Country in the spate of hartals

Unfortunately, the country is being buffeted in the vortex of hartals. Since the night of Friday 6 April, when a 24-hour hartal was called to thwart the long march of Hefajat-e-Islam, up to 10 April 6 PM, we will have endured 72 hours of shutdown of the country.
We wonder whether these hartals were or are at all necessary. Regrettably, with every hartal we have witnessed a ratcheted up level of violence and destructive activities that border on subversion.
Over the last two months, political unrest and violence have taken the lives of more than a hundred fifty people apart from the severe blow that this has dealt to the economy, particularly the RMG sector. Bleeding the country, the worst sufferers being the poor, can neither be a tactic or political strtegy of any political party, least of all one that aspires to power.
While there can be no justification for calling hartal, the causative factors, and the prospect of an uncertain outcome of the current flux, that we are faced with due to the concatenation of various events, can only be addressed politically, and for this the ruling alliance should take the lead.
We reiterate what we have said in the past. The AL led alliance cannot skirt the question of the modalities of holding the next parliamentary election. It is not, as the alliance avers, an issue already resolved by the Supreme Court. And while the PM has discarded the idea of CTG out of hand in her recent BBC interview, it would be a folly to believe that a parliamentary election -- held under the stipulations of the newly enacted law, with the current incumbent in charge of the government, and with the parliament in vogue -- would pass the test of transparency and fairness.
The government should also not be unaware of the political mileage it is giving to the opposition by randomly litigating the top ranking leaders of the BNP on flimsy and ridiculous charges. It does not help the prospect of peace when the main interlocutors of the major opposition party are subjected to harassment and incarceration.