Sunday, February 11: Joint forces arrest S.M.
Nuruzzaman, ex-commissioner of the Phulbari town
municipality and a leader of the Phulbari chapter
of the national committee resisting the Phulbari
coal mining project. Nuruzzaman was instrumental
in organising the anti-mining protests at
Phulbari last year that led to BDR firing that
killed six people.

He was arrested by joint forces personnel and
severely beaten up in the Phulbari market-place
(in full public view) and then thrown in jail,
with instructions to the local constabulary to
hold him on whatever charges they could think of.
It was only following protests and reporting of
the incident in the media that he was released
the next day.

So how should we understand this shocking
incident? Yet another example of the caretaker
government over-stepping its brief and taking
action that is both high-handed and
unconscionable? This is exactly the problem with
the current situation of unaccountability, right?

Not so fast. This kind of action is indeed a
problem, but not for the reason that most think
it is. It is not simply a case of the caretaker
government acting in an authoritarian and
unaccountable manner. The danger, I am afraid, is
far more fundamental than that.

Consider this: almost two weeks after the
incident, there is still no information as to who
gave the order to arrest Nuruzzaman and what the
intention behind the action was. Right now the
chain of command is so muddy that it is
impossible to get to the bottom of the question
of on what authority and with what objective
actions are being taken.

The danger is not so much that the caretaker
government is abusing its authority in an
unaccountable and non-transparent manner. The
danger is that there remain those within both the
army and the administration who are sympathetic
to the outgoing BNP administration and who are
using the confusion to try to bring about the
downfall of the present government.

The current set-up is such that those within the
government who wish for it to fail and be
discredited are able to take actions and give
orders that are actually harming the credibility
of the government. Unchecked, they will only get
bolder and more audacious.

This is how best to understand the bostee
evictions and the anti-hawker drives. It is not a
question of the caretaker government as a unified
body being authoritarian and contemptuous of the
public. Indeed, to this day, the caretaker
government still cannot state with certainty on
whose authority these policies were implemented,
let alone on what grounds.

What is happening is that BNP loyalists are using
the current confusion and the fact that there is
no centralised authority and universally
acknowledged chain of command to take actions
that they know will bring the current government
into disrepute.

The idea is to create pockets of resistance
against the current administration so that when
the time comes to put 50,000 people out on the
streets to protest power shortages (or whatever)
it will have a ready supply of men and women with
a bona fide grievance against the current
government.

It is heart-breaking that many of the bostee
dwellers who had known nothing except extortion
and marginalisation and repression these many
years and had cheered the coming of the new order
on January 11 found themselves its first victims.
Their euphoria has, of course, turned to
disillusionment and anger. That’s the idea.

Nowhere is the spectre of the BNP machinations
more apparent than in the attorney general’s
office and the judiciary. The egregious handling
of the corruption cases is not merely the work of
an over-matched and over-extended prosecutorial
team, but reflects the concerted efforts of BNP
loyalists still in the attorney general’s office
to cast a pall of doubt over the entire process.

The loyalists know that they have a sympathetic
judiciary that is ever happy to step in and hand
down judgments that defy both rationality and
established precedent and procedure, and that if
there are any holes in the prosecution that these
will be seized upon gratefully by both defence
and arbiter.

In other words, the counter-reformation is very
much alive and well. It would be a mistake to
think that these people are going to lie down and
play dead. They will not give up without a fight.

And as long as their bank accounts remain
untouched and Tareq Rahman remains at large and
the judiciary and attorney general’s office
remain in their hands and their people in every
corner of the administration and army continue to
sabotage the caretaker government, they will
believe that they are still in with a fighting
chance. And they would be right. Don’t count them
out just yet.

The stakes for the caretaker are unimaginable,
the cost of failure unthinkable. If we are really
to put in place the reforms necessary to make our
democracy functional and really do something
about the culture of corruption and criminality,
and, most importantly, impunity that has
flourished in the period of the Fourth Republic,
then we have to be aware of this ferocious
rearguard action that is being waged by the
forces of the counter-reformation.

This is the answer to the question as to why so
many of the most corrupt and criminal remain at
large and outside the dragnet. It is important
for the country to understand that there are
split loyalties in the current administration and
there remain four-party sympathisers at its core
who are pulling out all the stops to protect
their allies, and that their machinations need to
be recognised for what they are and neutralised
without delay if the country is to not descend
into chaos.

It would thus be a mistake to think that these
machinations are signs that the caretaker
administration is even worse than what came
before it or take these actions as evidence that
we need to return to where we were on January 10.
In fact, the opposite is true.

These actions are best understood as the
desperate struggle of the ancien regime to try
and sow the seeds of confusion to discredit the
current administration and return itself to power
by any means necessary. The danger is very real,
and it is crucial that we all understand what is
at stake.