The minister was obviously unhappy with the criticism made of the corruption in his department. He had every right to feel unhappy about that, but when he demanded to know, in visible anger, from a representative of TIB who the latter was, he was only making it known all over again that even ministers are sometimes subject to vulnerability.

And as you mull over the irate Mannan Bhuiyan, you just might be drawn to the spectacle of Science and ICT Minister Abdul Moyeen Khan flinging a copy of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper to the floor right in the presence of the representatives of donor agencies. One certainly understands the ire of the minister, who is otherwise known as a gentle, polite man who could perhaps have done much more good to our world if he had stayed with the teaching of physics at Dhaka University. Where the minister's observations about the PRSP are the matter, many of us by and large agree with him. But not many among us would do what he did with that PRSP copy the other day.

And even as you wonder why so many people in responsible positions are taking umbrage at so many innocuous things these days, you have the rather unsettling matter of the Board of Investment chief's characterization of the Centre for Policy Dialogue as a bunch of shameless liars and conspirators. That was an outrageous act. What followed only left us even more stunned, for when you have such respectable individuals as the five members of the CPD trustee board being compelled to obtain bail over an issue that really has no basis, you seriously ask yourself why the country has come to such a pass.

Anyone who thinks Rehman Sobhan can be treated with manifest indignity will surely need to be reminded of the pre-eminent role he has played in the creation of this country. As one of the young economists who once assisted Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in advancing the Bengali cause for autonomy through the formulation of the Six Point program, Rehman Sobhan remains an iconic figure not just for his generation but also for ours as well as those to come. And those four others? They are all individuals of good conscience and have without question done us proud in their professional fields. Our respect for them, in this post-arrest warrant affair, has only registered a necessary rise.

In these past few years, the very bad precedent of muzzling dissent, or the other person's point of view, has been taking sinister shape in Bangladesh. There are perhaps few countries in the world, at least among those which loudly proclaim their democratic credentials, where editors, publishers and reporters are often compelled to seek the protection of the judiciary only because a few irate men, who incidentally are part of the power process or closely allied to it, are clearly unable to accept criticism of their actions in the media. It is a sign of malaise in a land when senior journalists, who also happen to be eminently respectable members of civil society, must go looking for lawyers only because a few angry men caught in the act of doing wrong are bent on hounding them out of their profession or forcing them into cowering silence.

And just what the state of the law is something you can deduce from the alacrity with which warrants of arrest are issued against citizens without affording the affected an opportunity to explain their positions. And then there are the plainly violent expressions of political intolerance. When a ruling party lawmaker runs news reporters out of town because they have carried out their professional responsibility of upholding the truth, and when no one in the corridors of power thinks it is behaviour most reprehensible, you cannot but realize the sordid levels to which respect for others, for those who do not share your view of the world around you, has sunk in Bangladesh.

On a very broad scale, the liberalism that we watched taking shape in the 1960s and the early 1970s have in these past three decades taken a bad mauling. How do you explain the fact that the widow of General Khaled Musharraf now finds herself in a position where she must vacate the accommodation allotted to her by the Ziaur Rahman regime in 1979? Matters ought not to have turned out this way. Begum Musharraf has in the last thirty-one years gone through much emotional suffering, for reasons we are all aware of.

The biggest difficulty, where the rest of us are concerned, is in coming to terms with the truth that not even the family of a prominent freedom fighter can any more assure itself that it is the recipient of national gratitude, that the country will look upon it with respect because one of its members once took the bold step of going to war to free the land of the wolves that threatened to devour it.

Note, though, that the intolerance we speak of encompasses nearly every sector of Bengali society at this point of time. That includes the media, among which happen to be newspapers only too happy to be economical with the truth or playing truant with history. Quite a few editors bristle when you choose to describe Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as Bangabandhu. There are some newspapers which adopt so-called policies wherein Mujib is not Bangabandhu, wherein on November 3, 1975 it was not the four national leaders but four Awami League leaders who were murdered in prison. What you then are left facing is something more than a distortion of history. You are a witness to a crude form of intellectual dishonesty.

The absence of tolerance assumes a graver form when perfectly good and responsible individuals seek to defend the deaths in "crossfire" of men with alleged criminal records. It is an eerie situation when the rule of law takes a backseat to the caprices of a few when individuals are hauled away by the security forces, eventually to be left dead on open fields as a result of what is generally -- and unconvincingly -- given out as a consequence of a skirmish between the dead man's accomplices and the security forces. The inexplicable part of the story is that all the "accomplices" have "escaped" and no one among the security people has been killed or wounded in that "skirmish." Lest you have missed the point, what has happened here is a simple issue of doing away with an alleged criminal without much of attention being paid to an upholding of the law. Intolerance has stealthily, and sometimes brazenly, taken the place of wisdom. The fury and ferocity with which the police erect barricades all over town every time the political opposition plans agitational programs and the glee with which they break the bones of political workers in full view of the world quite undermine the original objective of Bangladesh being a land of civilized people. A misuse of official power and position is what increasingly strengthens the idea of intolerance.

You can go on and on. The reality before the country today is that the very places where you would normally expect justice and fair play to work for you -- the civil service, the political process -- are swiftly getting to be off limits for citizens. A businessman complains against a newspaper and the result is a prohibition on the dissemination of news about him or his business empire served, of all people, by those who man the Press Council!

And then there is the tale of the seven policemen who would like to be transferred from the local constituency of Law Minister Moudud Ahmed because they do not feel comfortable in their jobs there or, plainly, have come up against impediments. People in trade lodge complaints against ministers and lawmakers, only to find themselves hauled away to face prosecution over a sudden litany of cases.

It is a depressing condition we are muddling through. It is a sad country we inhabit. In the gathering grey of twilight, it is not poetry we read across the expanses of the sky. It is fear of what new travails and heartbreak the coming day will bring that takes hold of our souls.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.