The former environment minister and Awami League politician Hasan Mahmud has very generously informed us that the theft of coal of the kind we have just observed at Barapukuria actually began in the period of the BNP government. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it did not. That is not the point.
But what does worry citizens is this rather irritating habit on the part of certain ruling party figures to try explaining away their government’s lapses through drawing attention to the misdeeds of those who came before them. Let us reassure ourselves: we remain fully aware of the terrible record of bad governance, coupled with an unpardonable distortion of history, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party engaged in during its time in office. That the BNP has done grave damage to the ethos of Bangladesh has never been in dispute. We hold it guilty of playing truant with our heritage.
Should that, however, be any reason for the leading lights of the Awami League to persuade us, or try to, into believing that nothing wrong was done on the watch of the government now in office when all that coal disappeared from Barapukuria? The test of governance is for those in power to acknowledge wrong where it is committed and then quickly go for damage control. Of course, in the matter of the coal scandal, it should have been the sacred responsibility of the authorities to keep watch over the operations of the Barapukuria Coal Mine. That responsibility was cast to the winds and what we now have on our hands is yet one more instance of individuals or a group of individuals taking an entire nation for a ride.
It is just not acceptable to evade the issue by trying to pin the blame for the scandal on a government which left office twelve years ago. Any attempt at doing that would be an absurdity. What truly needs to be done in the circumstances is for the government now in office to go after the officials of the Barapukuria mine and have them answer for what has been going wrong at the mine. And yet that would not be enough, for it may well be that more grasping hands have been at work at Barapukuria. Let the owners of those hands be identified, if there are good reasons to think such hands have been busy helping to remove all that coal from the mine in the expectation that people would not notice.
But people have a bad habit of noticing almost everything in these post-modern times. They worry about the gold which seemingly goes missing from the vault of the central bank. They are gravely concerned when the central bank’s foreign reserves disappear from New York. In more recent times, the dramatic manner in which the Farmers’ Bank was brought down by those who should have done better has left citizens wondering at the cavalier attitude of the authorities towards the whole issue. No one has been charged. There appears little likelihood of those behind the scandal being brought to justice. And that is precisely where it hurts. The hurt is in the people, whose faith in the rule of law, in democracy, crumbles when the criminality involved in the collapse of the Farmers’ Bank, in any institution for that matter, is pushed under the rug.
The rug has also come in handy for people in authority to keep their silence over the indiscretions of those who, in their time on the board of Janata Bank, cheerily gave away vast sums of loans to one single individual. The men responsible for this bad transgression have not been summoned to a public inquiry in Parliament. The law, as far as citizens are aware, has not been applied in dealing with this gross dereliction of duty. It is an attitude that does not bode well for the country, for it is testimony to the propensity on the part of those who matter to keep their heads under the water for a while and then re-emerge once the noise has subsided and proceed into carrying on with life as usual. Wrongdoing is thus ignored, to serve as a bad hint that those who steal the resources of the state or squander them through distributing them in uneducated fashion can indeed stay above and beyond the law. Worse, it is a sign of all the other wrongs to be in the years to come, those on which we might expect legal harshness to be applied but which proposition may conveniently be set aside.
We inhabit bizarre and eerie times in Bangladesh today. With each passing day, our future is being seized from us, in gradual and painfully incremental manner, by the robber barons in our midst. With every passing hour, our faith in the power of the law to swat down the villains who are determined to upend our lives through their manifest misdeeds erodes, ever so slowly, ever so surely.
That is the sadness which weighs us, humble and proud citizens that we are, down.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is the Editor-in-Charge at The Asian Age