It can’t have come as much of a surprise that Khaleda Zia would put together another week-long program of country wide public protests. After all, she’s about to be kicked out of her home. But to this writer this is one scream, one time too many, too much, too often, ad nauseum, a pitched battle against ghosts.
Protest social programs; protests government intervention on this and that market; protest voicelessness through your voice–but not this. Instead Begum Zia is publicly protesting an entirely private matter. No. No. Claim BNP leaders. This set of protests is all about the government quashing the opposition, failure to control prices, and on and on and on. And so it goes.
None of this has anything to do with democracy, though the specter of this new fight readily showed itself in every nucleus of the marauding thing that is the vendetta of the Battle Begums. And of course politics is the root cause of Begum Zia’s unkind eviction from her home, but that is hardly a matter of national regard. But it is being made so. The BNP could easily deal with the Awami Leagues advances if it took up its seats in Parliament to deal with opposition politics through political means. Instead, the BNP takes to the street on the slightest scratch.
Now the BNP wants that scratch to be caressed and balmed on humanitarian grounds. A leading BNP lawyer has claimed that the government would do well to reconsider the notice of eviction on just humanitarian grounds. Of course Begum Zia has another in upscale Gulshan–on top of who knows what else. This is silly. So to get to the facts of the matter, technical and dry, I’ll quote today’s Daily Star at length:
“The government last year asked her to vacate the residence on an area of 2.72 acres of land at the Dhaka cantonment, which she was allotted 29 years ago under a controversial lease agreement.”
“The cabinet on April 8 last year cancelled the lease on grounds that the leasing process had been faulty and she violated lease terms. Subsequent notices furthermore said she was carrying out political activities from the house located in a “protected area”.
Khaleda Zia filed the writ petition on May 3, 2009, challenging the notice.”
The rules governing property allocation throughout government and the military dictate that no individual shall be allocated more than one piece of property. The government drew up plans to build apartments for the victims of the recent BDR tragedy and chose Begum Zia’s home as the location of the new apartment complex. Of course, politics governed the choice of the site. But the moral claim of the exchange between government and a private party falls to the rules and here the rules trump Mrs. Zia’s counter-claim.
She must move out of her home. No shrieks and cries, during and away from public protests will change that.
