Quotes of the Day

Sitting inside his sports-goods store on Dhaka's centrally located Bangabandhu Avenue, Rahim Ali could clearly hear the voice of Sheikh Hasina, the leader of his country's opposition, as she addressed a mammoth rally just outside his shop. Soon after Hasina's speech ended, Ali's windowpanes started shaking and cracking. Outside on the avenue, Delwar Hossain, a 26-year-old seller of peanuts, heard a loud noise and thought at first that the tire of a truck must have burst. A moment later, Quddus Miah, a street-side garment vendor, saw thousands of people, many wounded and bleeding, stampeding down the road; his first instinct was to protect his wares, but then he, too, turned and ran for his life.

News of the attack traveled around the country in minutes. Shortly after six o'clock, when Sayed Muhammad Ibrahim, a former soldier and an expert on security issues, was on his way home, he heard that several hand grenades had been flung at the rally in an apparent attempt to kill Hasina and the entire leadership of her Awami League party. The initial reports were unclear about Hasina's fate. Ibrahim, a decorated hero of his country's war of liberation in 1971, shivered. "I thought to myself, what will happen to my country now, what will happen to my friends? Only Allah knows."

What happened on Bangabandhu Avenue on that evening of Aug. 21 was extraordinary even by the bloody standards of Bangladesh—a nation that has endured at least 21 major bomb blasts that have killed 158 people in the past six years. The attack occurred during a rally attended by some 15,000 people, just after Hasina—a former Prime Minister of Bangladesh and daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's founder—had delivered a speech protesting a series of bomb attacks on her party workers in the city of Sylhet. As Hasina prepared to leave, hand grenades began raining down on the crowd from the rooftops of nearby buildings. While bodyguards surrounded her, Hasina, whose father, mother and three brothers were assassinated in a military coup in 1975, began praying loudly. Her bodyguards swept her into a bulletproof sport-utility wagon and whisked her off to safety as gunfire smashed into the vehicle's sides. "Allah helped me," she told TIME. "He saved me."

Not everyone was so lucky: 20 people, including a bodyguard who had shielded Hasina, and a senior party leader, were killed, and more than 200 were wounded. When street vendor Miah went to retrieve his merchandise, he found the avenue strewn with the dead and wounded. "I was too stunned and numbed to help anyone," he says.

Hours later, a shaken Hasina accused Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's four-party coalition government, which includes two fundamentalist Islamic parties, of carrying out the attack in a bid to destroy the Awami League, traditionally the country's liberal, non-Islamist party. "How can a well-planned assassination attempt take place in the heart of Dhaka without the complicity and involvement of the government?" she told TIME. The government flatly denies the charge, calling it "ridiculous," but Hasina's followers are in no mood to believe this. Bangladesh's already polarized political culture—in which the ruling party and the opposition routinely charge each other with criminal behavior—has turned even more toxic. After the grenade blasts, the opposition called a two-day nationwide strike that turned violent, left hundreds of people injured, brought trains, traffic, shops and universities to a halt—and made it clear that Bangladesh has now entered uncharted political territory. "This incident has shaken the foundations of democracy in Bangladesh," says former President Badruddoza Chowdhury.

Making matters worse is the continuing uncertainty over the identity of the terrorists. Two days after the attack, a previously unknown group, Hikmatul Zihad, e-mailed a local paper to claim responsibility—and promised to kill Hasina within seven days. Last Friday, Bangladeshi authorities began questioning a man they suspected of sending the e-mail from a cybercafé, but political analysts are unsure whether he is suspected of being a member of a terrorist group or is just a prankster. As for Hasina, she questions the government's capacity to conduct a proper inquiry and is asking for an international probe into the bomb blasts. While they grope for clues, security experts agree that the attack, with its use of hand grenades instead of crude, homemade bombs, shows how brazen Bangladesh's terrorists have become. "A new threshold has been crossed," says former Foreign Minister Kamal Hossain. "We have seen a tremendous escalation by communal and antidemocratic forces."

Bangladesh's increasing combustibility was made apparent on April 1 when the police and coast guard raided a boat in the southern port city of Chittagong, stumbling onto a treasure trove of illegal weapons: 2,090 submachine guns, 150 rocket launchers, 25,000 grenades and more than 1.1 million bullets. The authorities had to transport their catch in 10 trucks. With so much weaponry pouring into Bangladesh, the country's gangsters and Islamic terrorists are well equipped to cause mayhem. Since April, for example, local newspapers have claimed that a gang of Islamic terrorists headed by a man known as Bangla Bhai ("Bengali Brother") has killed at least 10 people through methods that have included torturing two victims to death while their cries were broadcast over a loudspeaker to their entire village.

Bangla Bhai, who has told the Bangladeshi press that he is committed to establishing a Taliban-style Islamic government in the northwest of the country, remains at large. Although Prime Minister Zia has ordered his arrest, the police appear to have made little progress, fueling widespread suspicions that the government isn't serious about cracking down on Islamic terrorism. Bangla Bhai has said that his organization's goal is merely "to awaken people's religious feelings to establish their links with the creator."

Meanwhile, the sense of disorder across the country is mounting. On May 21, the British High Commissioner to Bangladesh, Anwar Choudhury, was wounded in Sylhet by a bomb that killed three people and wounded more than 50. Although no arrests have been made, the city's mayor has said he suspects religious extremists of carrying out the attack. Three journalists have been killed in Bangladesh so far this year, and several more have been threatened with violence. Adding to fears that freedom of expression is under attack, Prothom Alo, a Bengali-language newspaper, has been subjected to mass protests by fundamentalists since it suggested recently that some madrasahs in the southeast were being used to train Islamic militants (a claim the madrasahs deny). The newspaper's editor, Matiur Rahman, says copies of the paper have been burned in demonstrations, a bomb has been hurled at one of his journalists, and mobs have demanded both the closure of the newspaper and his arrest.

Worst hit by the deterioration in law and order have been Bangladesh's religious minorities. The Ahmadiyya, a tiny Muslim sect that is not recognized by the fundamentalists as being truly Muslim, has had to endure angry mobs surrounding its mosques, defacing the walls and disrupting religious services. The other prime target of the extremists' wrath is the country's large Hindu community, which has been repeatedly subjected to threats, rapes, arson, looting and assaults. Human-rights activists claim there has been little effort made to protect the Hindu community. "In many cases the police simply refuse to register complaints from Hindu victims," says Rabindra Ghosh, an activist with Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities.

However, Harris Chowdhury, a key adviser to Prime Minister Zia, denies the charge that his government is lax in protecting the rights of Hindus and says Bangladesh's record in safeguarding religious minorities is superior to that of many of its neighbors. Dismissing critics who accuse his government of failing to curb lawlessness, he insists: "The law-and-order situation in this country is quite good."

The government's critics claim it is failing to crack down on violence by religious extremists partly because it needs the support of two Islamic fundamentalist parties to stay in power. Prothom Alo editor Rahman says one of the politicians leading the angry demonstrations against his newspaper is a lawmaker from an Islamic party that is part of the ruling coalition. Former Foreign Minister Hossain remarks: "It is almost an irresistible inference that what has been allowing [the terrorists] to carry on their attacks with impunity is that they have patrons and protectors in high places." Zia's adviser Chowdhury denies the charge, asserting that his government is investigating all the terrorist attacks thoroughly. Yet opponents point out that months after the Chittagong arms haul, the authorities have still not made any significant progress in identifying the men who were trafficking the weapons, just as they have failed to catch Bangla Bhai.

The first step on Bangladesh's road to recovery, says Hossain, is for the government to make public the records of all previous investigations into acts of terrorism and to ensure that the assassination attempt on Hasina is thoroughly probed. "If the government fails to hold a proper inquiry and take proper action, it should make way for a new [government]," says Hossain. But there is widespread consensus that the opposition must also do its part to heal the country's poisoned political culture. "The bitter fighting between the two parties has allowed the fundamentalists to grow in strength," says editor Rahman. While Zia has offered to meet the opposition to discuss the assassination attempt, Hasina dismisses the idea of a reconciliation. "With whom should I meet?" she said to TIME. "With the killers?"

For all its problems, Bangladesh continues to possess two heartening resources: the courage of a small band of intellectuals and journalists who on a daily basis resist the spread of extremism, and the religious tolerance of a large number of its people. Yet its strengths might prove useless unless its political leaders stop fighting among themselves and start reining in the fundamentalists—while there is still time. Says security expert Ibrahim: "Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia must meet at once and start talking, before this country sinks into the Bay of Bengal."

• Aravind Adiga
• In a divided nation, an attack against Bangladesh's opposition party leader marks a new low