Humanity debased

The spurt of violence, business feud and even killing is nothing new in this country but the macabre method the father and the son were done to death is more than alarming. It was an act of such horror, such barbarism that there is almost no person in the country who does not feel personally shamed. Unfortunately the human mind has its limits. It will find it impossible to comprehend the abominable ferocity of killing and then shredding the body of victim into scores of pieces.

Business community from Nawabpur to Sadarghat burst into angry protests against the terrorism, killing and extortion let loose by a handful of gangs who are almost known faces in the area. Days after the killing, the fear stalks the lanes and by lanes of this cursed city. It is only apparent that the knife of the killer, hidden in the dark, is as sharp as the rhetoric of the persons dismissing it as business feud. Whatever the cause, a crime is a crime; to give it a politico-business garb is to glorify it. And such gestures only seek to obscure administrative shortcomings.

On the other side, anxieties of the harassed citizens multiply. Days after the savage killing, Kazi Abdur Rouf lane reverberates with suppressed grief and anguish. Kajal, an activist of the ruling party backed political party, it is learnt from police sources, was also accused of killing police sergeant Forhad in Jagannath University College campus. He is also accused of killing Selim Reza, a watch trader in the Patuatuly market. Although he is a prime suspect in so many killings and his house is only 50 yards from the police station, he evaded arrest all the time. Often death becomes a matter of more than personal grief to the bereaved family. It becomes a metaphor of the social disruption arising out of political clout. While these cases may hardly affect the mightier matters of state, they certainly reflect the brazenness with which such powerful and greedy monsters feel they can use clout to subvert law and justice.

Haji Shamsul Haq and his son's killings coming barely a few weeks after the bizarre killing of Selim Reza at the same locality and at a time when the prosecution in the case is floundering has heightened the cynicism about the efficiency of our police administration. Street wisdom says, even if these killings have touched the human chord, grieved hundreds and thousands of people within and outside the country, punishment of the killers is a distant dream. Disappointment has gripped the victims' family and the grief stricken nation about the slow progress of investigation with the killing of two accomplices, near Mitford Hospital, involved in killing and shredding of the victims' bodies. People wonder if ever any clue to these killings would be available!

What does it take to commit such a dastardly crime and then walk away unpunished? Most evidently, it is lack of operative conscience or actually something more mundane: A good lawyer with an ability to manipulate a creaking criminal justice system. Added to this are cash, muscle power and a few political connections. At least, that's what the number of high profile unresolved criminal cases seem to indicate.

Evidently, the whole episode is a sad commentary on the non-functioning of the police administration and the executive government. Unhappily, the criminal justice system in the country seems so vulnerable to manipulation. And in the Shamsul Haq and his son Russel killing case, manipulation has started in full swing through erasing all evidences associated with the killings. The killer engaged two "dom"s who were without any grain of doubt, highly drunk and completely off their mind to realise the macabre crime they were committing. Now these accomplices have been cleared off from this earth by the killers. Says a legal luminary in the country "the system is so lethargic and flawed that by the time such cases come to court the evidence is lost and in most cases the witnesses have turned hostile. Essentially, it's the criminals who are benefited. In the case of sergeant Forhad's killing no witnesses turned up against the alleged killer Kajal. Consequently, he was acquitted. This must have emboldened him to slide into crime one after anther. In one such case in the recent past, the judge highlighted how the clout that criminals like Kajal and his ilks enjoyed had ensured that the investigators blatantly botched up the probe.

Kajal did not have a glorious past. His father, late Abul Hashem known as Jobba Haji reportedly rose from rags to riches by taking illegal and forceful possession of a market in the Sadarghat area. Somehow, Kajal's father and Haji Shamsul Haq jointly held the ownership of the eight storied Sufian Market at Sadarghat. His father later sold his share of the market to Haji Shamsul Huq for 35 lakh taka. Kajal's father was paid Tk. 33 lakh while he was alive. Kajal, a powerful cadre leader couldn't countenance this deal.

Not since Ershad Shikder of Khulna, now in the condemned cell who also resorted to such evil means in putting his rivals to death then shredding their bodies to pieces, has this society seen anything like it. In killing Haji Shamsul Haque and his son Russel, the alleged killer Kajal didn't merely snuff out two human lives, rather the act killed the pretensions of an entire class we belong to. It took one abominable act of a monster son of a so called businessman to expose the lies, duplicity and depravity of the country's creamy layer the killers now belong to. There is probably not a sane person who has not been outraged, shamed and sickened by the manner five businessmen in the city's wholesale market have been killed in the last three months. But one needed to see the latest tragedy leading to the bizarre killing of Selim Reza, a wholesale watch trader in the Patuatuly market, Haji Shamsul Haque, wholesale cloth dealer in the Sadarghat market and his son Russel to understand the full horror these thugs are indulging in.

Coming back to the problem of horrific crimes being committed and going without punishment, it is pertinent to observe that things had gone so wrong in the country mainly because the governments perhaps did not fully understand the meaning of governance. The main thing that had gone wrong was that the country had become a "soft" state, revealing itself to be completely incapable of fighting the forces of violence and terror. Very often and on too many occasions, the question of cadre politics, partisan interest have hamstrung the police investigation and judicial process.

What happened to the old Dhaka city businessmen was evil and would perhaps not have happened if the high echelons in the party, society and administration would not have whipped up political agenda and partisan interest at the cost of the government and the country. Kajal reportedly went up from strength to strength, got so much powerful and desperate because of protection from his godfathers. It is the sort of political agenda that inevitably ends up harming its proponents as much as its victims.

Md. Asadullah Khan, formerly a teacher of Physics, is Controller of Examinations, BUET.