Shahnoor Wahid
The era of Vlad the Impaler has come back. The porphyric Count Dracula is happy to see his followers in the 21st century doing exactly what he loved to do in the dark forests of Transylvania, in the courtyard of his dreaded castle. His favorite pastime was hoisting his enemies on wooden stakes and watching as the sharp needle-like point pierced through the rectum of the victims and came out their mouth. The lifeless bodies would hang there on the blood-stained poles for months to strike terror in the hearts of the enemies. The legend that he drank the blood of his victims evolved out of stories of such terrible tortures that he enjoyed to watch. His followers rejoiced at the gory sight and hailed Vlad as their true king.
His present-day followers in Bangladesh also get ecstatic seeing the mutilated, blood-stained bodies of their victims, writhing in pain and screaming for mercy. The lifeless bodies once belonged to their fellow classmates or villagers and they had committed the crime of not believing in the same ideology as their assailants did. Like the victims of Vlad, the impaled victims of mob beating are writhing in pain on hospital beds.
One gets beaten to death for one hundred and one reasons in this country. You may get lynched or ‘mobbed’ for supporting a certain political party or for not wearing a beard of a certain length. The overly religious zealots would even dig up a dead body and burn it in aberrant frenzy in a bid to enter into the Guinness Book of World Records first and then into heaven after death. These fanatics are the descendants of those crazy mobs who used to burn young and old women on wooden stakes by calling them witches. This was popular in medieval Europe. But their Bangladeshi brethren went one degree ahead; they dug up a dead ‘heretic’ and burned the body in broad daylight. They believe they have earned a lot of ‘sawab’ and will enter through the gates of heaven hereafter.
So, the sport of ‘mob-ism’ is going on in full swing in Bangladesh. In the past people used to get shocked at such spectre of horror, but now they don’t. Rather, they get bored when things quiet down on the roads, when there are no more blood-chilling screams of dying victims outside in the dark alleyways and when no more someone is impaled or no dead body is found for burning. However, political observers assure us that there will be more impaling and more burning (this time someone alive) in the near future, especially until the next general election.
Surely, we shall witness some bizarre drama, some uncanny happenings in the future days as politics will gather momentum. There will be plenty of dead bodies to organize a bonfire or hang those from foot over-bridges for display.
From docile, music-loving people, we have morphed into a trigger-happy, knife-wielding, blood-thirsty nation, just like their idol Vlad the Impaler.
The writer is a senior journalist.
