Photo: Reuters

This piece is going to be its writer’s expression of solidarity with the teeming workers who flocks in the garment factories, day in day out, for yearn of a life so that they can buy food to live and feed their near ones, so that they too can prolong their life span. So that they would be able to live in city, fall in love and raise offspring. And buy colour TV where the glittering lifestyle cramped with subtle nuance of emotional tempestuousness, hitherto unfamiliar in their own lives, of people who do not belong to their own class, country or speak their language, keep them fascinated for a significant portion of their non-working hours. For this fantasia infested boxed life charge up their sentient as much as the charger does to their mobile sets. On whose sweat, (and blood and limbs) his country accumulates digits to surge its GDP curve. This is also going to be my aeration of revulsion at the profiteers, corrupt businessmen and government officials, and the government and opposition politicians for their apathy to the sufferings of the people and at the decadence in social mores and triumph of greed.

These I do in concert with retired government apparatchik’s, politicians, newspaper columnists, bloggers, writers, poets, fellow shoppers –  in TV talk shows, in hoisting flag half-mast, in twitter blogs, in after dinner chit chats or at barber shops.

And for doing all these, I render this piece into an exercise in futility.

For inevitably, this will draw out comparisons and analysis of what happened in Tazreen and elsewhere,  and will be a aide-mémoire that the louse-ridden government and controlling bodies have ceased to become functional against collective greed of the powerful few. How political scoring, blame game and apathy for the people in the lower rung of the ladder took over all sense that was needed to stop repeat of the same tragedy again?

Admittedly, these have all happened: a ninth floor building was built on a three or six floor foundation.  The municipal authority of Savar sanctioned the plan ultra vires, and RAJUK, the authority that should have monitored these defaults, did not intervene or stepped in to regularise it. When the crack showed up on the building, the bank at the ground floor packed its business and moved away from it. The governing body of the RMG industry, the BGMEA notified not to use the premises for the obvious risk to the worker lives. And at the spectacle of the mother of all flouts, the garment factory owners assembled their workers in the building on the fateful day to carry on as usual.

Of course, they had their shipment schedule to maintain. Failing, it could induce their foreign principals to take business away from them, may be to another country. Bangladesh would lose valuable foreign currency earning and this in turn could delay its attaining middle income country status by such and such date. Only saboteurs, who do not want to see Bangladesh prosper would impede that prospect. So, some of them knocked on the building hard to make it crumble. Everybody else: Savar Municipal Authority, RAJUK, the architect, the factory owners were all imbued with a rare sense of patriotism in their thoughts and deeds.

I understand the building was also an assembly point for the workers when they were called for their rent a mob moonlighting chores, organised by the owner of the building, who is also a ruling party somebody. I do not know what the rest of the world is thinking about the characteristics of the Bengali people in general, but I guess, as a young poet Sukanta inspired us to believe, some hundred years ago, that they view us in awe, because even in a desolated reduced to ashes state, Bengalis do not compromise with evil. I should also think this is not unique to Bangladeshi only as a people. What is puzzling however is our propensity to tolerance of the evil deeds and inability to see beyond the box, our overwhelming urge to be compliant with the power that be and inability to take a principled stand.

The successive governments have failed in implementing building codes despite a number of publicised structural collapse since 2004 (Shankharibazar in 2004, Spectrum in 2005 and Phoenix in 2006). There is also a charge of criminal negligence which can be pointed towards the authority in their inaction to make provisions for disaster management when calamity of this magnitude strikes. The fire service and the army do have some resources but for improved management international organisations and coordinated programme with foreign governments should have been set off.

But importantly, nobody has ever been made accountable for these inactions or misdeeds. No one person or body has been seen to be brought to justice. And the people of Bangladesh has voted to powers the two same ruling clique by rotation despite everything that has been done to them, no matter how outrageous or heinous that have been.

At the inception of industrial revolution in the nineteenth century Europe, the Communist movement urged the metamorphosed industrial labours from peasantry to rise in armed struggle, reasoning that they had nothing to lose other than their shackles, in the then upcoming struggle for their emancipation. Had Europe truly not seen the spectre then, we would not see the social welfare states and economies across Europe and North America today, where the workers’ right and securities are treasured, monitored and implemented virtuously.

Now at the inception of globalisation why are our workers still mired in their current state of cerebral or sentimental backwater, while we are emerging as the new breed of sweat shops of the world?

But please pause for a thought, if you would.

This is post Shahbagh country. We are seeing in television how ordinary people have come out in flocks to help out in the salvation of fellow citizens from the debris. How the rescue workers, doctors, nurse, fire service men, police, army have thrust aside their uniformed animation and put that extra effort and have shed that extra drop of tears while relentlessly carrying out the rescue work.

Bastille fell for lesser reason. Nobody should, least of all the vested interest groups who have the most to lose, ignore these cyphers. It may be tempting, under the false cocoon to dismiss this as bubble in the mass emotion, with flawed conviction.

But doing so will be the beginning of an undoing; doing at peril.

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Latif Quader is Fellow Chartered Accountant and a businessman.

However, for the same modus operandi to apply, in the latter half of 20th century, there were some not so minor complications. For, by then there have advent on the world scene hundreds of nation states or assembly of diverse population under singular state identity, many of whose population was permeated with post enlightenment ideas of freedom of speech, egalitarianism and individual rights. Delusion with after death purgatory and various shades of divinity and omnipotence sans humanism already had slinked inside human minds, and the world was acquiescently divided into two camps, more or less along these lines.

So, when regiments of armies with modern combat armaments were unleashed on to the unarmed civilians of the then East Pakistan, its people’s sensibilities took jolts: of multiple dimensions. They woke up to rude realisation that it was, what they thought their own army, who had attacked them; that their country had  been controlled by a minority sub-nation within the country, who held uninhibited hatred for them; that they would rather annihilate them than to consider them at par in every aspect of citizenry; that, during the crackdown, one only has to be a Bengali to get killed by the soldiers; and that the religious bond that was supposed to have tied them together under the cloak of one nation, was a big farce, per se.

Millions fled from the country; and its young men banded together to put up armed resistance. People proclaimed independence of their land freeing all ties from its previous statehood. During the next nine months, the army killed an estimated three million defenceless people and raped two hundred thousand women. This went almost unabated, with pockets of resistance put up by the freedom fighters; until irregular clashes with bordering India escalated into a full-fledged frontal war. Within weeks the Indian army and the Freedom Fighters crashed a demoralised and broken army to surrender; and the new government took over.

If, the crackdown by the army on the night of 26^th March was a tremor in the acuity of the known realities in Bengali minds, then the onset of their collaborators, from among its own creed to the mayhem was shattering in its core of their faith in humanity and sense of nationhood. A traumatised and fearful people vowed to get equal from the very day it started. It took roots in every Bengalis grain to see that this is done by equal measures, in time, come hell or high water.

Up to that point it remained all very straight. Unadulterated realism stroked again, however, when the saga of our self-rule set on. The 195 officers and soldiers of the surrendered army, identified as the core band of war criminals and perpetrators of the genocide had to be repatriated back to where they came from, under the Geneva Convention rules for Prisoner of War. The newly enthroned and excitable ZA Bhutto put out threats to harm the Bengalis who were entrapped still then in Pakistan. The US, and Pakistan’s Islamist and regional allies were up into nipping in the bud the war torn country. International Marxism had taken a bizarre stand supporting the genocide, while their local cronies muddled the Chinese version of the doctrine with China’s foreign policy and its regional interest, proclaiming its Chairman as ‘our Chairman’. Famine followed when emergency food aid was blocked by the US. At home, and state principle of democracy was abandoned in favour of one-party rule under the very benevolent leader, who had earlier declared a general amnesty for war crimes, in the aftermath of inspiring his people to take up armed struggle for a free country.

A heroic freedom fighter, who became the army chief, assumed power after the leader was killed. Within less than a decade after its liberation, Bangladesh returned to the normalcy of East Pakistan, when known and high profile collaborators were winning ‘elections’ and assuming high offices under his patronage. Their rehabilitation process were further sanctified, when his regime, knocking the second state principle of nationalism, went onto a course of recreating a parallel Bangladesh – or at least an illusion of it – and a new slogan, a pseudo national anthem and a new definition of nationalism followed.

Rehabilitation continued when a second dictator took command at the helm and took the country further backward. His onslaught was on the third state principle, of secularism. As if inserting ‘Bismillah’ in the constitution did not go far enough, he decreed Islam as state religion in the constitution; all to gain favour of the Islamists, or at least what he thought would gain him a place in the hearts and mind of god fearing people.

However, by then the widow of the slain dictator and the daughter of the dead leader were out there on the streets to claim, what they thought was their inheritance. Both seemed under misplaced belief that the ex-collaborators and their brand of religion and politics mattered, when it comes to win the hearts of people. Islamisation began at home, and abroad: while dress code and the styles changed at home, visit to destinations abroad changed, making Saudi Arabia the most visited endpoint, pilgrimage as often cited reason.

While all these went on, war crimes trials were pushed back from the point of a distant wishful thinking, into national oblivion. But just as it happened, a housewife, and mother of a martyr in the name of Jahanara Imam, publicly reminded the unfinished issue; and she caught on people’s imagination by opening up a platform and even held public mock trials of collaborators.  When this mother was a courageous voice in wilderness, the widow had assumed the control of the government riding high on people’s emotion by the cooperation of the collaborators and their likeminded allies.

Nearing the end of her regime, the daughter, in an uncanny twist, lured the mandarins to team up with her, thus opening the floodgate to stripe off the bureaucratic establishment of their work practice, ethics and values. She bought the widow down through street barricades and ‘ballot’, but then when in power her regime let loose in the country an unprecedented rise in state patronised terror by organised party men, somewhere becoming as much effective as de facto local government.

The second coming of the widow was defining moment in the history in many ways. Firstly, people realised that the democracy and the form of government they had salvaged through street fighting, has then emerged in to a system ‘of choice between the lesser of the two evils’. That voraciousness and pillaging of public coffer by the ruling family members, their cronies and party apparatchiks are sanctioned actions; that the democratic system is nothing but the rule of one of the two families; that parliamentary seats or nomination is an auction process that goes to the highest bidder whose presence in the parliament session, and that voicing of any issue in public are dependent on which side of the house they were sitting, the rigours of Article 70 of the constitution and, when applied are often their exercises in obsequiousness.

Her regime made mockeries of the judicial system, the office of the President and the caretaker system of government. When the daughter’s second term ensued, she took to the street with greater vigour. Stalemate in the power handover negotiation and anarchy on the streets of Dhaka prevailed over, leading to army takeover of the business of governing the country.
Everything was put into quarantine for two years. In the interlude of power politics sobriety returned, and introspection led Sheikh Hasina to vow trials of the war criminal. After forming the next government, when she initiated the trial process, just about four decades had passed on by then.

The protracted process ended up with letting loose of one criminal before his apprehension, and way before his death sentence. The next one secured a ‘life sentence’ when death verdict was the right order. People smelt political underhand complicity, and one small ‘event invitation’ in the facebook gathered cyber-savvy fresh citizenry into the Shahbagh Moar in thousands. These brands can now be seen as distinctly different from their previous compliant, fatalist and torn generation.

Now the country has got the just verdict in the third time. No doubt this is a testimony to the maxim: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does (Margaret Mead).

Let thousand more flowers bloom for a very long time; for many of the escaped 195 are still alive and yet to face an International Court. And, for the ongoing trial process at home let’s not forget that, to make peaceful revolution impossible is just as well making violent revolution inevitable.

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Latif Quader is Fellow Chartered Accountant and a businessman.