The propaganda and the mindset

Awami League can justly be credited with having given us something new. So far we had heard of land-grab, river bank-grab, property-grab, office-grab, vehicle-grab, etc., but never of billboard-grab. On Monday morning the city dwellers were caught by surprise with several thousand billboards at almost all major intersections and roads of the city, with messages of self-praise about how successful the government has been in fulfilling its promises.
Taking a leaf out of Gen Ayub Khan's propaganda circus of the late sixties, titled "Decade of Development", Awami League appears to be  launching  its own propaganda offensive about its own five years of development.
It is quite natural that prior to elections political parties will go on a public relations offensive, and to achieve it they will launch all sorts of propaganda to put forward their best achievements.
This is more true of a party that came to power with a massive landslide but has suffered terrible defeats in recent polls. So for Awami League to go for a propaganda offensive is not only not surprising but in fact critically necessary.
Thus AL  propaganda per se did not surprise us. But the banal, unethical and illegal manner in which it was done has shocked us.
Billboards are a private business. There are 1,200 legal ones owned by the municipality, which they lease/rent out to advertising agencies, who in turn rent them to clients.  Over the years billboards have become a big business (greatly damaging the city's beauty, which is a separate issue against which we have written hundreds of times without much success), with thousands of them springing up in every conceivable space, and in some inconceivable ones as well, many of them unauthorised but operated with the connivance of the higher ups.
With the growth of the city's population and economic strength these billboards became more and more expensive, with many of them costing as high as Tk 50 lakh a year in some strategic places. The average cost will be around Tk 12 lakh in the main thoroughfares. Collectively it is several hundred crore taka annual business.
As a political party AL can definitely launch a propaganda for itself. For that purpose they can of course hire billboards. And AL has all the money for this purpose and even bundles more. But that is not how they chose to go about it.
The ruling party opted to "hijack" billboards instead.
The advertising agencies that had leased them and the business houses that hired them found their properties taken over by the ruling party. Why? Because the Awami League felt like telling the people how successful they have been.  Was any permission sought from the paid users of the billboards? No. Who will compensate for the lost business? Nobody knows. For how many days will the 'takeover' continue? Nobody knows. By whose order were these billboards occupied? Nobody knows.  However, given the fact that AL leaders have publicly endorsed the action, we can surmise that it was a party decision.
So the question is what sort of "mindset" prompted Awami League to indulge in a criminal act of  'hijacking' city billboards, which are private property?  Did it not occur to them that taking over these billboards is an unlawful act, similar to occupying  someone's house or office or factory or land and telling the owners that we are going to use it for a certain time? It is like going to the owner of a car, bus or steamer and taking it over just because we need them.
When the distinction between proper and improper, decent and indecent, right and wrong, ethical and unethical and, most importantly, legal and illegal, becomes either blurred or inconsequential in the thought process of any citizen, especially those belonging to the ruling party members, then we have the makings of a severe law and order problem.
Imagine anybody else doing the same thing. God forbid, if the opposition BNP did it?  There would have been several police cases by now with, maybe, some arrests also. But that would have been the most correct action. So, why not in this case? Just think of the precedent it sets and the terrible consequences that might follow unless it is "nipped in the bud".
The Prime Minister never tires of claiming that nobody is above the law. If so, then the ruling party, in illegally occupying the billboards, has broken the law. We wait to see what action she takes, for what has happened is both immoral and illegal, and as the highest elected leader and law enforcer of the country she cannot ignore it.