Home Minister Dr. Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir has invoked the right of “citizen’s arrest,” calling upon the public to deny Jamat-Shibir camp-followers’ presence on the streets to “deter” Jamat’s hartal call (half-day in the capital) on January 31. Earlier he had denied Jamat’s “right of assembly” by rejecting the prayer of a Jamat leader of Dhaka city to hold a rally protesting “unfair” trial of Jamat’s national leaders and demanding their release from long detention under protracted “process of trial”. The ground for refusal of permission to hold a Jamat rally as publicised was that the police could not find the applicant. Usually, leaders of other political parties applying to hold permission for public meetings do not have to appear personally before the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but simply send a deputy to discuss terms and conditions that the police may impose on the particular day, time and place of assembly for the sake of public order.

Presumably, relevant Jamat leaders are in hiding for fear of indiscriminate arrest on grounds of “suspicion of sabotage”. Indeed, most known leaders and leading workers of Jamat are evading arrest by staying away from home and restricting public appearance (showing up only in the midst of a large gathering or in a protected place). The jails around the country are already overflowing with Jamat and Shibir activists picked up by the police in pre-planned raids or at random. The detainees are implicated, also at random, in one or other of the many gang cases for “violent” acts, filed and framed by the police against unspecified names and numbers of perpetrators.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the police could cite “non-appearance of the applicant” as ground for rejection of Jamat’s application for permission to hold their public meeting. The result was Jamat’s hartal call on January 31, and violent confrontations between the police and the “hit and run” pickets. Public response to the Home Minister’s call for “citizen’s arrest” of Jamat-Shibir agitators went unheeded. It is difficult to assess whether resultant public sympathy is more for the Jamat-Shibir men driven to desperation by the Home Minister’s policy of denial of any political space for their protestations, or for the police “overstretched” (in places overwhelmed) by the task of application of coercive power in execution of that policy against an organised section of the polity with grassroots connections throughout the country. There has been “some” response from the Home Minister’s party political hoodlums, who took the Home Minister’s words followed by directives from “some” Awami League functionaries as license to take law in their own hands. Awami League-Students League-Youth League-AL Volunteer Corps activists confronted pickets in physical encounters here and there. One group gunned down some “suspected” picketers causing multiple death and bullet injuries.
Early in December last year, the Home Minister had similarly denied permission for a Jamat meeting claiming there was no application seeking permission for the public meeting. Metropolitan police, however, contradicted the Home Minister’s claim saying they had received an application for permission, but did not grant it. The reaction was the call for hartal by Jamat “on its own” on December 4. The success of that impromptu hartal call by much-weakened Jamat surprised “some” Awami League leaders, who privately resented the unnecessarily “provocative” stance “irresponsibly” voiced by a “limelight-seeking” Home Minister (competing with the “talkative” Finance Minister), who has so far proved tall in words but short in actions. Some Awami League leaders and in particular the Awami Youth League leader chided the Home Minister for calling upon party activists to put up resistance to pickets. They pointed out that it was the job of the Home Minister, his police and his intelligence units to maintain order in the streets; it was not the job of party political activists. A section of Awami Students League leaders, however, belatedly responded to the call of the Home Minister to physically resist pickets, subsequent to the success of Jamat’s December 4 hartal, when on December 9 sparse pickets of the 18-party alliance led by the BNP were out on the streets to enforce their “street-blockade” programme. A militant team of Awami Students’ League armed with knives and sticks from Jagannath University mistook a tailor called Biswajit (from the minority community) on his way to his shop, and running to escape a “cocktail-explosion”, for a picketer, chased him and knived him to death in barbarous frenzy. The scene of that death on television shocked the nation. The Home Minister and the Prime Minister’s office tried to deflect attention from the ruling party perpetrators of the crime, claiming they were infiltrators in the ruling camp and had family connections specifically with the Jamat. Public hue and cry foiled that ploy, as TV pictures clearly identified the perpetrators and the media dug out the facts of their actual involvement with Awami Students’ League leaders who, the identified goons confessed, directed them to engage in “preventive” violence.
Repetition of the same strategy of engaging political muscle to augment law-enforcers with party militants to foil Jamat activism and the hartal call has now resulted in a high price of blood, life and limbs that the country is evidently neither ready to pay nor persuaded by the raison d’être proclaimed. Orchestration in the media of a demand to ban Jamat politics, presumably being vigorously advocated by a clique within the ruling alliance, labelling “Jamat-Shibir” as a terrorist outfit, and the Home Minister’s patent provocations to create conditions for public outcry for such a ban, are very much off the mark of ground realities and the paradigm of post-liberation democratic evolution of Bangladesh polity. It is not clear whether the Prime Minister herself is as yet a party to that ill-conceived strategy, which BNP leaders have characterised as a recipe for “civil war”. To survive and prosper in the difficult days ahead of global financial disarray and pessimistic world market outlook, Bangladesh simply cannot afford even “civil war”-like conditions, let alone any episode of civil war.