Humanity's abandoned house

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina asked a seminal question in the parliament on October 6, a question that sublimated the anxiety bubbling inside every sensible heart in this country. She asked why nobody had come to the rescue of Khadija Akhter Nargis, who was waylaid on her way home and publicly hacked by a deranged man. She also resented that some people instead of helping the victim, recorded her misery on their cell phones. Then the prime minister asked the mother of all questions: Why are people losing those values that make them humans? It's obvious that two-legged animals are giving four-legged ones a run for their money.

Humanity, in the simplest sense, is the quality or state of being human. Hence, it's shocking when human condition is denied its elements and some of us in human forms indulge in animal instincts. When militants butcher innocent people they never met before, it surely looms the spectre of erosion in humanity. It's the same thing when parents kill children, children kill parents, siblings slaughter siblings, or neighbours slay neighbours. Rejected lovers stab or hack their objects of love like angry children smash toys.

Scientists agree that evolution and genetics have baked a certain amount of murder into humans as a species. Mammals average a lethal violence rate of about three killings of their own species in 1,000 deaths. The "root" violence rate of early humans and many of our closer primate cousins is about 20 in 1,000. In the medieval period, between 700 and 1500 A.D., that deadly rate shot up to about 120 per 1000.

This arithmetic resonates with what the Prime Minister has said. She was dismayed at the rising lethal violence rate. And she sounded worried because human suffering has been turned into spectator sport. The Romans cheered gladiators spilling blood in the arenas. That blood sport is now played in our homes, neighbourhoods and restaurants.

But why feel sad for that one girl in Sylhet only? Sagar and Runi were stabbed to death in their apartment in 2012. The killers apparently ate food, sipped tea, and chatted with their hostess before doffing their masks and raining down on her with a hail of knife blades. They also waited for her husband to return home late in the night. They bound and gagged him as if to make his body airtight, so that life couldn't escape it until they had exhausted their rage upon him.

Many more lives have been taken since then under many different circumstances. A meritorious student named Toki was killed in Narayanganj, his body put in a sack and dumped in a river. A young girl named Tonu has been raped and killed, her body discarded like a rag doll in a bush. Suraya Akhter Risha, a student of Willes Little Flower School, was stabbed by a stalker and left to bleed on a footbridge in Dhaka.

These are but the tallest peaks of a mountain range of crimes that got the most media attention. There have been many targeted killings, forced disappearances, extra-judicial murders, rapes, family feuds, and street brawls in the intervening period that made it clearly evident that this country is reeling on the verge of a moral bankruptcy. Honestly, right now we aren't even paying a penny on the dollar of humanity.

What was particularly disturbing about the hacking of Khadija is that she suffered her agonising fate in broad daylight. There were many onlookers, but nobody stepped forward to stop the assailant. Humanity was hiding in the thick of huddled bodies jostling to get a better view of the crime. It was scared to assert itself because it was lonelier than the victim herself.

And that loneliness is the creation of a society where everybody is alone in the crowd. It includes not only those who are hacked, stabbed or shot to death in public, but also those who are molested within four walls or dragged from their homes in the middle of the night by plainclothes men. Those who are killed in fake encounters probably ingest the same sense of forlornness before being cut down by dubious bullets.

It's no exaggeration that we are an absurd nation where every individual feels deeply desolate in the midst of a dense population. The reason why nobody comes to the rescue of others is that, instead of protecting an individual, the support system provided by family, society, and government makes him or her more vulnerable.

The answer to the prime minister's question is writ large on the wall: Humanity in this country is an abandoned house and nobody lives there. Johne Donne writes in his poem No Man Is An Island, "Any man's death diminishes me/Because I am involved in mankind." Humanity doesn't get involved in mankind unless humans will get involved first.

The writer is the Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.

Email: [email protected]