Let me tell you what is going to happen next. In our limitless capacity to absorb horror, we are soon going to toss it into a dark recess of our psyche. This tragedy will work its way toward the back of the newspaper and ultimately fall off the page. It will happen I know, because it has happened before. Another bomb blast will claim fresh casualties, and the new horror will replace the old.

Kibria wasn't just anybody. He was a meritorious student, a career diplomat, international bureaucrat, former Minister of Finance and a noted politician of the country. I never met him but as much as I know his was a life lived in reasonable decency. We needed people like him to stick around for a long time, people who are educated, knowledgeable, experienced and suave, people who are rare sights on our political scene.

It is pointless to ask who could have done it. It could be anybody, some fundamentalist madcaps, hired hands, or mindless political jerks. But it doesn't matter anymore. Burkert accounts for some of the characteristic elements of tragedy. The Dionysian sacrifices were viewed as a deed that was both necessary and awful and the sacrificers wore masks to conceal their identity. In the same way, those who attacked Kibria turned off the electricity before they hurled the bomb. They were guided by their killer instinct to destroy a precious life. But they also wanted to conceal their identity, because they must have realised that they were doing something very awful.

Still they went ahead and did it. WEB Du Bois, a 19th-century American political activist, said that the tragedy of the age lied not in the fact that men were poor, not in the fact that men were wicked, but in the fact that men knew so little of men. If the killers of Kibria ever get caught, it would be interesting to find out how much they knew about their victim, whether they had appreciated the value of the life they were going to ruin.

Here I am talking in relative terms. Kibria must have had his shortcomings as well. But he stood out as a different breed compared with other politicians, who earn black money, shelter criminals and cause harm to the country. May be everybody didn't agree with him or share his political views. Yet he was not so obnoxious as to deserve the cruel treatment he got in the end. Most people would agree that they never thought Kibria was the sort of man whose life should end in the blast of a bomb.

Honestly, it bothers me every time I think that a fatally wounded Kibria was dragged hundreds of miles in a van. There could be 101 reasons why he couldn't be transported in any other way. But we need to know if the government failed to provide a helicopter to rush him to Dhaka. A minister of the ruling party was airlifted sometime ago when he received burn injuries in an accidental fire. Why couldn't a critically wounded minister of an earlier regime get similar facility? Did Kibria's party or family make an approach to the government?

It is sad that Kibria died, even sadder that he was killed in a ruthless manner, but the saddest thing is how the man who lived for his country died in vain. It is the same blame game, which has started again, the same political jousting between the government and the opposition as each side wants to prove that it is not a shrinking violet. Once again, it is the same frantic reaction, political invectives, and violence on the streets. Hartals came like an addiction. Kibria's family refused to take his body to the parliament. The Awami League MPs boycotted the President's speech.

All of these worked out the same pattern we have seen in the past. Once again, there is an investigation committee; once again we are asking for international intelligence to find the mad men hiding in our attic. If the past is any lesson, all of these will not take us anywhere except to the same dead end where hatred is perpetuated again and again.

Chairman Mao Tse-tung of China once defined politics as war without bloodshed and war as politics with bloodshed. Perhaps what we see is a new brand of politics, when people have become contaminated in their instincts. It is war every time you disagree, and you must spill the blood of your enemy. Those who killed Kibria must have disagreed with him. We are not talking about those who threw the bomb, but those who masterminded the whole thing.

The widening gyre of that disagreement hit the nation last week as the opposition once again vowed to topple the government. It was an amplified version of the same war cry that had led Kibria's enemies to eliminate him. It was the same intolerance, the same arrogance, and the same madness on a bigger scale. The hatred led to killing, and the killing led to further hatred, a vicious cycle of seminal instincts, which fed on itself.

For any politician, who loves this country, the challenge is to break this cycle. Kibria loved this country and he made enemies with people who were opposed to him. But he never thought of eliminating anyone because he knew where to draw the line between war and politics. It must have been the same reason why he quit the Foreign Service of Pakistan when its army engaged in war against the people of Bangladesh. Because war means end of politics, when rivalry of men is bereft of all sophistication to thrive on raw instincts.

Let us face it, like the tragedies of the past, even Kibria's loss will slip away from us. Perhaps we will be busy grieving the loss of another life as another bomb goes off at another time. Perhaps another party stalwart or another cadre, or may be a whole bunch of them will go at a time. Politics looks like a minefield, where the slightest disagreement or opposition can blow up anyone.

We can mourn the death of Kibria for many more days. But we have a bigger tragedy to mourn all the time. We might blame it on the government or the opposition. We might blame it on the fundamentalists, the Indians, the Americans or any number of conspiracy theories. The fact remains that we are losing our grip on politics, and increasingly looking like a land of warring factions. The New York Times story, the Indian refusal to attend SAARC in Dhaka, the U.S. demand for full disclosure before it sends the FBI team, these are telltale signs of our frittering image.

The killing of Kibria is more than a death.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.