Politics of destruction again?
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
BANGLADESH has been blessed with 'relative' political stability for nearly the last three years. Relative in the sense that business losses in the form of work days lost, production stoppages, snags in distribution processes, et cetera, that usually have a retarding impact on business, were few in number compared to the periods of political upheavals that the country witnessed many times in the past decades. The political upheavals left deep scars on the economy in the form of under-productivity and under-investment and hence the worsening of mass poverty.
However, the main political opposition to the government has declared their intention to wage a mass movement in the coming months. And everybody knows what such a warming-up means: hartals or work stoppages in industries and services, disruption in the dispatch and receiving of raw materials and finished products, hazards in maintaining the normal level of export and import activities thereof, intolerable hardships in the life of daily wage-earners such as rickshaw-pullers and a lot more in inviting adversities on the economy.
Do we have to go through these horrors again? Is there any justifiable compulsion really for the opposition to force the country to this path? Should not the stakeholders start doing the needful -- without wasting time -- to discourage the opposition from launching such destructive activities?
M S Huq
New Eskaton, Dhaka.
However, the main political opposition to the government has declared their intention to wage a mass movement in the coming months. And everybody knows what such a warming-up means: hartals or work stoppages in industries and services, disruption in the dispatch and receiving of raw materials and finished products, hazards in maintaining the normal level of export and import activities thereof, intolerable hardships in the life of daily wage-earners such as rickshaw-pullers and a lot more in inviting adversities on the economy.
Do we have to go through these horrors again? Is there any justifiable compulsion really for the opposition to force the country to this path? Should not the stakeholders start doing the needful -- without wasting time -- to discourage the opposition from launching such destructive activities?
M S Huq
New Eskaton, Dhaka.