Brig Gen Shahedul Anam Khan ndc, psc (Retd)

The west saw him as a terrorist; to the rest of the world he was an intrepid warrior trying relentlessly to right the wrong his nation was done in 1948.

The 2020 US Presidential election has been perhaps the most closely contested election that came down to the wire.

Lenin once said that “there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.

I’m told that there is only one vegetable that can make people cry. And this tubular vegetable is making almost an entire nation cry, except those unscrupulous traders who shut the doors of their godowns as soon as India announced a moratorium on the export of onions.

It is just as well that we are kept reminding by the UN on this very day since 2007 of the values of democracy and its importance in our life through the observance of the International Day of Democracy.

One would like to know more than what one has come by so far about the killing of Major Sinha. There were two ongoing investigations of the murder—a rare thing—and the report from one, instituted by the home ministry, has been submitted. Usually, one would hear very little of a criminal investigation till the framing of charges.

Bangladesh has inherited many legacies by virtue of its long history as a constituent of a larger geographical entity, of which it was a part till not very long ago.

There is a common refrain amongst the public circle whether things would have moved with the speed that it has in the case of Major Sinha, were it not for the fact that he was a military officer.

It is not often that one hears the putative lone superpower ruefully ventilating its frustrations in public.

Perhaps this was one murder too many by the police. Sinha’s is yet another name added to the long list of victims of the law enforcing agencies, killed in gross violation of all norms of law.

We knew that our system was plagued with moral and systemic corruption, but we couldn’t imagine that it was this bad, and were it not for Covid-19, much of the muck that has surfaced in the last four months might have remained under the surface.

“Don’t worry, I’m safe where I am now!” The scamster had thus assured his wife after multiple fraudulent acts committed by him were exposed by the media, and he found himself a wanted man under the law—the law that he has been violating with reckless abandon as a pretender claiming an ambidextrous competence.

He departed rather unsung, his glorious past recalled in this country by only a few of his friends and admirers, limited to Facebook posts mainly.

No pandemic has had such severe global impact, both in terms of its global reach and the related consequences, as has Covid-19. Records show that major pandemics have occurred at a hundred year interval, if we consider the last half the millennium, e.g., the cholera epidemic which originated in India and spread up to China by 1920, lasted seven years.

“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

Much has happened between the time the virus struck in Wuhan in December 2019 and now. By the time this piece appears in print more than a million and a half people around the world in more than 200 countries will have been affected and nearly a hundred thousand will have succumbed to the virus.

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again exposed our soft underbelly, particularly of the richest and the most militarily powerful countries in the world.

It is not hard to detect the deep sense of remorse in the writer of the article, “Incubator of democracy or lessons to subvert it?”

It couldn’t have been less propitious a time for US President Donald Trump to arrive in Delhi on the final leg of his 36-hour visit to India. Some parts of Delhi were burning as riots broke out in northeast Delhi.

ndifference and apathy are even worse than hatred. And when those are directed to a system rather than an individual, it is dangerous and ominous, even more so when its significance is either not comprehended or disregarded wilfully.