Wicked people say that most Bengalis cannot understand the difference between praise and mockery. That is why the proverb exists: “Hujur koichhe shalar bhai, anonder ar sheema nai!” (“There is no limit to joy since master has called me a brother-in-law!”)
In other words, the master called him “brother,” and that alone brings overwhelming joy. They do not notice that there is another word (“shala”) before “brother,” which serves to mean both a very close relative and, humorously, is a widely used insult. For the ignorant, only the “brother” exists, so he is overjoyed, and the insult is lost.
The press wing of our Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, the media cell of the ruling BNP, and the party-owned newspaper Dainik Dinkal are no different. In a desperate effort to portray the PM as a “man of the people,” they have turned the very same PM into a laughingstock.
Here’s what happened: Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has gone to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly session. This time, the number of people in his entourage is lower than that of past heads of government. The newspapers have praised Tarique over this.
Tarique also deserves praise for another matter: he did not disrupt the schedule of the state-owned Biman Bangladesh Airlines and divert an aircraft from another route to take him to New York. He travelled on a Turkish Airlines aircraft, in business class. This cost much less than taking his own personal Biman aircraft.
But these two matters did not get much traction with the PM’s press wing or BNP’s media cell in building Tarique Rahman’s image. They needed something different. And they discovered it at Istanbul Airport in Turkey. There, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman sat in transit for more than two hours. During this transit, he ate at the business class lounge.
In this day and age, everyone knows that a business class passenger gets free food from that lounge; it is included with the business class ticket. But although most people may know this, the prime minister’s press wing, BNP’s media cell, and Daily Dinkal apparently did not.
The digital edition of Daily Dinkal wrote, “During a transit stop in Istanbul, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman and his wife Dr Zubaida Rahman are buying comparatively cheaper food by standing in line and bargaining.”
In its desperate effort to portray Tarique as a “common man,” Dinkal Digital later issued six more corrections to this one report. Up until the fifth correction, they more or less carried the same tone: Tarique Rahman stood in line with the “commonfolk” and bought food to eat. By the final and sixth correction, it merely said, “Tarique Rahman stood in line with the commonfolk and ate.”
This sparked trolling on social media. Someone laughed and said, “Oh bhai, do you have to go to the business class lounge and bargain with cash to buy food?” Someone else, raising their eyebrows in astonishment, said, “Bargaining with common people in a crowded business class lounge? What a revolutionary discovery!”
In this way, the situation has now reversed. Instead of building a “great image” for the prime minister, his press wing and the party newspaper have turned Tarique into a laughingstock.
In the 1980s, when the all-powerful Hussain Muhammad Ershad was in power, on some random Fridays, he would appear at a mosque during Jummah prayers. Pouring out emotion, he would say that the night before, he had dreamed of praying at this mosque. As such, as soon as morning came, he had rushed to pray at this mosque.
The worshippers at the mosque knew the truth, however, because for the past week, they had seen DGFI, NSI, SB, and CID people moving around the mosque. Everyone had already predicted that some bigwig of the state would be coming to pray the next day.
At the time, there was no social media, whispers among the worshippers remained among themselves. The next day, the country’s daily newspapers published reports about how the head of state had prayed at a mosque seen in a dream. Of course, one or two rebellious weekly magazines did not hold back from poking fun at the matter, with people laughing and joking about Ershad’s “dream.”
Since then, a lot of water has flowed down the Padma, Meghna, Jamuna, and Buriganga. The world we live in is a much different one to the one left behind. Technology has now reached a point where people can pull up anything by pressing a button on their mobile phones. But the press wing of the prime minister in the modern era, or the media cell of the ruling party BNP, are probably stuck in the 1980s.
Why else would they, in order to establish Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s “common man” image in this day and age, have chosen a strategy from the Ershad era?
