Let us start with the government's response to the attack. The government has repeatedly made overtures to Hasina and the AL and sought to bury differences and sit down with the opposition in the name of cooperation and unity. On the one hand it has made all the right noises about now being a time for national unity, and how the attack on the AL rally shows that the nation can no longer afford the divisiveness between government and opposition that has marred the affairs of state for so long.

The problem is that while the government has been making all the right noises on the one hand, on the other it has done everything in its power to continue to marginalise the AL. The first indication that the government's fine words of reconciliation ought not to be taken at face value came with the attack by police and ruling party activists on processions protesting the carnage. This is not the way to win friends and influence people.

The fact that politics as usual would not be suspended in the interests of national unity was further underlined the same day, when the government pushed through the controversial appointment of nineteen new additional judges to the High Court in the teeth of opposition from the Supreme Court Bar Association, which pointed out that the appointments were clearly political, and continues to protest them. One would have thought that two days after a national tragedy of the scale of August 21, and in light of the pieties the government was mouthing about unity and consensus, that it would have refrained from such a transparently political manoeuvre.

Not content, apparently, with beating up opposition protesters and enacting its own divisive partisan agenda, on Monday the government went on the offensive at a rally it held in Dhaka.

Speaker after speaker of the BNP high command took the stage to point the finger of accusation against the AL for the attack that the AL had suffered.

The General Secretary of the party was quoted as saying: "The [AL] itself kills people, resorts to violence, explodes bombs, and trains activists to make and explode bombs."

Not to be outdone, the Health Minister accused the AL of calling hartals to shield those responsible for the attack. The Shipping Minister went one further by alleging that the AL had been itself involved in all of the bomb blasts that the nation had suffered since 1999.

But the prize for the most offensive accusation would probably go to the Housing and Public Works Minister who minced no words when it came to his theory of culpability: "Hasina's politics is based on killings and she wants to capture power even by killing her own party men."

Please bear in mind that these are senior members of the PM's cabinet.

Where, you might ask, was the PM when her senior colleagues were busy throwing mud at Hasina and the AL?

She was meeting with top business leaders where she issued a call for the political parties to bury their differences and unite for the good of the nation. I do not think that I am the only one who was struck by the disingenuousness of her call for national unity at the same time her party faithful were busy throwing the kitchen sink at the opposition.

But I would be remiss were I to only point out the government's misdeeds in the aftermath of August 21 without mentioning the opposition's shortcomings.

In the first place, the dust from the attack had not even settled before the AL, for its part, began pointing the finger of blame at the government and at the PM in particular. The accusations coming from the AL leadership including Hasina were every bit as acrimonious and intemperate as the ones being issued from the other side of the aisle. Just about the only good thing that can be said about the AL response to August 21 was that it did not make any attempt to cloak its bitter accusations against the government and the PM in hypocritical calls for the need for national unity.

If its unconvincing response to the carnage of August 21 was a missed opportunity for the BNP to demonstrate statesmanship, this was nothing compared to the opportunity missed by the AL.

The grenade attack of August 21 was aimed squarely at the AL. The leader of the opposition and the senior leadership of the party escaped death by seconds. It was AL activists and workers and party members who were killed and injured.

The nation was shocked and unnerved by the attack and the AL quite rightly experienced a massive outpouring of sympathy from the general public. Even many people who ordinarily have no sympathy for the AL or its politics were horrified by the death and destruction and were inclined after the attack to give AL complaints and demands a patient hearing.

But the actions of the AL since August 21 run the risk of dissipating any good will and sympathy that might have been generated by its victimisation at the hands of the bombers.

The AL clearly sees the attack on it -- the blame for which it puts squarely on the government -- as evidence that the ruling alliance is no longer fit to govern and that nothing can be gained by sitting down with them.

I personally do not subscribe to this point of view and am disappointed by the inability of the nation's politicians to attempt to reach across the political aisle for the common good.

But it is not the AL's rebuffing of BNP efforts to cooperate that I am most perplexed by.

In the first place, it does not seem to me from the available evidence that the government's overtures to the AL have been particularly convincing, and given the hatred and hostility that has been leveled at the AL in the past, and the fact that 20 of its party members lie dead and 200 injured, its reluctance to sit down with the government is perhaps quite understandable.

But what I find difficult to comprehend is how the AL can permit the good will it has accrued to dissipate into the air. In this respect, the AL's one point demand for the resignation of the government seems to me to be a mistake.

After August 21, the AL was holding all the cards. The government was desperate to sit down with them, to at least create the appearance of statesmanlike bipartisanship, if nothing else. The AL could have set just about any conditions it wanted for agreeing to sit down with the government.

It could have demanded that the BNP drop its coalition partners from the government. It could have said that it would only sit down once the government had brought the Bangabandhu murder case to completion. It could even have set success in the investigation into August 21 as a precondition for talks.

Any of these positions would have been considered eminently reasonable by the general public and would have put the pressure on the government. The government would most likely have rejected the conditions, but then, at least, the AL could have said that it had made a good faith effort to cooperate, but that it was the government that was dragging its feet.

The one-point demand set forth by the AL -- that the government resign immediately -- is the one demand that even many of it supporters would have to concede is unrealistic and permits the government to make the case that it is the AL that is being recalcitrant and uncooperative.

The AL could even have demanded a snap mid-term election -- in essence this is the same thing as demanding that the government resign -- but it sounds more reasonable and accommodating. But the AL -- like the BNP -- never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

It is said that true character is revealed in times of crisis. By that measure, I am afraid that the AL and the BNP have both once again come up short.

Zafar Sobhan is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.