Silencing our outcry

WHY should the police brutality on protesters come as a surprise? They felt 'obliged' to act on the behalf of their helpless compatriots who only had a few guns and shells to protect themselves against the onslaught of (defenceless) protesters. After all, they unnecessarily raised their voice against a crime that apparently never happened. They should have known better than to protest against the criminals who are so difficult to apprehend. The IGP AKM Shahidul Hoque in fact lamented that the public should have "arrested" the miscreants instead of depending on law enforcement officials who, might we point out, were appointed for this very reason. 

How do you expect such a force to understand what constitutes sexual assault? A policeman thinks that it is appropriate to grab a female demonstrator by her neck, knock her to the ground and have her cornered by at least three other cops who consider kicking and hitting a woman to be completely normal. 

If they can be so ruthless as to chase a girl, throw her on the ground and beat her mercilessly, why then do you think that they would consider a "little shoving", "jostling" and "pushing" of girls by some "naughty boys", as the IGP has suggested, at this year's Pahela Baishakh to be out of the ordinary? 

Everything is media constructed. Because what else does the media have to do apart from gathering  video footage and detailed news of girls being molested at the largest secular festival of the country? The news outlets of the country are so devoid of news that they felt the urge to blow up a simple case of 'eve-teasing' (a 'nice' way to describe sexual harassment) by a handful of miscreants into a full-fledged incident of sexual assault. They are just out to tarnish the image of the country.  And so what if there are CCTV footage? What's the need to believe your eyes? The people of Bangladesh are surely suffering from a case of collective myopia. Hence, their vision is hampered, their logic tampered with. 

So protesting against social injustices is now against the law? That's what it seems like. How else do you explain why the law enforcement officials found it necessary to disconnect the loudspeaker used by the protesters and then immediately unleash their wrath on them with batons, water canons and teargas shells to disperse them? The DMP Commissioner Asaduzzaman Miah had promised to meet the protesters to talk about the developments, if any, regarding the investigation of the sexual assault of April 14. Unlike what the cops would have us believe, the "police were attacked" with bricks only when the protesters were unnecessarily targeted and assaulted. 

This whole 'attack on cops' theory perpetuated by the law enforcers is a tad laughable. Simply because the demonstrators were not armed and wanted to speak to the DMP commissioner while the police were equipped with batons and guns. 

The perpetrators of the April 14 assault are yet to be apprehended because apparently the police don't have enough evidence to catch the culprits. Despite there being police officers present at the venue, they couldn't (or wouldn't) prevent the attacks, and yet, they expected the public to do their duty for them. If the police showed the same 'machismo', the same verve, timeliness and strength that they employed while attacking the unarmed protesters, perhaps we would not still be waiting for an answer as to who were responsible for such a heinous public attack on women. 

Unsurprisingly, we are yet to get any kind of acceptable response from the government or other authorities concerned regarding either the sexual assault or the attack on protesters; only one cop got suspended for the brutal violence. And yet, the police force keep defending their acts and claim that the cops' action was within the boundaries of law. 

The IGP's suggestion that the public defend their rights and fight for their safety, thus, does not sound like a bad idea. In a country where the police are provided an implicit sense of impunity, we seem to have no choice but to save ourselves.  

The writer is a journalist, The Daily Star.