Awake our conscience! Now or never!

The psychology of these beasts needs to be well looked into, not because they have solely branded themselves as children of Satan by this abominable act, but because they are a part of the very society that consists of many more people like them. Therein lies the rub.

The foolhardy people, the political opportunists, a large part of the administration have attempted to wash their hands off by labelling the torching of the Shil family as an episode of dacoity, as if people didn't know how to separate a dacoit from a crime otherwise motivated. Nothing in the eyewitness reports does suggest that dacoity was intended at all. If an act of dacoity was contemplated, then why did the beasts carry gunpowder and petrol? There were other motives, which require to be unearthed now.

The thread is important here.

Before this incident, on 9 May in another carnage at a nearby village, Purba Chambal, a Hindu widow, called Arati Bala, a mother called Zhinu Bala Devi and her daughter Champa Bala Devi were also burnt to death in a similar fashion, with petrol and gunpowder. Reportedly, in Patiya also a Hindu family was exterminated through torching.

The thread that runs through between these incidents does suggest that in the minds of a certain section of people something, that I would not like to name, has shaped like a possibility, especially, in the present culture of ineffective administration, and the chimera of which has struck terror in my mind, and in that of many others.

I often think of Ahmad Safa, about his famous essay "Bangali Mussalmaner Maan" (the mind of the Bangali Muslims). His thesis is that the Muslims of this region were converted from the scheduled castes of the Hindus, and therefore, though their religion has changed, their fate has remained as deprived as before. Education, neither the Bengali education, nor the Islamic education, has ever taken place in them. So they remain as downtrodden as ever in body as well as in mind. They are (or we all are) an undeveloped mass on which culture does not take its hue. Such a scenario may be taken as an explanation of why certain people could become so lowly as to behave like beasts.

In one of his recent films, The Pianist, Roman Polanski, the Polish director, has shown the life of a Polish pianist who was kept a jimmy by the Nazis, and before whose eyes many incidents of extermination of the Jews took place.

I don't know why the Banshkhali incident has brought back the film to my memory!

I don't think that the Banskhali carnage should be let go unaccounted for. Each and every culprit involved should be brought to book at once. Otherwise, the Banshkhali incident will trigger off wrong signals in every sector of our national life.

Awake! Our conscience! Now or never!