Don’t they have homes to go back to?

Selima Rahman informs us that Begum Khaleda Zia has not been taking any solid food over the past few days

because of the disruption in food supplies to party leaders and workers holed up in the BNP chairperson's office in Gulshan. That is certainly noble on Begum Zia's part. If she has decided to demonstrate her solidarity with what Selima Rahman calls her starving supporters, one cannot but appreciate it. And if the police have been turning away food vans from the gates of the office of late, they surely have some questions to answer. After all, it is a matter of survival for all those BNP people, including Selima Rahman, who have taken it upon themselves to wage war against citizens from within the confines of that office.

Let us face it. When Selima Rahman tells us of the sufferings of her party people in that office, we understand the predicament of all those people. On a larger scale though, we as citizens – and that despite our diverse political inclinations – are concerned that neither Selima Rahman nor her party colleagues have ever expressed any contrition over the scores of deaths of common citizens through fire-bombing, over more than a month in which this has gone on, since the BNP and its allies called a blockade interspersed by hartals in the country. It is a bizarre circumstance when you have a former prime minister refusing to comprehend the terrible consequences of the dangerous politics she has now sought to pursue.

The BNP-wallahs, confronted with such complaints, will glibly have you know that their party is not responsible for the deaths of these poor citizens. Of course it is responsible, for it called the blockade in the first place. If the party and its leaders had any political foresight, they would have called a halt to the blockade when early reports of citizens dying in petrol bombings began to filter in. Someone should have taken a leaf out of Mahatma Gandhi's book, to let Begum Khaleda Zia know how politics can be saved from being taken over by anarchy. Gandhi called a halt to his non-cooperation movement in February 1922 when a mob, in a state of misplaced excitement, pushed twenty three policemen to death in Chauri Chaura. But, of course, Gandhi knew the nature of politics. He had a feel for history. You do not expect such wisdom to emerge from lesser mortals.

And so we will let it be for now. But then comes that rather nagging question: why doesn't Begum Zia go home? Let it not be said that the government is blocking her journey back to her residence. But if indeed we come by proof of the government making it hard for her to go home, we will surely grill the leading figures of the administration on their behaviour. So far though, there has been no clear indication that anyone is stopping Begum Zia from going back home. She has a home. An office is an office. Why must she try to make people think she is in an Aung San Suu Kyi-like predicament? You do not expect a politician cognisant of her or his responsibilities to the country to spend weeks in make-believe confinement. Neither do you expect a former prime minister, for all the steep decline in her political sagacity, to go on depending for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the largesse of others, even if those others happen to be family members happy to cook for her day after day.

At Gulshan, the BNP has simply been making a comedy and then a farce of politics. You only have to think of the politicians and workers who have chosen to be beside their leader as she wages her battle for 'democracy.' These politicians and workers, we are being told by Selima Rahman, are starving because the food vans are being turned away by the police. Well, they have a very simple way, assuming that they are famished, of overcoming the problem: they can all go back home. Don't these politicians and workers have wives and husbands and children back home? Don't their families cook and eat in the comfort of home? Why must they think they are doing the nation a huge favour by staying in their chairperson's office and hoping that their means of nutritional sustenance will come from outside? If the fear of arrest, once they step outside the gates of the office, holds them back, that too is no good reason either for them to spend days and weeks on those premises.

Imagine the many complications attendant on the refusal of the BNP chief and her loyalists to go back home and bring back a semblance of social normalcy in their lives. Home is that one place from where they can shape their politics, perhaps even reinvent it. But at the Gulshan office, the logistics available to cater to such a large number of people as are now resident there are not enough. There is the matter of toilet facilities. People need to shower, to shave, to brush their teeth, to relax on chairs, to sleep in comfortable beds. Yet the stubbornness, beginning at the top and coming all the way down to the most humble party worker, has now turned the BNP story into a farce. It is bizarre. It is unprecedented. For perhaps the only time in the history of politics has a political party opted to eat out of others' hands, to refuse to have its activists go home to their families.

Here's a final thought: even as Selima Rahman speaks of famine-like conditions at her party leader's office, even as all those lower level leaders and activists have abjured all thoughts of home, there is the eerie, soul-shattering feeling taking hold of our sensibilities – one that relates to all the families ruined when their parents, sons, and daughters were put to the blockade torch in all the questionable refinement of cruelty.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist, current affairs commentator, and columnist.