Fishmongers are usually a docile type of community who know their art well. But of late, intruders into the trade have been overtly responsible for its corrosion. How corroded fish trade has become can better be gauged by the aggression unleashed on a mobile court when it put to test the wares at the Town Hall fish market, Mohammadpur. The mobile court led by a senior assistant secretary of the public administration ministry found formalin-treated fish almost with all the fish vendors of the market. When the on-duty police contingent of the mobile court started seizing the fish proving positive in the test, the irate fishmongers started pelting brickbats at the members of the team on the anti-formalin drive. A few of the members of the law enforcement team were injured following the attack.
Mercifully, the law enforcers could repulse the attack by firing blank shots and thus were able to bring the situation under control. The situation could easily go out of hand and loss of life could not be ruled out. How dare the traders, who were guilty of committing a crime, attack a mobile court? One simple answer is that they have become accustomed to practising this illegal business for a long time. Now criminality has, like it has become the order of the day in various other areas, become a norm. The abnormal has taken over the normal. The practitioners of such illegal ways have become accustomed to taking it for granted. So single-minded are they that they could be censured or taken to task for their crimes is something alien to their thought process. It is because of this, they are unashamed to swoop on the mobile court. Conscience has gone into hibernation and they are ready to go to any length in order to protect their ill interests, no matter if it means taking law into their own hands and hindering the execution of orders from the authority concerned.
The attitude behind such deplorable actions has however developed by default of the people in authority. They have allowed the muscle power in the first place to rule the roost. Notwithstanding the fact who or which party is in power, the story runs the same. Like war lords, a new breed of criminal bosses has emerged, who could not care less about the law and order. They pull the string from behind the scene and their wishes are the wishes of the people in power. Used to accomplish the dirty works for their mentors, they also contribute hefty sums to party funds and thus prove themselves indispensable to top political leaders. So a nexus has been formed -one that is capable of turning black into white and white into black. Law heaves a deep but tentative mourning sigh before the anarchy now being staged at all levels of society.
Fishmongers live in this society and they have picked up the awful trait. More are to follow suit. Unless the process of cleaning the Augean stable begins at the top ladder, lawlessness will spread as an epidemic soon. Society will indeed be unliveable. Can a nation born out of a most terrible war allow this to happen? If it happens, it will be a great disservice to the martyrs who laid down their lives for the liberation of this land.
Aggression unleashed by fishmongers
Neil Ray | Published: May 26, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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