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In perpetual fear of free speech by Shameran Abed THE commemoration of our historic language movement that culminated in the bloody massacre on that February morning more than half a century ago takes on greater significance this year because so many of the ideals that formed the basis of that struggle and for which our people were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice are once again under siege. The language movement was waged not just to resist the attempts by our rulers in the western wing to make Urdu the state language of Pakistan, nor merely for our right to speak in our mother tongue. The struggle was for our right to speak freely, express ourselves without fear and give voice to our aspirations – political, economic and social – in the language, tone and tenor of our choice. Today, we are witnessing once again, and not for the first time since our national independence nearly 37 years ago, efforts by authoritarian forces to asphyxiate democratic space and infringe upon our inalienable rights to think, speak and express freely.    With the people’s obedience more or less ensured through the imposition of a repressive state of emergency that has confiscated our constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights, the efforts of the present regime to limit and control the discourse have concentrated on the mass media. Both the print as well as the electronic media have been made to find out, a few among them the hard way, what it is like to operate under an unelected military-controlled regime that is not interested in a proper debate and has little tolerance for dissent. At the start of its tenure, the regime had promised to allow the media to work without hindrance or restriction, a promise it has reiterated several times since. Yet, what we have experienced in reality are systematic efforts to choke any available space for free thought and speech, tight control over content and at times the tendency of this regime to take matters a step too far by harassing and persecuting its detractors.    The print media has been comparatively easy to contain for the current regime, largely because the majority of the print media organisations fell eagerly and neatly in line behind it from the very beginning. Some newspapers, especially ones that are run or are manned by veterans of past autocratic regimes, were only too aware of the ‘correct’ behaviour in such times and adopted a policy of self-censorship from the get go, hence restricting provocative content even before receiving any direct or indirect instruction from the enforcers of this regime to do so. Those that belong in this group simply did not want to find themselves on the wrong side of this regime and so were only too eager to steer clear of controversy. Another group, however, and among them one or two of the most prestigious and popular newspapers in this country, went a step further. This group was not content with giving carte blanche to an unelected regime but felt it necessary to boldly and brazenly do the government’s bidding, even when that entailed pushing the perceived political agenda of this so-called non-political regime. Such was the desire of certain newspapers to help the government in implementing its absurd and obtuse ‘minus-two’ scheme that they were willing to compromise their journalistic standards in order to do just that.    One or two newspapers and news and current affairs magazines did, however, choose to engage with this regime more critically, being wary of its motive and demanding a plausible exit strategy from the very beginning. For such indiscretion, the editors of these publications have been severally summoned to the headquarters of the armed forces intelligence and called over telephone by the same government agency to cajole or intimidate them into falling in line. This, thankfully, has yielded mixed results.    With regard to international news and current affairs publications that are available in our country, this regime’s actions have been more erratic. The distribution of some of the more popular publications, like the London-based Economist magazine that has been consistently critical of the regime, has not been restricted or limited. The reason may be the fact that the banning of even one issue of such a high-profile magazine is likely to cause more of a stir, nationally and internationally, and bring more attention to the authoritarian nature of this government than what is written in the few column inches that these publications devote to our country. Yet, while the Economist has been left alone, the government has taken a much more hard-line stance with the Kathmandu-based pan-South Asian current affairs monthly, Himal. Several pages were ripped out by the authorities here before distribution of the magazine’s April issue, pages that contained an editorial titled Khaki politics in Dhaka and an article titled The Dhaka regime’s messy surgery. The Himal countered by dedicating much of the May issue of the magazine to what it called on its website the ‘ongoing political experimentation in Bangladesh’, prompting our regime to ban distribution of the May issue altogether.    The much larger headache for the current regime, however, has been the electronic media, which not only have a far wider outreach but have demonstrated far greater courage and improvisation in order to get dissenting views on the air. Such is the popularity of the private television channels – around the country and across demographic groups – that this regime has had to tread very carefully in trying to control what is put out without appearing to be clamping down on media freedom. What the regime has been able to do fairly successfully from the beginning is to control the news programmes, through which it has managed to ensure that nothing manifestly negative about its political agenda is reflected in the news shows. It has been alleged by several key officials in different electronic media organisations that high-ranking military personnel would visit daily and remain in the newsrooms to ensure that the private channels were following instructions on what to put on air. While it is unknown whether those reported visits are still made, there is little reason to believe that they have stopped.    Yet, the government has had to watch rather helplessly as news of the spiralling prices of essentials items, slowdown in investment and economic activity and daring murders and robberies that have indicated a law and order downturn have been reported repeatedly in the news, calling into question the ability and competence of this regime to govern effectively. Moreover, while it has tried to ensure that the news programmes do not patently expose its attempts at political restructuring, even a simple narration of political events taken over a continuum since this regime assumed power will have made it absolutely clear to all that this government has spent a great deal of time, most of it in vain, trying to plot a political course to perpetuate itself in power well past its expiration date.    What has been more bothersome for this regime has been the late night television talk-shows, which had become extremely popular even before the advent of this government because of their ability to bring people with diverse political views to the table to discuss the issues. The assumption of power by this regime gave the talk-shows a unique opportunity to hike up their ratings by bringing in guests who were not afraid to be critical of this regime, thereby helping to quench the public’s thirst for some dissenting views in these suffocating times. Just as the talk-shows grabbed this opportunity with both hands, those who are critical of this government and are unafraid to tell it like they see it have also used the platform and pulpit provided by the channels to challenge this regime. This was necessary, of course, at a time when the country is governed by a regime that is controlled by the military and made up of a handful of the country’s increasingly detached elite without the existence of parliament or any effective checks and balances on state power.    The regime’s response: to ban certain outspoken critics from appearing in talk shows. As a matter of fact, at one point following the campus protests last August, the regime had stopped talk-shows from being aired altogether, only to relent afterwards once it realised that its attempts at controlling the media were becoming too naked to the public eye. Since then, it has gone back to its earlier attempts to bar certain people from appearing in talk shows and trying to ‘encourage’ the channels to invite others, obviously people who are loyal to this regime. Very recently, several high-ranking officials of a private channel allegedly had to face the wrath of the military for inviting a particularly outspoken critic of this government even after it was apparently made clear to the channel that the person in question was not to be invited under any circumstances without prior approval of the forces intelligence. The regime had also grown so wary of live television talk-shows that elicit viewer phone-ins because of the difficulty of the shows’ producers to control what is said on air that it has now forbidden the talk-shows from allowing viewers to call in live.    However, the major casualty of this regime’s authoritarian intolerance has been the country’s first 24-hour news channel, CSB, which was shut down by the authorities following its coverage of the August 2007 protests on the pretext of some technicality. The channel’s role in providing live and continuous footage of the protests and thereby exposing the brutality carried out by the law enforcement agencies on the protestors not only offended the government but made it apprehensive of the ability of a dedicated news channel to expose a potentially damaging story before the authorities can effectively kill it off. When a standing committee member of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a former army chief, was assaulted by party men in November for his alleged betrayal of the party chairperson, the authorities made sure that the footage of the assault was not shown by any of the channels in their regular nightly news programmes even if they had managed to capture it and that pictures, which later surfaced on the internet, were not printed by the newspapers. Such control over content would not be possible with a full-time news channel that had the ability to air footage almost as soon as it could get its hands on it.    On other occasions, such as when the chief adviser collapsed while delivering a speech outside Dhaka, the authorities made the television channels stop airing the footage of his collapse after several channels had already aired it on earlier bulletins. That, of course, was a legitimate request on grounds of decency, but while making the media show respect and decency towards the country’s chief executive who had fallen ill can be understood, forbidding the airing of footage of a now full-time politicians being assaulted by members of his own party cannot possibly be explained by the fact that he happened to be a former head of the army. Once again, it was the tendency of the authorities to protect one of their own that was on display, even at the expense of twisting the arms of the media that is apparently supposed to be free and devoid of restrictions.    Therefore, while the current regime continues to tell everyone who will listen, especially its prime backers in the international community, that the media is being allowed to work freely, the reality paints a very different picture. The country’s first 24-hour news channel is no longer on air, and neither are the other channels allowed to invite as guests to their talk-shows those who have spoken out against the increasingly obvious political designs of this regime. The print media also have been told to fall in line and the organisations that have not continue to disobey instructions at their own peril. These are not actions of a government that is truly committed to advancing and strengthening democracy, something that the chief adviser has once again tried to claim on the eve of this Ekushey. Instead, these actions call into question the central premise of this regime. That is something that its principal actors must reflect on as they stand at the foot of the Central Shaheed Minar to pay ‘homage’ to the heroes of our language struggle.    Shameran Abed is assistant editor, New Age

HEADLINES    Ekushey and the state of undemocracy    In perpetual fear of free speech    A people’s history of the language movement    Language, nation, and multiplicity    Being Ekushey    On tyranny and terror: freedom of thought and choice of speech    The university and democracy    The implications of a playground brawl    Denying freedom, denying development

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