Bangladesh's Fascist Islamist: '''Hefajat’s barbarity''

THE wanton violence and destruction perpetrated by Hefajat-e-Islam on Sunday and Monday defies logic and description. We wonder what measure of madness can overcome a group of people who, in the name of ventilating their demands, can go berserk and indulge in senseless destruction of public and private property. They behaved as if they were in an enemy territory. We condemn this in the strongest possible terms. Nearly a hundred government and private vehicles were put on fire, and hundreds of shops in an around the Shapla Chattar area suffered the same fate at their hands. Whose property were they burning? Whose livelihood were they destroying? By creating mayhem, by destroying public and private assets, by turning a part of the capital into a battle-zone, Hefajat has blatantly violated its democratic right, and for which, we feel, it owes an apology to the nation. We respect Hefajat’s right to hold its own views on different socio-political-religious issues, with which we of course do not agree, but that does not give it the right to resort to setting public and private property on fire or to resort to criminal activities as a means to have their demands met by the government. No political party or socio-political group has the right to hold the people to ransom to coerce an elected government to meet its demand. We have seen their demands ventilated on 5 April of this year and we see no reason why that programme should have been replicated a month later, and that too topped up in violence. If it is the 13 point demands that Hefajat wants the government to implement than the PM has articulated the government’s point of view in this regard. And if there are any disagreements on that, the only civilised norm would have been to engage the government without threatening to bring it down or giving ultimatums for dire consequences. We are constrained to say that instead of showing respect to Islam and upholding its image, which the group claims is its intention, its gratuitous exploitation of the religion has not only denigrated it but have also cast the group as one that adheres to violence rather than peace which is the they very fundamental of Islam.