Frequent lynching points to restiveness in society
LYNCHING of as many as six people in two incidents in a single day tends to indicate that the country continues to plunge into lawlessness belying the claim, made on more than one occasions, by the key functionaries of the Awami league-Jatiya Party government that the law and order situation is under control. According to a report published in New Age on Saturday, exasperated by repeated robberies without any remedy, the villagers at Kuruhata of Kapasia in Gazipur on Saturday night beat a group of `strangers', suspecting them to be robbers, leaving four of them dead on the spot and five others critically wounded. Moreover, another suspected robber was beaten to death on April 6 by the mob in the same area. Meanwhile, according to another report published in New Age on the same day, two suspected robbers were beaten to death at Dharmapur village in Lakhai upazila of Habiganj early Saturday.
It is unlikely that people are unaware of the fact that beating anyone to death is a culpable offence. Yet, lynching is on the rise. According to the annual report of Odhikar, a human rights organisation, 174 people were beaten to death across the country in 2010, compared with 127 in 2009. Besides, as Odhikar says in its first quarterly report of 2011, 37 people were killed in mob violence around the country from January 1 to March 31.
The failure of the law enforcement agencies to stem unrelenting slide in law and order ever since the assumption of power by the Awami League-Jatiya Party government in January 2009, along with their continuous denial of the reality on the ground regarding law and order, may well have touched off a pervasive sense of insecurity among the people at large. It may also have led them to believe they are on their own when it comes to their safety and security. Meanwhile, the unabated extrajudicial killing by the law enforcers may have given rise to the impression in some sections of society that it is alright to take law in their hands or to execute summarily the alleged criminals.
The government needs to realise that the extrajudicial killing, be it by the law enforcers or by the angry mob, eventually undermines its self-professed commitment to the rule of law. Hence, it needs to be decisive in reining in crime on one hand and putting an end to all kinds of extrajudicial killings, including lynching, on the other.
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