together. If the left hand of the law shakes hands with the right, criminals become political and politicians become criminal. What transpires in that uneasy transaction is loss of character when moral turpitude is confused with moral rectitude and values are immersed in the chaotic swamps of their own contradictions. Frankly speaking, the practice of stripping, if we may recall, started with the police when they had denuded a woman named Moni Begum during a BNP-led demonstration. Only were the perpetrators of the "inappropriate" act punished for their offense it could have warned, not encouraged, the subsequent repetitions.

For God's sake, it is not my intention to take a dig at any particular government. The growth of crime is the outcome of a sclerosis, which developed gradually under every government. But one thing to resent is how the politicians have played dice with the fate of this nation, and scoffed the sublime goal of democracy with the ridiculous zeal for power and private gains. Instead of giving us a government of the people, by the people and for the people, they have tumbled their noses at us with what Arthur Seldon called, "Government of the busy by the bossy for the bully." They have pushed democracy to its edge and turned the demos crazy.

The advent of the new millennium brings us many promises. We look forward to economic progress, technological advancement and political maturity. We look forward to cultural rebirth, religious harmony and human dignity. Scientists have determined that between 6 million and 4 million years ago man learned two-legged walking. The next significant development was invention of tools 2.5 million years ago, and the amazing growth of the brain would come after another 1 million years. But it was not until a few tens of thousands of years ago that the brain would show its capacity for abstract thought.

The mankind has come a long way ever since the apes and hominids split from their common origin more than 4 million years ago. But crime is dysgenic, because it tends to put the ape back inside men. Sir Winston Churchill, former British Conservative politician and Prime Minister, attacked his opponents in the government in a scathing speech. "So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent." As we go on living in many paradoxes, crime and civilization are the biggest paradox of all. Because, civilization makes us all-powerful to reach the moon but crime makes us impotent when it comes to rescuing our loved ones from predatory men.