These folks are here, they are well funded, well motivated, and evidently well-armed. Their intentions are not hidden any more either. They seek to create a perfect militant theocratic state upon the corpse of an albeit imperfect pluralist democracy they loathe. This is the same democracy that required a down payment of three million martyrs and regular installment payments of hundreds more every time autocracy raised its ugly head. The names and methods of these shadowy outfits are different. Yet, their objective is the same: undermining our democracy by unleashing terror in the hearts of helpless citizens. If protecting the life and liberty of its citizens is the prime duty of a government, as indeed it ought to be, then the government of the day has its work cut out for it.

Simply banning a given organisation and arresting a few cadres is but a temporary cure. Such measures, as temptingly alluring as they are, correspond to giving chemotherapy to address cancer when what is needed is to cut off the tumour. As we have seen elsewhere shadowy groups which are proscribed simply change their name and start their evil work under a new signboard. Far more comprehensive measures are needed to combat this menace. Most importantly there must be the political will to acknowledge the problem and crackdown both on the underground terrorist networks and their above-ground friends.

Let us call it as it is. While the terrorist cells are found in the remotest corners of the country, some of their sympathisers are ensconed rather close to the centers of power in Dhaka. The occasional speeches by certain members of parliament are not exactly too different from the pamphlets found in these cells. If the government believes that by giving a little bit of ground to certain elements it will buy the loyalty of like-minded groups around the country, it is being blissfully naïve. Groups that have a philosophical contempt for pluralist democracy can rarely be co-opted permanently into the democratic order. Rather, they use democratic power to arrange the funeral of democracy from the inside. Recent human history is replete with examples like Spain and Germany in the 1930s and Czechoslovakia in the 1940s where democratic appeasement of non-democratic forces eventually resulted in the death of democracy.

It will be wise for the government to review the list of its purported friends. Can groups whose ideology was rabidly anti-Bangladesh and who to date have never apologised for their 1971 role be counted as permanent allies of democracy? One needs to look no further than some of the major educational campuses to see how well treated the ruling party's own student wing is at the hands of its nominal friends.

On the eve of American general elections in 1996, Republican candidate Bob Dole said that Democratic Bill Clinton was his adversary, not his enemy. Senator Dole was simply describing the ground rules for political partisanship in a democratic order. The BNP government ought not to think of the Awami League as an enemy but rather an adversary. The same goes for the Awami League as well. As disparate as they appear from time to time and as mutually acrimonious as their leaders can be, these two parties have a vested interest in the republican democracy that both struggled to establish through the nine years of autocratic rule. No, the enemy is an ideology that openly disdains the very concepts of liberty, equality, and democracy. This enemy believes that the end justifies the means. Be it terrorism, armed insurrection, hateful literature, and even pure murder, the enemy knows of no bounds in its effort to subjugate our people under its warped sense of the divine mandate.

The machinery of state that has so often been used to intimidate political opposition and professionals' association can be better deployed to thwart the real enemy lurking in the shadows. Will it not be wiser to deploy the heavy hand of the police to hunt down terrorists instead of raiding women's dormitories? Can we not send BDR battalions to uproot shadowy militants instead of using them to stop Opposition rallies? While we are at it, why not spare an army battalion from Liberian peacekeeping and have it flush out the hatemongers in our own backyard?

Some time ago the government launched Operation Clean Heart with much fanfare. After the recent discoveries of militant outfits in several rural areas, may be it is time to trigger an Operation Clean Hearth to cleanse our hearth of armed bigots whose shadowy dens of hate are seemingly far more numerous and more spread out than previously believed.

Left unattended in today's global situation, the tumour of fanatical militancy can only grow ominously. The only cure for a tumour, before it turns into a full fledged cancer in the body-politic, is to cut it out. It is the duty of this government to resolve itself to fight the militant menace without delay. It is a fight in which no mercy can be shown and no quarter given. Unleash the security forces on their hideouts, freeze their assets and bank accounts, lodge cases against them in the courts, and prevent them from using sanctified houses of worship as meeting halls. Our reputation depends on it, our peace depends on it, our way of life depends on it.

Our democracy depends on it.