Editorial Desk :
Overall development of the society is not possible if any community is left to lag behind. It is the responsibility of the government to bring forward the left behind communities of the country. The other communities too must change their attitudes towards the Dalits, plain-land ethnic minorities, transgender persons and tea garden workers. And along with the changed attitudes, the draft ‘Anti-Discrimination Act’ must also be passed in the parliament, say participants at a discussion.
The speakers made these from text books remarks at a roundtable discussion on ‘Empowerment of left behind communities and participation in the development process’ in Dhaka on Saturday.
Representatives of Human Rights Programme of the Delegation of the European Union to Bangladesh and the Christian Aid country; leaders of Bangladesh Dalit and Excluded Rights Movement (BDERM), NGOs and the civil society organisations participating in the discussion said that there is nothing blocking the way for having a law for those who have fallen back.
It is a Constitutional obligation to uplift the backward people of our country. When there is little or no respect for the Constitution what change it will make to pass a law? The fools are fools but we are not a nation of fools. The whole system of the government survives through inequity and disregard of law. We are living in deception and lies like under dictatorship anywhere.
The speakers have urged the government to improve the lot of the down trodden people. But the government is for the rich people to be heard and helped. They should have asked how corruption has flourished to make favoured ones become exceedingly rich. The general public are not worth counting. We have oligarchs like in Russia and other dictatorships for making corruption a family business.
The lawmakers who spoke at the meeting are whose law makers?
A recent book described the 20th century, despots were ostentatiously violent. Hitler, Stalin and Mao slew millions. Lesser monsters such as Mobutu Sese Seko, a Congolese tyrant, hanged cabinet ministers in public. The aim was to terrify people into submission. In contract, the modern dictators pretend to be democrats. They hold multiparty elections and seldom claim to have won more than 90% of the vote, as was the norm for non-democracies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They rig less and gerrymander more. In 2018 Viktor Orban, Hungary’s spinner-in-chief, turned less than half the vote for his party into a two-thirds supermajority in parliament.
We urge others not to teach us while tolerating spin and ruthless dictators working against public interest. It should be humiliating both for them and us.
