ON Tuesday, foreign diplomats, including the US and EU ambassadors in Dhaka, met with BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia at her Gulshan office. Reiterating their urgent concerns about violence against innocent citizens of Bangladesh, the diplomats urged Khaleda to ensure that the violence resulting from her movement comes to an end.  

Khaleda, however, accused the ruling party men of carrying out the petrol bomb attacks against the common people. She reportedly provided newspaper and video clippings to the diplomats to support her claim. 

If there is, indeed, substantive evidence of AL complicity in the violence, we would urge the BNP to share the details with the media and public. If the allegations are verifiable and found generally accurate, then surely the government should be held accountable. If that is not the case, the BNP must answer to the people whyit based its narratives on partisan grounds, thereby misleading not only the ambassadors and the world, but the people of her own country 

It needs to be stressed that there are also numerous media reports and video footages that demonstrate the involvement of activists of her own alliance, which appear to have been conveniently left out of her narrative. 

It is of vital national interest that we address this issue of political violence in earnest, instead of providing a one-sided picture, at best, and a distorted one, at worst. We cannot forget that since January 5, 2015 at least 81 people, an overwhelming majority of whom have no political affiliation, have lost their lives, their families destroyed, in political violence. Unsubstantiated blame-games under the circumstances do nothing except make a mockery of human lives.