POLITICAL Adviser to Prime Minister and former bureaucrat HT Imam said police failure to save blogger Avijit who was killed under their nose at Dhaka University campus can’t be acceptable and claimed he has already asked the authorities concerned to identify those policemen and punish them. He said police clarification on Avijit’s killing at a small distance from their location is not acceptable as well. Speaking at a seminar in the varsity campus on March 15, the political adviser to the government said he knew many incidents when police ignore calls for help to save people’s life. They did not turn up to the place of occurrence and stop violence. HT Imam asked senior police officials present on the occasion to punish them to restore public confidence in the service. Such punishment for failing to act timely to prevent crimes could also reduce human rights violations, he said. The Adviser was quite critical of police in Avijit killing and it is quite obvious in view of public criticism of government failure to give protection to him in an open place. We also share his views when he said if the killers of non-conventional writer Humayun Azad and such other bloggers were arrested and punished and people involved in last year’s political violence were punished, perhaps the killing of Avijit would not have happened. But the question is whether police are the only active force to help the government every way. There are armed political gangs enjoying political protection. It is difficult to know which government force works for what purpose. The fact is terrorism is politics of both the government and the opposition. The government is said to have been fighting extremists in the country over the past six years, how it was possible then for them to hit a high value target in the varsity area defying multi-tiers protection shield is a question easy to be asked but easy not to be answered when the government is determined to remain in power through blaming the opposition movement for democracy for all violence and killing that is going unabated in the country. The other point is if police were asked to act honestly and neutrally and their accountability was rigorously enforced without discrimination, such murders and regular human rights violations would not have happened so easily. What the Adviser should know is that engineering election result is not difficult to continue in power offering those in government every opportunity to extract state benefits. But for maintaining of peace, police and other law enforcing agencies have to be politically free to enforce law without political bias to attain political ends. The police are being used for the government to remain in power and not truly for maintaining law and order.
