Where are we heading to?:Daily Star

Suddenly politics seems to be out of every one's hand. And nobody knows how this crisis is going to end. Even the Awami League top guns are short of answers. Meantime, the nation braces for more bloodshed that has already caused 19 deaths in the last 10 days. After the January 5 election, a false sense of tranquillity prevailed for a year. The violence that the BNP and Jamaat had started subsided
with the election over. There was strong opposition from the western powers to an election without participation of all political parties.  There were speculations what the relationship between the AL government and the West would be. But once the new government was formed, the West had also shifted its position. Economy started rolling after the violence and mayhem. Big projects got off the ground. There were no major political disruptions from the opposition that looked so tattered and weak after it boycotted the election. Its leaders were in the blues. But all that now looks like a distant vision. Advertisement None of the top leaders of the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami are in the field. BNP Chief Khaleda Zia is under virtual “house arrest” in her Gulshan office. Yet violence is spiralling out with the shooting of BNP chief's adviser and former diplomat Reaz Rahman being the latest turn in the game. The West that was silent for so long stirred up again and issued quite a few strong statements condemning it. Meantime, freedom of speech seems to be under tremendous test. Any dissenting views are critically looked upon and media houses which spread news disliked by the government are being persecuted. The question that now comes to the fore is why the AL suddenly felt so nervous when the BNP wanted to hold a rally and detained its leader? What was the AL to lose if a rally was held on January 5? The answer may lie in the January 5 election that was boycotted by the BNP. This one-sided election put the AL in power again but left it vulnerable to the core of its base. It felt nervous because it knew people didn't like such an election, and the BNP might bank on it to intensify its movement. AL leaders have little idea how the situation would be tackled. But they have been asked to keep vigil in their locality against “the misdeeds of the opposition”. This might further aggravate violence and the whole country would suffer.