WHO blames police for not performing their duties sincerely? The people who oppose the regime and failed to find out any good deed of the government are critical of the police and other law enforcers’ deeds. In Bangladesh political culture, police are used as political tools of the ruling elite that prevents the force from performing their statutory duty of providing security to all citizens. While police are busy over conducting secret drives to hunt political activists, muggers in the city’s Mirpur area dragged a woman to death for snatching her handbag on Tuesday. The incident could not be seen merely as a mugging but a failure of the state in providing security to the ordinary citizens who pay their salaries.
Several dailies reported that muggers from a moving microbus pulled the handbag of Ayesha Akter Ripa when she was going to her sister’s house at Lalmatia in a rickshaw in early morning. Ayesha kept the strap of her bag tangled with one hand; as a result, she fell down from the rickshaw. As the microbus didn’t stop, she was dragged along until the muggers got the handbag. Fatally injured, Ripa died while being rushed to hospital by some people. City dwellers in the recent months are becoming victims of mugging and snatching and the criminals mostly ride on cars or motorbikes, as police are mostly napping or being used as political tools. Even two days after the mugging cum killing on the unsecured city streets, the police could not trace the microbus and muggers who dragged Ripa to death. People are in doubt about the useless expenditure of their tax money behind police and intelligence agencies. Some might get rotten smells of a political connection between them and the muggers, but that is not the reality. The city has turned into a muggers’ heaven under the very nose, if not patronisation, of the rulers of the day.
Who is actually responsible for the killing? Surely, the Home Minister has to answer the query of Ripa’s six-year-old daughter, who is searching for her mother. Our roads and highways are steadily turning into death traps due to the reluctance of police and administration as they are, may be, busy over punishing opponent political activists, or making plots to stage crimes. Actually, it is the government’s duty to protect the rights of the taxpayers and ensure their security according to Social Contract theory, but all of our successive governments think that they are the king or queen of the’Bangladesh empire’ though it is a people’s republic–in theory.
The ordinary people are the true owners of the country as the Constitution of the Republic states in Article 7 (1) that all the powers in the Republic belong to the people, and their exercise on behalf of the people shall be administered or applied only under the Constitution. But the incumbent government does not truly represent the people’s will, as they have not been elected through fair elections. It is the core reason behind the indifference of the rulers to the people’s woes.
