WE are witnessing something unprece-dented and unheard of in the electoral history of Bangladesh. In absence of any challenger from opposition parties, some 151 candidates from Awami League-led ruling alliance are going to be elected without having to test their…
BEFORE Nelson Mandela ascended to the peak of his political career as South Africa’s president through a multiracial election held in 1994, his country was an international pariah. Obviously, the apartheid policy of segregating the majority black population from the…
COMPARED to Watergate, Friday morning’s breaking into BNP’s central office at Nayapaltan by plainclothesmen was too violent to be called the AL-run election-time government’s ‘Nayapaltangate.’ The ‘Watergate Scandal’ in the USA that was instrumental in the resignation of President Nixon…
THE two major events of last week, US envoy Nisha Desai’s three-day Dhaka visit and Khaleda Zia-led opposition delegation’s meeting with the president, though they could not break the prevailing political deadlock, did at least present the country with a…
NEITHER the hartal called by the opposition, nor the arrest of five BNP leaders by the government makes sense. The 72-hour hartal that the opposition BNP-led 18-party alliance had called in the afternoon of Friday surprised many, because the last…
A recent survey carried out to gauge the public’s view of contemporary events involving politics and government has come up with startling results. The authors of the study, The Daily Star and the Asia Foundation, found that respondents from the…
THE prospect of telephonic contact between the two party supremos seized the attention of the media and curious public the whole day on Saturday. Will they talk, and if so, when? Everyone was agog. Finally Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, also…
SCARCELY 24 hours had passed after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in her address to the nation called upon the opposition to join parliament for a dialogue and also invited it to participate in her proposed all-party election-time administration, when the…
THE speculation now going the rounds is what will happen on October 25 and after. But why should it be so hard to predict things about a time that is only a week and a half away? That is because…
POLITICAL use of religion has been largely behind social intolerance and communal disharmony in South Asia since the fag end of British colonialism in the region. And even after the colonialists left the subcontinent, indigenous politicians who took charge of…
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” – Arthur Schopenhauer LANGUAGE matters. To comprehend what someone is saying, members of the audience listen both to what and how something is…
TWO trucks were speeding wildly along the old Dhaka-Narayanganj road in Fatulla to overtake each other at dead of night. One of them first rammed into a roadside teashop, then stopped dead in its tracks causing a chasing police van…
THE Indian Border Security Force (BSF) has decided to revise the Felani Khatun murder trial, the Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh told the media on September 13. This decision has come a week after a special BSF court had cleared…
HOW power is transferred from one government to the next is an indicator of whether we are talking about a democracy or a dictatorship. While at the end of its term a democratic government hands over power to the next…
OVER the last few days Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, from different public gatherings, has been seeking people’s mandate to rule the country for another term. From a party rally at Suhrawardy Uddyan last Friday to the women’s gathering in Ashulia…
THE four days’ nightmare at the Jahangirnagar University (JU) is over at least for the next ten days. Vice Chancellor Professor Anwar Hossain, who was kept shut in his office from August 21 till August 24 by his agitating colleagues,…
THE Egyptian Spring went into coma on July 3 with the overthrow of the country’s first elected government of Mohamed Morsi by the military. And with the August 14 massacre of civilians who were protesting through sit-in demonstration against the…
THE Bangladeshi youth Nafis has nothing in self-defence as he has admitted to having plotted to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Had the explosive device he used to carry out the terrorist attack on the US…
THE pattern is familiar. Since the 1990s, before every election for the Jatiya Sangsad (parliament), the political situation becomes dicier with every passing day. The atmosphere this time seems even worse than before. The efforts being made earlier by the…
POWER is blind. Politicians have power and, unless tempered with responsibility, they have the proclivity for getting blinded by it. Patuakhali’s lawmaker Golam Moula Roni did go blind on Saturday afternoon when he failed to control himself and fell upon…
OUR native brinjal or begun in Bangla, has been genetically modified by introducing an alien gene into is DNA(genetic material). The modified version of this popular vegetable called Bt brinjal has the ability to fight its worst enemy, a pest…
THE January 25 uprising of 2011, popularly called Revolution, that overthrew the three-decade-old dictatorship of Hosni Mobarak saw a united Egypt. Protesters who gathered at the Cairo’s Tahrir Square represented all Egyptians regardless of their political or ideological identities, except,…
THE suspension of Bangladesh from US’s Generalised System of Preference (GSP) scheme has given rise to the all-too-familiar blame game in our national politics. The government in its initial reaction to the US decision did not miss the opportunity to…
HOW helpless is an institution or an individual before the power of a government? Ask Nobel laureate Dr. Munhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank (GB). The government first dislodged the person Yunus from his position as the managing director…
WHAT should we make of the results of the just completed elections under the four city corporations? Can we look at the result as the outcome of the anti-incumbency factor, since all the winners are opposition BNP supported mayoral candidates?…
THE governments since independence have been courting black money to come into mainstream economy. But so far the unwilling horse of black money could hardly be led to water, far less made to drink. Even so, our finance ministers won’t…
THE former military dictator Ershad has dared the ruling Awami League the opposition BNP together to prove their popularity in a presidential election. Since such an election is against the spirit of constitution, he has even suggested that such an…
It was again another big mess-up by the government. Failing to dissuade the leaders of Hefazat-e-Islam (HI) from withdrawing their long march to Dhaka, the government finally gave it permission to hold a rally at the end of the long…
THE nation is passing through the worst of the times in terms of confrontation between the government and the political parties in the opposition. On Friday, some UN Human Rights experts called upon all the parties involved to end violence…
PRESIDENT Zillur Rahman died at a point in Bangladesh’s political history when politics and politicians were being looked upon as a necessary evil only. In the public eye, they were nothing but a bunch of individuals bound by clannish loyalty…
As politics is becoming more confrontational, the narrative of social discourse is getting warlike. The language of extremism as a consequence is no more confined to the domain of extremist politics, but has flooded into the otherwise civil preserve of…
Spiral-ing violence is engulfing the entire Bangladesh society. The number of the dead is swelling by the hour. It all started after the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICT) sentenced Jamaat-e-Islami ((JI) leader Delwar Hossain Sayedee to death on Thursday for…
