The ordeal that the hostages at Holey Artisan Bakery Café in upmarket Gulshan area, Dhaka went through before they were mercilessly slaughtered for not knowing the Koran or for not speaking Bangla must have been an excruciating. Now that terror is a global phenomenon no country can claim to have a remedy for dealing with this human crisis. They can only try to minimise the risks but claims of a fool-proof security mechanism is no longer possible. The international community is shocked at what happened on that Friday evening. Such terror attacks tend to destabilise a country’s economy even as corporates look to shifting to safer environs. In recent times Bangladesh’s human development index (HDI) has gone up. In key sectors such as maternal and infant mortality and other health parameters, Bangladesh is doing much better than India. Hence human development, the yardsticks for measuring which are crafted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) using a western model of development, fails to measure the complexities of the human mind and its ability to deal with multiple challenges, including the radical forces that embed themselves in ideologies and theologies which preach terror as a means to an end.
The seven states of North East India are Bangladesh’s closest neighbours. Trade and commerce are being proactively promoted and there are ongoing talks about communication links between Bangladesh via Tripura to Kolkata. Other routes through the North East which would link Bangladesh with Bhutan, Nepal and China are also being proposed. With terror gaining ground in Bangladesh there is a danger that those routes may also be used as transit points for arms and terrorist outfits of different hues. There are discussions galore about the identity of the killers on that fateful day. It is learnt that they are educated, young men who have been radicalised by a form of Islam that is intolerant of liberal ideas and the brave and emerging new world which accepts the third gender (LGBT) as part of the new human order. The killers claimed they are ISIS and that is the troubling point. ISIS is an ideology, not a group. Ideologies are adopted and embedded into the minds of those who believe that the world is too accepting of what in their opinion is unacceptable behaviour. The café at Gulshan that was stormed by the terrorists represents that new liberal, tolerant counter-culture that is also another form of modernity. Many wonder if Islam has evolved to adapt to these cross-currents of change or whether it has remained uncompromising and strictly illiberal in these times when the control of all forms of religion over the human mind is fast loosening.