HOW the culture of impunity turns a human being into a monster can be best exemplified by the incident of transport workers who threw an unconscious passenger into a canal instead of arranging emergency healthcare. News media, quoting spine-chilling confessions of the accused, reported that Saidur Rahman Payel, also a student of a private university, was badly hurt when he tried to get on the bus after a brief stop on Dhaka-Chattogram highway as the bus was running. As the injured became unconscious and bled profusely, the supervisor, driver, and conductor threw him into a canal without considering admitting him to a hospital-how brutal! Our experiences prove that transport workers in the country enjoy near total impunity and the entire transport sector is in a messy condition due to political backup and capacity to organize mayhem.
The manner in which human life is treated so trivially by some transport workers, evident every day, be it on the roads of the capital city or elsewhere, is distressing. Human life has been degraded to the point where these people cause injury and death recklessly showing little respect for the law. But then this does not come as a surprise, especially when we have lawmakers who are directly involved in the transport business and are leaders of transport workers’ trade unions, who have managed to block any meaningful legislation that would bring some order to this chaotic situation.
In April, after two weeks in coma Rajib Hossain, a student of Titumeer College succumbed to his injury —his hand had been severed by two running buses in the capital city. A week after Rajib’s accident, a bus smashed the right leg of a university student Runi Akhter against the pavement. In last August Rupa Khatun was brutally raped, killed and abandoned in Gazipur jungle by transport workers. Though the speedy court awarded death sentence to four in the Rupa case, many cases are still unmoved.
The culture of impunity that reigns supreme in our transport sector arises from the fact that there are thousands of cases of death and injury on our roads but victims and their families rarely get justice. Payel’s case is not simply one of negligence but a planned murder, and it is time that these killers are convicted and made an example of for their heinous crime.
The manner in which human life is treated so trivially by some transport workers, evident every day, be it on the roads of the capital city or elsewhere, is distressing. Human life has been degraded to the point where these people cause injury and death recklessly showing little respect for the law. But then this does not come as a surprise, especially when we have lawmakers who are directly involved in the transport business and are leaders of transport workers’ trade unions, who have managed to block any meaningful legislation that would bring some order to this chaotic situation.
In April, after two weeks in coma Rajib Hossain, a student of Titumeer College succumbed to his injury —his hand had been severed by two running buses in the capital city. A week after Rajib’s accident, a bus smashed the right leg of a university student Runi Akhter against the pavement. In last August Rupa Khatun was brutally raped, killed and abandoned in Gazipur jungle by transport workers. Though the speedy court awarded death sentence to four in the Rupa case, many cases are still unmoved.
The culture of impunity that reigns supreme in our transport sector arises from the fact that there are thousands of cases of death and injury on our roads but victims and their families rarely get justice. Payel’s case is not simply one of negligence but a planned murder, and it is time that these killers are convicted and made an example of for their heinous crime.
