A great sense of rumour!

By Azad Miah, Oldham, UK
28 December 2003, 18:00 PM
Every time the AL leader Sheikh Hasina makes a comment, she reminds me of two other world leaders. One is Donald Rumsfeld who has recently won an award from The British Plain English Campaign for his legendary linguistic talent when he said "....there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know"! The other leader is L K Advani who comes out occasionally and says "this is Pakistan's fault, that is Bangladesh's fault and that many millions of illegal Bengalees are living in India". But the man doesn't provide one single hard evidence to back his claims. I wonder if Advani even knows how many zeros there are in a million.

Anyway, coming back to our home-grown talents, every time something bad happens in Bangladesh (a launch accident, for example), Sheikh Hasina somehow gets all these rumours in advance where it is all BNP's fault. She says we know the BNP did this and so their government should resign, but she provides absolutely no evidence! Someone should tell her that a launch accident is not reason enough to start a guerrilla war against an elected government. Of course, the government must be held accountable and they should explain to the public why it happened and what they intend to do to prevent similar things from happening in the future. But to hold the government accountable, we need people who can read map and find their way to the Jatiya Sangsad, rather than dancing on the street killing mosquitoes with their placards! We are aware that the four party government deliberately bullied AL in the parliament and its members were not behaving like responsible leaders.

But if Sheikh Hasina was wise enough, she could have used it to her advantage. She should have attended parliament to represent the people no matter how much abuse she faced from the BNP. If Nelson Mandela can go to jail for his people, why couldn't Sheikh Hasina go to parliament for her people? Then again, some of you are probably laughing at me for comparing a legend like Mandela with Sheikh Hasina. My apologies.

Sheikh Hasina could do with a bit of "sense of reality" rather than "sense of rumour".