An expatriate's views
Shaikh Rouf Ahmed, Whittington Road, London
I am a chartered accountant and have been resident in the UK for almost 40 years. My family and I instinctively visited Bangladesh every two years on an average. Every time we visited our country we faced hartal nearly once a week. I do not consider any of those hartals as meaningful in any sense. There is nothing for the country to gain out of those disruptive and chaotic situations. Hartals are called just by an announcement without any detailed discussions between the political parties. No sensible persons have ever wanted to respond to any hartal call. It is only the fear that prevents them from defying such hartals. Who gains from hartals? Well, I will leave this to the general people to judge. I do not need to mention who suffers as a result of hartal. Of course, when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers. An already crippled economy of the country is only dented further. Day-labourers have to go hungry. I have never found any newspapers that published the true and accumulated cost of every day's hartal to the nation's economy. There is nothing further that I can add to such miseries. With all this in mind, I call upon the professionals, teachers, students, traders, trade unions to organise themselves and come out on the street in solidarity with a common slogan such as "We shall not obey any more hartal calls". Let all the disputes between the political parties be confined within the parliament house -- the house that belongs to them only. General people are not interested in what goes on in the house. They want to get on with their struggle for survival undisturbed.
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. PHOTO: AFP |
