The abominable chemistry of shutdowns

The other day some of my friends had a long debate on shutdowns in Bangladesh. Fourteen-year-old Monir, who sustained burn injuries when pickets set fire to his father's covered van on Dhaka-Gazipur highway during shutdown hours last Monday, succumbed to his injuries at the intensive care unit of Burn and Plastic Surgery Unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
Competitive shutdowns serve nobody's cause except that of the wily politician. The devastation and sufferings of the general public due to a shutdown are at times more severe and widespread than those on account of the cause for which it is observed. The ``success'' of a shutdown is proportionate to the quantum of fear its organisers are capable of generating. Hence the ``success'' of a shutdown does not really demonstrate the sympathy for its cause nor is its ``failure'' indicative of the absence of such sympathy.
The frequency with which shutdowns are declared in Bangladesh does not so much signify concern of political actors with the stated issue, as much as a way of displaying a whole lot of emotions in order to get out of hard institutional work. Shutdowns, in this sense, are a mischievous distraction for they pretend to convey the impression of sympathy when they are actually a stratagem for self-glorification. In many ways these shutdowns are analogous to the scene around the sick bed of a person suffering from a major illness. The room is crammed with so-called well-wishers who are quick with all kinds of advice on what the treatment regimen should be, and they are even willing to go as far as second-guess the specialist who is looking after the case. They will loudly commiserate with the patient's relatives, and even cry copiously in the presence of the poor patient. But, if at that time, a nurse were to enter asking for blood that the patient urgently needs for surgery the next day, the crowd quickly melts away and soon the room is quite empty.
Shutdowns are very nearly the same. In most shutdowns there is a lot of wailing and a huge public display of lachrymose sympathy. The fact is that shutdowns have little utility in such a situation. A shutdown is presumably called when a political organisation wants to draw attention to a long-standing grievance. But in this case the government, and, indeed, every political party, was fully aware of what happened to innocent students in the junior student's certificate examination?
On occasions such as this, a shutdown is really an empty exercise. Like the crowd around the sick bed, the protagonists of a shutdown are only interested in displaying how concerned they are instead of buckling down and doing something which is concretely useful to the situation. An adequate institutional response in such instances would be to look after the victims and their families, and to trace the terrorists to their disreputable lairs and flush them out. But the shutdown activists had none of this on their minds. The 18 party combine declared that the shutdown was a success in large parts of Bangladesh. Success in this case was measured by the number of shops that were forced to close down, by the number of buses that were damaged, and by the number of trains that were stalled by agitators.
In none of these demonstrations of political power were the victims of the massacre even remotely taken into consideration. In not one instance of stoning trains, damaging transport vehicles, or forcing commercial activities to close, did we get any closer to tracking down the terrorists. The real inspiration behind a shutdown is really to look for an excuse from getting away from hard work. It is hard work indeed to apply the healing anodyne in a constructive and caring fashion such that the victims and their families are actually rehabilitated. It is also very hard work to track down the flow of terrorists and seal off all reservoirs of sympathies that they may possess among the population. This is a job that the security and the paramilitary forces cannot accomplish alone. They need the support of all political parties and the citizens. Once again, these shutdown activists did not have the slightest intention of proceeding on any of these fronts.
In fact, it is legitimate to argue that when a public tragedy occurs there should be a political taboo on shutdowns. If people have time and energy on their hands they should help relieve public distress without adding to the strain on national resources. Unfortunately, wasteful activism of the shutdown kind has been condoned for all these years because the public too is largely uncaring when a tragedy occurs that affects other people. This is why, the enormity of the cynicism with which shutdown operators carry out their exercises goes politically uncensored.
Contrast this with the public response to terrorism in America. When the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsed in New York, there was no shutdown, strike or sit-in anywhere in the United States. The most urgent task was to rescue victims, to get to the terrorists, and to make sure, as far as possible, that such attacks do not happen again. That New York was able to show the world that it was not just the Big Apple but also the big heart was because the thought of a sit - in, strike, or shutdown did not occur to any political party or rabble-rouser anywhere in America. This is what allowed firefighters, doctors, volunteers and state officials to effectively help victims of the tragedy. The New York experience demonstrates the contrast between how politicians in Bangladesh handle public tragedies and how they should be dealt with by a citizen-caring political system. When shutdowns are called in times of national tragedies, they are hatched by people who are supremely callous of what citizens really need. This leads one to wonder why our political system tolerates such behaviour time and time again.
But it is not just the shutdowns held in the aftermath of tragedies that demonstrate the uncaring character of our political system. In most cases, the governmental response to public disasters is equally thoughtless and testifies to ample evidence of not wanting to do the hard work that really counts. Most governments, this one included, usually believe that it is enough to make some financial payment to victims and their families and then conveniently forget all about them. Governments, therefore, are also guilty of taking the short cut. No matter what the nature of the disaster - a terrorist outrage, a train accident, a natural calamity - the government of the day announces within hours that the victims and their families will be monetarily compensated and then a strange administrative amnesia sets in.
What we must realise as concerned citizens is that political demonstrations of grief are often a smokescreen to avoid performing public responsibilities. As citizens then we must also let our political classes know that we have seen through their game.
[email protected]