DHAKA: If ever there was a time for the pathologically polarized political mainstream of Bangladesh to come together and fight a common battle, it would be now. For it would seem that the very polity that they constitute - both using and abusing it to whatever benefits, or the lack of them, to themselves and the people - has come under an imminent threat.
The bomb attack on an Awami League rally on Saturday that the party president Sheikh Hasina narrowly escaped unscathed (at least physically) has left both the polar opposites visibly shaken, as indeed the entire population.
On the one hand, the government, eternally and blissfully oblivious of bomb attacks, arms hauls and the like in the way that it chooses not to take either their extent or their repercussions into cognizance is suddenly faced with an incident that it simply cannot overlook and let it go like bygones.
A narrowly-missed attack, and that too at so public a venue, on a former prime minister and the leader of the opposition in parliament - someone who in the books of protocol warrants the utmost security - is not just an embarrassment that the government has to endure, both at home and abroad.
It is also a reflection of the government's ever-loosening grip (if any) on the law and order situation and, more importantly and worryingly, of the fact that the government is continually failing in its governance - the let-off provided to perpetrators of a series of bomb blasts that has blighted the country for a few years now proving the prime example of this utter failure.
In fact, the government does not even have a single suspect lined up to be charge-sheeted for any of the major blasts of recent times, such is the (in) sincerity and (in)efficiency of its investigation process.
The government would be hard pressed (or foolhardy) to deny that an attack like Saturday's was a consequence of such blatant indifference and/or inability in performing its paramount duty of governance. The main opposition party, on the other hand, is naturally shocked at both the enormity of the attack and its proximity to its leader.
It too, however, will be hard pressed to deny its own role in perpetrating the currently practiced stream of politics that allows tit-for-tat blame games to overshadow and diffuse the real motives behind major bomb blasts that allow the forces behind them to be let off, absolutely unnoticed. After all, there have been no suspects named for the blasts that rocked the nation during the Awami League's previous term in power either.
Even so, whether out of sheer fear or a show of deserved solidarity, Tuesday's hartal - the best observed in Dhaka since the days following the ill-advised elections to the ill-fated sixth parliament - was testament of a shift of public sympathy (however slight and however short-lived it might prove to be) towards Hasina.
But the Awami League would be ill-advised to, first, narrowly interpret Saturday's attack as simply an attempt on Hasina's life and, second, to bask in the glory of the sympathies received from home and abroad. Unfortunately, it seems to be heading right that way.
As heinous and condemnable an attempt on the life of the leader of the opposition in parliament and a former prime minister is, the venue (a public gathering), the brazenness and the sheer unforeseen nature of Saturday's attack make it much more than merely so.
Saturday's was an attack on the entire political process that, however falteringly, Bangladesh has embraced. It was an attack on not just Hasina, but on the Awami League, the BNP, the lefts, and on each and every player that makes up the polity that was so painstakingly brought into being a decade and a half ago and, for better or for worse, has been so laboriously nurtured since.
It was an attack on the people - its constituents - who have invested so much faith, conviction and commitment to the development of the political process that is Bangladesh's democracy today.
The immediate public reaction to the attack - of a fear to attend public gatherings, a fear to engage in the political process, as clearly seen and felt in the three days since the blasts - was the first evidence of that threat to depoliticise the masses, to turn the public apolitical coming true.
Perhaps out of an understanding of the situation as such - or perhaps out of mere civility that has escaped our politics for long - the ruling BNP has twice extended olive branches to the Awami League over the last couple of days.
First on Sunday BNP's secretary-general and senior minister in the cabinet Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan asked his counterpart in the Awami League to "unite to overcome forces that are trying to destabilize the country". Later the same day came Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's offer to visit Hasina that led to a two-day-long drama afterwards.
Both the gestures were flatly and unambiguously rejected by the Awami League. Given the trend of politics prevailing, the opposition party's outright dismissal of the gesture may seem to be a Pavlovian reflex. But such reflexes do not help the situation.
Still, given the disturbing nature of the circumstances, and with democracy as we know it itself under attack, the expectations are of sincerity from the government and reciprocity from the opposition. If for nothing else, at least for their self-interest then. -By arrangement with New Age/Dhaka