Who dunnit? Or, what dunnit?

Rubana Huq
Published : 30 May 2012, 08:52 AM
Updated : 30 May 2012, 08:52 AM

A couple of journalists along with a few other staff of www.bdnews24.com were attacked. Who dunnit? Dunno.

All I saw was blood on the floor of the office through a quick footage filed in the virtual site. All I saw, at the hospital the same night, was a smiling face of one of the reporters who had just been attacked. It was as if nothing had happened to him. In spite of the injuries, Rifaat seemed to have a strange calm that could be read as resilience. There was a cleaner of www.bdnews24.com on the emergency ward who had suffered slashes on his face and yet was busy greeting every visitor with a smile. It was as though being attacked was just another unpleasant, yet an expected item on their platter…

There were cameras all around the place. Journalists being attacked obviously make substantial breaking news for any channel or newspaper. Meantime, a day later, the two boys who were injured have undergone surgery. They are now reportedly stable. The rest who were hurt have survived the attack. How did it happen though? The incident apparently had begun with altercations between a staff and a local goon and then all hell had broken loose while the local goondas had launched their attack.

Question is, what prompts this rage and who backs this spirit of vengeance? Who is all-powerful in this state? If every neighbourhood turns into a battle field, if second tea-stall turns into a centre of violence, and if a blade can slash journalists in minutes, then how safe are the rest of us, who live in unguarded houses and don't belong to bold media houses or strong political circles?

Police thrashing teachers; police thrashing journalists; human chains throughout the country; protests in every institution; hunger strike of the traders, freedom fighters; open clashes of the workers with the police…none of this smell of good news.

Every conversation turning into a politically heated debate; every head leaning towards a mercurial blame game; every dialogue turning into an accusation; every statement becoming a weapon of slaughter; every glance meaning to be an insult…is this who or what we are turning into?

Or rather, what are we ourselves turning this country of ours into through our constant outrageous expressions of rage? And why? Why is it suddenly that we have started to react to every issue? It's as if we have never had hartals, never had buses burnt, never had opponents injured, never had people disappearing, being picked up, hauled into vans. It's as if we have never given bails, never indulged in mud slinging, never shot filth in the parliament, never had traffic jams, never had power cuts, never suffered inflation, never had liquidity crisis, never had crunches! It's as if we have all fallen from Eden to Hell. With the Awami League in power, Hell seems to have descended on all our own private spaces.

Now, I am not politically affiliated with any party and when it comes to vote, I trust my instinct and make silly choices every term. (At one point, I even voted for a candidate whose deposit was forfeited as he failed to bag more than 5000 votes. So, please don't trust my taste.)

But I do believe in self-reflection. Can it be that we have just stopped looking at ourselves? Even if we take the post '91 set-up as a benchmark of our democracy, haven't we always been like where we are now? Apart from a few hiccups like 1/11, when have we ever been better? With the two sides swinging from one extreme to the other, all we've done is hang by their rope, being swung to either direction, every five years. This is exactly the tight rope-walking phase that every democracy goes through. As much as the spectators watch the acrobats perform in a circus and pray for a safe passage, the fear of a possible fall also haunts them. But in a democracy, we are not merely spectators, but spect-actors. We watch and we react. That is how the psyche of a voter is formed. While the rope walking is entirely a politician's job, the rope needs to be well woven to help the political feet steady its pace. Now who provides the rope or rather, who snaps it?

After 1/11, we would like to believe that the chain of democracy has just begun to set in, and we have ourselves just started to endorse the process. But ironically with every deviation, we now look for defence and find answer in the process. With every bail denied, we cry, "But it's the law!"; with every arrest, we scream, "But it's the law enforcing agencies!"; with every disappearance, we chant, "Conspiracy!"; with every murder, we claim to sense an unexplained motive and assure fastest justice that eventually never comes through.

I say "we" as representatives who govern the state are chosen and endorsed by us. I say "we" as these representatives also fall prey to our "chamcha-hood". And this is exactly how the most tragic part of power seeps in.

This feeling of absolute Power lends a delusion of immortality. Some form of power must have seduced the elements that had attacked the newsroom journalists and workers. Similarly the one ruling the state also gets addicted to the red high chairs and starts looking upon them as their all-time property; their highflying grasp on authority seems to last forever and worst of all, those in power begin to disbelieve mortality and start believing in "Here Forever". Unfortunately, the sudden stints at power come with no guarantee of eternity.

As a reaction to this arrogance of power, public psyche is seduced by rebellion and led to violence. But then the public too has to be completely seduced to undertake dangerous journeys. Seduction is a politically charged word where control is completely lost along with the sense of dimension, purpose and propriety. One is only seduced when its guards are down and when its defence mechanism is at the lowest because of the lure of the approach.

Point is, who succeeds in seduction?  And who ends up being seduced? And what are the tools of seduction that are used on a free liberal democratic civil society? Our civil society, currently, is taking Johnny Cash's advice: Walk the Line. We are all taking risky steps and burning our bridges at both ends. We are the lot who do not want to answer questions but rather wanted answers when we vote. We are the same lot who need not have been seduced by those in power who appease their own desire for approval of their own faction, of their own supporters in us. We are the same people who are witnessing our leaders and establishment subscribing to the lone warrior myth of leadership and heading towards heroic suicide. Our leaders and their loyal followers seem to have forgotten that catalyzing change does not mean becoming a lightning rod in the process. The feeling of extreme power can trickle down to even a sheer student of a local college and a paan-vendor. Since as a race, mimicry is our specialty, we learn what we witness the most. Today, we are learning and adapting to violence on a daily basis. Thank you, Politics!

At a point like this, when most things go wrong at the same time, the lights on our shelves and lenses need to be adjusted, for our own sakes. Or shall we turn the lights off and bring upon ourselves misery that sudden eruptions of violent episodes have bred? Or shall we rather carry our own torches and focus on issues with our own private microscope? In the meantime, should we not look towards Media with caution and attention if indeed Media happens to be the strongest tool to shape a nation's psyche? In that case, every headline should matter, every scroll must impact; every breaking-news must create a new tremor. And certainly, in that case, every path in front of a media house needs to be protected; every worthy journalist needs to wear a badge of immunity; every report should go in stark black-and-white and every reader must sense the height of objectivity with every story that is filed.

Martin Luther King made sure that the media was always around wherever he went. If violence occurred, media was there. As a result, King, later on, did not have to be provocative. Eventually, in 1963 it was numbers and not violence. The nation marched on civil rights; 240000 people marched with him and in Washington D.C they finally heard him say: I have a dream.

Well, we have a dream too. And if protecting our journalists ensures our safe passage, so be it.

———————-
Rubana Huq, a poet, columnist, and a researcher.