The new Awami League (AL) government was simultaneously handling an international balancing act (UN membership, repatriation of Bengali soldiers, war crimes trials, relationships with Islamic nations), and facing a strident opposition, mainly from a left energised by defections from the Awami League to form JSD (Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal or National Socialist Party). On New Year’s Day 1973, police fired on protesters in front of the USIS (United States Information Services) building. When Dainik Bangla published a special report on the incident, Hasan Hafizur Rahman and Toab Khan were made OSD (Officer on Special Duty, a punishment short of firing) in retaliation.

Although the Pakistan-era PPO was repealed this year, Printing Presses and Publications Act (1973), which carried nearly identical powers (Riaz, 1993: p. 205) replaced it. The Second Amendment to the Constitution was also passed, allowing for the suspension of certain fundamental rights of citizens during an emergency. In one example of “emergency,” the Deshbangla office was raided after they published a news item claiming that the town of Rangamati would soon fall under the control of “armed rebels,” including indigenous Jumma people. 1974 saw the passage of the notorious Special Powers Act (SPA), which was used numerous times over the next decades against the media and opposition politicians (recipients included the same AL that passed the law). In a moment of unintentional irony, the Press Council Act (1974) was enacted in the same week as the SPA, although they contradicted each other on press freedom. Finance Minister Tajuddin Ahmed seemingly went against the SPA when he called for “healthy and fearless journalism,” but this gesture did not reduce the coercive power of the law.

Students protesting outside USIS (United States Information Service) after police firing, January 1, 1973. PHOTO: Ittefaq

1973-74 also saw the first blasphemy cases involving religion. These allowed a small gesture of strength by Islamic groups, which had been delegitimised by their unwavering support of Pakistan during the war. In 1973, Daud Haider published a poem in Shangbad where he allegedly satirised Prophet Mohammed, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha. A college teacher filed a case, and Dhaka saw its first postliberation Islamic party procession. Haider was taken into protective custody and later exiled to Germany. Soon afterward, social worker Engineer Enamul Haq published a leaflet that contained a reference to the Prophet’s wives, although Haq said it was not meant negatively. Death threats were issued, and processions were brought out, but the government dismissed it as “politics of anti-liberation forces.” Haq spent time in protective custody and was released.

1975 was the year things fell apart. Increasingly besieged and isolated, the AL passed the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, which dissolved all political parties and created BKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League or Bangladesh Farmer Laborer People’s League) as a unified political party. The Newspapers (Annulment of Declaration) Act (1975) announced the closure of 29 daily and 138 weekly publications. Only a few titles (e.g., Dainik Bangla, Bangladesh Observer) were allowed to continue. Numerous journalists signed applications to join BKSAL, although it was not clear whether this was voluntary. Among the few who refused to sign were Nirmal Sen (who had been censured the previous year), Kamal Lohani and Mahfuz Ullah.

Whether a free press in 1975 would have saved the government is unclear. However, the blanket suppression of media and political parties certainly did not stabilise the country, and the next chapter in the crisis was the military coup and assassination of Sheikh Mujib and his family on August 15th. On November 3rd, a counter-coup deposed the August group, and they were deposed in turn by a “Sepoy-Janata” mutiny four days later. The country seemed to be headed into a spiral of power struggles, until the cycle was broken by the consolidation of the Zia regime.

In connection with the November 7, 1975 Sepoy-Janata mutiny (the last coup before Zia came to power), Colonel Taher and eleven others were put on trial for conspiracy to overthrow the government. Among the charged was KBM Mahmoud, editor of by-then defunct English newspaper Wave. Mahmoud was accused of being one of the authors of a manifesto released during Taher’s mutiny. Bangladesh also saw a high-profile deportation when journalist Lawrence Lifschultz’s reports on the Taher trial resulted in his expulsion from the country. Lifschultz later turned his reporting and expulsion experience into the spine of Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution (Zed, 1979), co-written with Kai Bird. On the domestic front, Mainul Hossain, chairman of Ittefaq, was arrested and newspaper column writers were asked to provide their personal financial details to the government (Alam, 2008).

The 1975 ordinance placing the press under government control was repealed, but martial law regulations were passed that made it an offense “to criticise in any way the imposition, operation or continuation of martial law, to spread reports calculated to cause fear or alarm” (Alam, 2008: p. 221). With these controls in place, press reports about attacks on journalists were focused on non-state actors. For example, in June 1977, the dead body of a journalist was recovered from a pond in Tangail, and in early 1978, three journalists investigating the selling of adulterated medicine were badly beaten in Ishwardi. In an ironic twist, a bomb attack on a rally by Khondoker Mushtaq (despised by some for his role in the 1975 Sheikh Mujib assassination) spared him but accidentally killed nearby journalists. Other incidents reveal bubbling tensions under the calm. In 1978, 22 journalists were injured during a police beating at a rally demanding the restoration of freedom of the press. The office of Azad, the oldest daily newspaper in Bangladesh, also came under attack for an article that “hurt public sentiment.”

Hijacked Japan Airlines flight on Dhaka Airport tarmac, still from "United Red Army" (dir: Naeem Mohaiemen, 2011).

By 1977, filmmakers were sometimes in conflict with the BFCB (Censor Board), especially over “vulgar” content. Director Subhash Dutta also claimed a form of self-censorship: “War films did not sit well in Zia’s regime, which is why ‘producers [did not] consider making war films’ (Awwal, 2012). If there was indeed subtle discouragement of liberation war films in this period, it remains an under-explored mystery. Zia was himself a freedom fighter, so such films could theoretically have bolstered his government’s reputation. It took until 1981 for the release of a war film, Kalmilata (1981), with actor Sohel Rana playing the role of Zia (“A Major”). Twenty years later, Tareque & Catherine Masud deployed a different model in Muktir Gaan / Song of Freedom (1995), which highlighted both Mujib and Zia and was released under a BNP government.

The Zia government had a specific and targeted, soft-power approach toward the media, informed by the mistakes of the preceding era. The government brought in newspaper editors for private conversations about broadcasting positive news. As part of the accompanying charm initiative, senior journalists Enayetullah Khan and Daud Khan Majlish were brought into the government, Observer editor Abdus Salam became Press Institute of Bangladesh (PIB) chairman, Al Mahmud became Shilpakala Academy chairman, and former AL Member of Parliament ABM Musa became Press Council chairman. The government now had senior journalists in their own employ who could call editors on their behalf to make requests. Photos of Zia in a white vest with a digging instrument, promoting khal khonon kormoshuchi (canal digging program), or taking government officials on a 36-mile walk through the district of Pabna, were powerful new iconography for rural Bangladesh.

Other structural changes encouraged a more positive relationship with the media. Senior journalist Mahfuz Ullah calculated that Zia, as head of state, made the maximum number of visits to the Press Club. Attention was also paid to inviting a large number of journalists along on overseas trips. A diplomatic battle with India over the disputed Talpatti islands encouraged the press to project a united front against “external enemies.” Most significantly, the 2nd Journalist Wage Board was formed in this period (the 1st Board was structured under Pakistan’s General Ayub Khan). Veteran journalists such as Nirmal Sen (censured under the previous government) were on the union team, negotiating with the army’s chief negotiator, General Manzur. The Wage Board’s positive resolution created a pro-government mood in the press. This was generally maintained until the 1979 election, which brought a small opposition (including the AL) into the parliament. This began a period of dissent against the government, which the press started to cover.

Some reports suggest there were over 20 attempted mutinies during the Zia period (Mascarenhas, 1986), but there was little indication of this in the media. An October 1977 press release about an attempted mutiny at Dhaka airport was a rare exception, and this was precipitated by the presence of Japanese press at the airport due to the overlap with the hijack of Japan Airlines JAL 472 (Mohaiemen, 2011). Knowing that the international press would report it, the government preemptively published the bare-bone basics of the incident. Given the assassination of Ziaur Rahman in the 1981 Chittagong coup, we can argue that a free press might have alerted his government to continued resentment inside the army. In this context, an apocryphal story has circulated that a report on planning for the August 1975 coup was to be published in a July 1975 issue of Bichitra, but was dropped due to “sensitivity.”

Bulbul Ahmed as guerrilla, and Sohel Rana as "A Major," still from "Kalmilata" (dir: Shahidul Haque Khan, 1981).

A significant development for later censorship came early in this government’s tenure. Seeking to mark a decisive break with the 1972-1975 government and the forging of a new “Bangladeshi” (as opposed to “Bengali”) nationalism, the government removed secularism from the constitution and later issued a proclamation inserting Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim into the preamble of the Constitution. These moves created a conceptual basis for the primacy of Islam over other religions in citizen life. This shift, and the subsequent insertion of Islam as the state religion by the Ershad regime in the 1980s, facilitated later legal prosecutions for blasphemy. We see this reflected in the post-91 era, with the mushrooming of cases based on religion.

"Army Yes/Ershad No– Khaleda? Ershad Yes/Army No– Hasina?", Cover of JaiJaiDin, November 19, 1984.

In 1982, shortly after coming to power, General Ershad told the New York Times, “There was nothing to write against us, so they [journalists] are not writing anything.” A short time later, Ittehad published the first criticism of the Ershad military regime and was promptly banned. Golam Mazed of Daily Ranar was also sentenced to three year’s imprisonment for criticising martial law. The arrest happened in April but was not reported for four months due to press censorship. The gap between proclamations to the West and actions at home became a continuing theme of private discussions.

One persistent device of the next decade was the regular issuance of “Press Advice,” instructing newspaper editors about what not to print. Although a phone call transmitted these advisories from the Information Ministry, veteran dissident journalist Mahfuz Ullah has done a service to history by keeping a regular written record of all “Press Advice” received from the Ministry between 1982 and 1990 (Ullah, 1991). Looking through the records, we start to see what the government considered important and dangerous. For example, they instructed newspapers not to report on a Rajshahi Jail prisoner’s hunger strike (January 1983), a seed distribution corruption scandal (September 1985), a Thai trawler scandal (October 1985), and a Shanti Bahini guerrilla attack on Rangamati Radio station (July 1990). Sometimes, the incidents were surreal, including a reporting ban on the death of an Airport customs officer indicted on watch smuggling (May 1983), the drowning death of a drunk Kenyan defense cadet (September 1985), and an electric short circuit at the Presidential residence Bangabhaban (December 1985). An advisory on November 9th, 1985, appears to be wrestling with philosophical concepts: “The number of dead in the Adamjee incident is incorrect. Those whom the news described as dead have not really died.”

While there may have been self-censorship of war films from 1976-1981, in the Ershad period, such films, and those with contemporary political content, were actively blocked. Ershad had been in a Pakistan prison camp after the war and could not claim a “fighter” role, and this transmitted into making the release of war films difficult, for example with Morshedul Islam’s Agami (1984). In this period, television became more of a focus, and the Censor Board asked for extensive edits in television serials such as Protikkhar Prohor / Hours of Waiting. Other films, such as Linja, were denied release due to the potential to inflame the democracy movement and was only released in 1991 after the regime collapsed (Awwal 2012).

General Ershad proved to be particularly inept at charming the press. Many of his steps (e.g., placing his wife on the nightly news, penning a song that played regularly on television) backfired, generating more press jabs. One heavily lampooned initiative was his publicly proclaimed persona as a poet, and instructions to print his poems on front pages generated intense backlash. Perhaps this also indicates that the national psyche could accept a military man projecting a disciplined ethos (Zia) but not one who wrote poetry (Ershad). One year into the regime, Mohammed Rafiq published his “Khola Kobita” (Open Poem) poem, which carried the explosive opening stanza, “every son-of-a-bitch wants to be a poet / ants insist they will fly / tusked boars dream of sitting on thrones” (Rafiq, 1983), seen as a dual attack on military rule and Ershad’s poet persona. Thousands of clandestine copies of the poem were circulated, especially on university campuses. Rafiq was summoned before a military board of inquiry, and later, a warrant was issued. He escaped and stayed underground for months. The following year, Farhad Mazhar was also arrested for his poem “All the corpses will take their revenge.”

This was a halcyon era for journalism when arrest and intimidation could not silence voices. Golam Mazed was released in 1983 and then detained again for writing another critical article. After eight months in jail, he was released for ill health and died five days later. Meanwhile, Dainik Desh was banned for an article that alleged that Burmese Muslim rebels were operating inside Bangladeshi borders (Alam, 2008: p. 192), and Shafiq Rehman’s Jai Jai Din magazine was shut down for almost 10 months. Rehman was a continuous thorn in the regime’s side (as Enayetullah Khan had been for the Mujib government) with a weekly column featuring romantic phone banter by a woman called Mila, which carried coded stories about the regime. By 1985, the regime’s grip on the press appeared to be slipping, and martial law was re-imposed after political protests. Habibur Rahman, President of the Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists, was the latest to be arrested. Jai Jai Din resumed publication and then was shut down again in 1986 for an article about the military. Several journalists were arrested, all under the 1974 Special Powers Act.

The government looked at international publications as a source of danger and London-based Bengali weekly Janomat was prohibited in 1986, one of the first actions against an overseas Bengali publication. Foreign press had been banned before, going back to specific issues of the Far Eastern Economic Review (7 February 1975. “Letter from London” alleged that the World Bank paid $4 million in bribes for an irrigation project) during the Sheikh Mujib government. However, the Ershad government paid particular attention to international information flows. The British press monitored the regime’s instability, and as a result, Ataus Samad of BBC was placed under SPA detention. His arrest spurred mass demonstrations at Dhaka University, where he was a part-time teacher, and he was released 16 days later. Indian publications The Hindu, Telegraph, Ananda Bazar, Sunday and Illustrated Weekly of India were all banned. London-based Notun Din was blocked under the Customs Act of 1969, a new usage of this Pakistan-era law.

Pijush Bandyopadhyay with Mujibur Rahman Dilu, still from "Agami" ( dir: Morshedul Islam, 1984).

As things slipped further out of control, a state of emergency was declared in November 1987. Dissatisfied with his Ministers’ handling of the press, General Ershad now took charge of the Information portfolio. A Martial Law regulation was passed prohibiting reports opposing the forthcoming elections and media coverage of protests. Daily Khobor came under fire for publishing a map that showed parts of Bangladesh as Indian territory, although the real reason was possibly their coverage of anti-Ershad protests. Local weeklies Desh Bandhu and Prohor were banned, Bichinta and Jai Jatra were suspended for two months, and Amar Desh was banned after an editorial about government corruption. Banglar Bani was closed indefinitely for an article alleging that the Home Minister allowed ruling Jatiya Party members to be supplied with weapons. To round off the year, Farhad Mazhar was arrested again for his poem “Lieutenant General Truck,” commemorating an event where an army truck ran over protesters.

The press was continually encouraged by the weakness of a regime that spent most of its tenure battling democracy activists. Tight control of the country’s only television station did not produce adherence to the state narrative. Nightly televised reports of a peaceful presidential tour contrasted with word-of-mouth reporting on a street battle with police the same day. Thus, the operating motif for this era was to trust nothing that came from state media organs.

Rubel, Imran, Rahi, Eliza in still from "Linja" (dir: Rana Naser, 1991) .

Censorship actions became more desperate as the regime approached its end. In 1988, there was a national press ban on reporting about election violence that claimed 13 lives. The Home Ministry ordered a black-out of the International Herald Tribune, and Minar Mahmud was arrested for reproducing an article from the Indian press in Bichinta. In an example of the government’s catch-and-release strategy, Robbar, which was suspended in 1987, was allowed to resume publication. The magazine was subsequently banned again for publishing a report criticising the government, and police filed a case under SPA against four of its journalists. Seeking to create an alternate power base, General Ershad passed a constitutional amendment declaring Islam as the state religion. In combination with the earlier Bismillah insertion under the Zia government, this set the stage for the blasphemy struggles of the post-Ershad era.

To create distractions from democracy protests, the regime seized the April 1989 issue of Newsweek, allegedly for carrying an image of Prophet Mohammed. An issue of daily Millat was also banned, and weekly Bibartan was charged with libel for a report on corruption at the Telegraph & Telephone Board. In 1990, there were 67 incidents of harassment, 24 attacks on media organisations, eight publication bans, 12 arrests and two journalist deaths (Nirikkha, 1991). Out of the total of 31 publication bans during the Ershad years, 24 were done under the 1974 Special Powers Act (Alam, 2008: p. 197). A state of emergency was declared again in November 1990, and all critical reporting was banned. A month later, the regime collapsed in the face of national strikes and millions of people on the streets. The press could definitively claim to have been a decisive element in this ending, along with urban political forces and university campuses.

Writers rally against proposed Blasphemy Act. Ist row: Azfar Hussain, Serajul Islam Choudhury, Faiz Ahmed, Shamsur Rahman, Panna Kaiser, Syed Shamsul Haq. 2nd row: Lutur Rahman Riton, Abdul Matin Khan, Borhanuddin Khan Jahangir, Humayun Azad, Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Badruddin Umar. Back: Syed Abul Moqsud, Anu Muhammad. 1994.

By 1993, blasphemy-related prosecutions saw a sharp increase, as Section 99A CrPC was invoked to proscribe book verses from Sufi mystic Lalon Fakir. A case was brought in court (Anjuman a Ahmadiya v Bangladesh, DLR (1993) 185) to stop the publication of the Ahmadiya Muslim community’s book regarding Islam e Nabuwat, then in its tenth edition and in circulation for 40 years. A private lawyer sought a declaration from the High Court that Ahmadiyas were non-Muslims. In support of his application, he referred to actions taken in Pakistan; however, the High Court ruled that it was not required to discuss Pakistani decisions. This was a temporary rebuke to blasphemy cases, but events soon brought religion to the national stage in an explosive way. This was through the crucible of the Taslima Nasreen case.

Though there had been other critics of religion (e.g., the 1973 Daud Haider case), the Nasreen case galvanised Islamist parties and national cultural politics within a corrosively patriarchal and macho environment (being led by female Prime Ministers for two decades had no positive impact on this). The government allowed the protests against Nasreen to spiral out of control, and there was an electoral math calculation related to vote banks. The Nasreen case was a cocktail of several issues: the Hindu community’s position inside Muslim-majority Bangladesh, the position of religious politics on the national stage, interpretations of the Quran and its intersection with women’s rights, cross-border currents between India and Bangladesh, the rise of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in Indian politics, and finally the figure of Nasreen herself as the mythical “wild woman” willing to defy conventions.

Taslima Nasreen in hiding at sculptor Shamim Sikder's house after Islamic fatwa was announced, 1993. PHOTO: Shahidul Alam / DRIK

Events began with the 1993 publication of Lajja / Shame, a novel set in the backdrop of anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Babri Mosque demolition by right-wing Hindu activists in India. The last page of the novel portrays the Hindu protagonist leaving Bangladesh for India: Bangladesh was no longer home to non-Muslims, that was the bleak message of the novel’s finale. The government immediately banned the book. As the controversy escalated, Nasreen gave an infamous and widely misquoted interview to India’s The Statesman newspaper, where she allegedly called for revision of the Quran to ensure women’s rights. Later, Nasreen claimed she had only asked for a revision of shariah law, and the newspaper misquoted her—but the correction was too late. A previously unknown group called Shahaba Sainik Parishad in Sylhet announced a bounty on Nasreen’s head, evoking parallels with the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie. In synchronicity, the Jamaat e Islami party (a junior partner of the ruling BNP) tabled a ‘blasphemy bill’ in Parliament. New groups like Touhidi Jonota Jamat reached the national spotlight through their anti-Nasreen programs. Death threats and strikes ensued, and police filed a case against Nasreen, forcing her to go into hiding. She eventually fled into exile in Sweden and, in later years, settled in India, where she has become increasingly out of touch with contemporary Bangladeshi feminism.

With Nasreen out of the country, defendants in other blasphemy cases started shifting strategies. In 1995, Humayan Azad’s book Nari / Woman was banned by the government because of chapters analysing religious doctrine that imposed chauvinism on women. While the gist of Azad’s critique was similar to Nasreen’s, he confronted the issue by taking the government to court. The ban was finally lifted after a five-year legal battle, which Azad won in the High Court (Humayun Azad v. Ministry of Home Affairs, 20 Writ Petition No. 2553 of 1995). In two other religious cases, the Lalon Fakir debate reached the courts in the 1996 Dr. (Homeo) Baba Jahangir Beiman-al-Shuresari v State and Sadruddin Ahmad Chishty v Bangladesh and others.

In one high-profile case not linked to religion, the government arrested Farhad Mazhar for his essay on an armed rebellion by the paramilitary force, the Ansars. In one of the contentious sections, Mazhar wrote, “The BDR soldiers that shot and killed the Ansars are also the same ‘farmers in uniforms.’ And yet, the BDR soldier did not realise that he had just killed his brother.” (Mazhar, 1995) International protests followed, led by scholars Salimullah Khan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Jacques Derrida, and the government eventually released Mazhar.

Elsewhere, the legacy of the 1971 war continued to be a sensitive area for the BNP government. Tanvir Mokammel’s film Nadir Naam Madhumati / The River Named Madhumati, which restaged Hamlet in a 1971 setting, was banned. Mokammel went to court, reversing the ban after a two-year legal battle. The government also tried to block the release of Tareque Masud’s Muktir Gaan / Song of Freedom, fearing footage of the war would help their rival, the Awami League, even though it also included audio of Ziaur Rahman’s radio broadcast on behalf of Sheikh Mujib. The film was eventually released after intense local media pressure, led by Sajjad Sharif of Bhorer Kagoj, the precursor to Prothom Alo.

Cases involving India were a particularly sensitive issue. Each newspaper that receives a declaration to publish has to agree to a series of conditions, including not publishing news that can “harm relations” with neighbouring allies. Thus, the arrest inside Bangladesh of Golab Barua, a guerrilla leader of the Indian separatist group ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), was presented in careful language, gingerly stepping around the groups’ actual demands (Ittefaq, January 4, 1998). Finally, in 2001, an issue of Desh magazine was banned for being “offensive to the country.”

The 2001 pendulum swing return to power of the BNP was marked by widespread post-election attacks against the Hindu community, who were perceived, whether accurately or stereotypically, to be a vote bank for the AL. Ironically, these are the types of anti-Hindu violence that, when presented by Nasreen in Lajja, were dismissed as “exaggerated.” Because some of the refugees from violence had fled to India, tracking them down required crossing the border in a manner that made it easier for the government to prosecute people. This method was used to arrest author Shahriar Kabir when he returned to Bangladesh after filming interviews with Hindu refugees in India. Similarly, reporters Saleem Samad and Priscilla Raj were arrested under sedition charges for assisting a Channel 4 (UK) documentary team that looked at the same phenomenon. Historian Muntasir Mamoon was also arrested, although the charges were never clarified.

One significant development in the pre-2001 period had been the launch of the country’s first private TV station, Ekushey TV (ETV). From the beginning, private TV stations were seen as being aligned with specific political parties, especially due to opaque licensing processes. The first manifestation of this was in 2002, when the government shut down ETV, allegedly due to irregularities in the license granting process. Whatever the technical specifics, conventional wisdom was that the channel was being punished for a partisan reporting role during the 2001 elections. The ETV case represented a new mode in state control mechanisms. While some newspapers were always in private hands, television and radio had remained state-owned, until the ETV precedent. Politicians understood that controlling state media had not saved the Ershad regime, and therefore, energy shifted to private ownership with at least one owner in any TV station being a person linked to the ruling party at the time of granting of license. This created a nimble method of controlling news and also allowed maintaining control even when out of power. The subsequent years would see a power struggle between new TV channels that had just received fresh licenses through their link to a new regime and older channels that the previous government had licensed.

Still from "Matir Moina" (dir: Tareque Masud), 2001. PHOTO: Tareque Masud Memorial Trust

Taslima Nasreen was back in the headlines, though at a more tepid pace. The Home Ministry ordered police to confiscate all copies of volume 2 of Nasreen’s autobiography Utal Hawa / Wild Wind. In Faridpur, members of a theater group, a number of whom were prominent in the Hindu community, were arrested under section 295A BPC for a play that was “causing hurt to religious sentiment.” Meanwhile, just as it had done in 1996, the Censor Board banned Tareque Masud’s new film Matir Moina / Clay Bird because its madrasa setting in 1971 was deemed sensitive. A week later, the film became the first Bangladeshi production to win a major Award at the Cannes Film Festival, an international embarrassment for the government. Masud, himself a former madrasa student, protested the decision until the Appeal Board finally lifted the ban, and the film was released to wide acclaim, with madrasa students also in the audience.

Religion was the center focus in 2003 with the beginning of coordinated national campaigns to declare the Ahmadiyas as non-Muslim. Khatme Nabuwat Andolon led the campaign and included members of Islami Oikya Jote (IOJ), a partner of the ruling BNP-Jamaat coalition. By 2004, the campaign gained momentum, and the government banned all publications of the Ahmadiya Muslims. In a seemingly related move, Member of Parliament Abdul Mannan prepared a private member’s bill on dhormo obomanona (insult to religion) but was persuaded by a fellow MP not to table it. Unlike Nasreen, the Ahmadiya case was easier to argue. Ain Salish Kendra, Shommilito Shamajik Andolon, and others issued a legal notice to the government challenging the ban on Ahmadiya publications. Barrister Sara Hossain took up the case, and the Court eventually declared a temporary stay order on the ban on Ahmadiya books, but to date, they have not revoked it.

In the other high-profile case of a commingling of religion and politics, at stake was a critique of Islamist politics rather than blasphemy. In 2003, author and well-known critic of religion Humayun Azad published excerpts from his forthcoming novel Pak Sar Jamin Sad Baad (a title satirising Pakistan’s national anthem, “Blessed be the Sacred Land”). In 2004, a Jamaat-e-Islami MP demanded in parliament that the book be banned. A week later, Azad was attacked by assailants from Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh outside the Ekushey Book Fair. After drifting near death in a hospital, Azad finally recovered. Six months after the attack, he flew to Germany for safety from further threats and to begin research for a forthcoming book. A week later, he was found dead in a Munich apartment. A final tragic coda to this decade’s power struggles over religious sensitivity.

Halfway through 2007, the CTG was capsized when anti-army riots broke out on the Dhaka University campus. Although the situation eventually stabilized, 24-hour news channel CSB (Chronus Satellite Broadcast) was accused of fomenting violence by repeatedly showing footage of the riots and shut down. After the Dhaka University confrontation, the regime became increasingly unsteady. Talk shows were curbed, first with a ban on live phone calls, then with a ban on talk show hosts. Issues of The Economist with negative reports about the Caretaker Government arrived in Dhaka with the offending pages torn out.

A negative innovation of this period was the publishing of “leaked” news from intelligence agency interrogations of arrested politicians. Kafkaesque scenarios were played out when “leaked” tapes mysteriously arrived at newspaper offices. While the CTG was the primary subject of discussion, a vacuum was also created in national politics (it took until mid-2008 for the AL to flex its muscle, and the BNP never recovered from the mass arrests of its leadership). In this gap, religion entered again. There are some theories that the CTG also allowed these issues to flare up so as to create an international argument for their continued presence to ensure stability against Islamists—this was also the go-to strategy for the subsequent AL government. This was the time of the cartoon controversy I described in my opening paragraph. Cartoonist Arifur Rahman was arrested, and editor Sumanta Aslam was fired. A Dhaka district magistrate ordered the suspension of the magazine’s publication. Arif was eventually acquitted after a successful legal battle by Barrister Sara Hossain, who has consistently taken on free speech cases over the last two decades, regardless of the party in power.

As elections drew near, almost on cue, the country saw a return of the ghosts of the 1970s. The Eid holiday issue of Shaptahik 2000 magazine was banned because of a blasphemous reference in an autobiographical essay by Daud Haider, writing from his German exile. An emboldened Islami Chhatra Shibir threatened to burn alive members of the theater group Udichi and a Hindu playwright for staging the allegedly blasphemous play Mandar at Rajshahi University. The University authorities responded by banning the play and the related local theater group Dhumketu Natya Sangsad. As the army prepared to host the elections, Jamaat-e-Islami announced its manifesto, which included the enactment of a “Blasphemy Law.” However, events did not go as planned, and there was a boomerang effect. When an Islamist group pulled down Mrinal Haq’s in-progress sculpture of Baul musicians near the airport, there was an intense mobilisation of cultural activists to defend Baul cultural icons. Just as “Islam in danger” is a rallying cry for Islamic parties, “Bengali culture under attack” brought together disparate cultural organisations. Some of this possibly had a spillover effect at the national polls.

During the two-year CTG regime, online news portals such as bdnews24 and blogs such as Sachalayatan, Somewhere In, and Drishtipat had emerged as news outlets and opinion platforms that challenged the more sedate op-ed pages of Prothom Alo, The Daily Star, Samakal, and Janakantha. An early sign that online media would be the new player of this era was the aftermath of the AL government’s first crisis—the February 2009 mutiny inside the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) compound in Dhanmondi. While the first hours of the event saw television reporters interviewing mutineers through locked gates at Dhanmondi Road 2, within hours everyone was blocked from live reporting. In the aftermath of a brutal outcome, the first major press revelation was junior army officers’ heated questioning of the Prime Minister inside a Cantonment meeting, the covert recording of which was leaked onto YouTube. This heralded a new phenomenon: audio recordings with no visuals attached, premiering on a video platform. The government found that censoring YouTube was a non-trivial matter, as it would also choke off monetizable media that IT freelancers depended on.

The government now turned its attention toward local journalists. Kazi Jesin, a critic of the government, lost her talk show Point of Order on Bangla Vision channel, allegedly after complaints from the government. Bangladesh Telecommunications and Regulatory Commission (BTRC) also halted Jamuna TV's test transmission for unknown reasons, and Channel 1, a station aligned with the opposition party, was shut down. The move was made in line with the Telecommunications Act 2001, which Asif Nazrul wrote “allows BTRC to be the judge, jury and executioner” (Al-Mahmood, 2010). In 2011, the proposed National Broadcast Policy included clauses for bans on “derogatory comments about national figures” and programs that “pose a threat to national security and sovereignty.”

Police grab Shahidul Alam's mouth to prevent him from speaking to the press after his arrest for Al-Jazeera interview on August 5, 2018. PHOTO: Suvra Kanti Das

In a significant acceleration of punitive measures, in 2010, Amar Desh newspaper was closed down, and editor Mahmudur Rahman was sentenced to jail for a report that was critical of the Supreme Court and then subsequently for reports accused of inflaming religious tensions (Mazhar, 2012). The Daily Star editor Mahfuz Anam, at one point, faced 55 cases in multiple courts, involving exhausting shuttling between districts. David Bergman faced a contempt court judgment for questioning due process in the long-awaited war crimes trials, even though he was an early activist demanding these same trials through his work on the TV programme War Crimes Files (1995). Bergman was eventually exiled to London when the government refused to renew his visa, despite being the spouse of Bangladeshi national Barrister Sara Hossain. When a group of citizens signed a letter defending Bergman’s right to free expression, the courts also sued them. While most signatories were let off with a warning, war veteran and founder of Gonoshasthaya Kendra Zafrullah Chowdhury was ordered to stand at dock as punishment for being a “repeat offender.”

From the group of signatories to the 2014 Bergman letter, photographer Shahidul Alam earned the ire of the regime when he gave an interview to Al Jazeera about the road safety protests of 2018. Jailed for 107 days under the Digital Security Act (using a loophole as Al Jazeera is television that is available on the internet), Alam refused to issue an apology and emerged unbowed at the end of the ordeal. The international attention to this case and the relentless prosecution of Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus tarnished the government’s image in the Western bloc.

In the cinema halls, there were several cases of attempted censorship. Enamul Karim Nirjhar’s Nomuna (2009), the follow-up to his award-winning film Aha (2007), was refused a censor certificate for its’ satirical portraits of political party leaders, with multiple characters played by actress Champa. Several newspapers demanded that Mostafa Sarwar Farooki’s film Third Person Singular Number (2009) be removed from theaters because the main characters “live together” outside of marriage, and sexual relationships are discussed freely. Farooki being a blockbuster director, this film sailed through the controversy unscathed. However, the “war on terror” subject was a more challenging obstacle and his film Saturday Afternoon (2019), based on the Holey Artisan attack, was held up by the censor board for four years. Even more polarising was the fate, again, of the 1971 war narrative when Rubaiyat Hossain’s Meherjaan (2011) ran into a firestorm for its onscreen romance between a Pakistani soldier and a Bengali woman. Denounced by government MPs, including a former actress, the distributor “voluntarily” withdrew it from theaters. The 1971 narrative was at issue again for controversies around books by AK Khandaker (1971: Bhetore Baire) and Imtiaz Ahmed (Historicising 1971 Genocide: State versus Person); the fallout was Khandaker’s resignation from Sector Commanders Forum and a university syndicate “bar” on campus activities by Ahmed. Those with direct war experience (AK Khandaker, Zafrullah Chowdhury) and experience as scholars of 1971 (Imtiaz Ahmed, David Bergman) were now being condemned by state-affiliated institutions for not being loyal to the official narrative.

The visual arts also came under the spotlight as police closed down the Into Exile: Tibet 1949-2009 show at Drik Gallery after pressure from the Chinese embassy. That same Embassy also managed to have a Tibet project censored at the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit at the Shilpakala Academy. Authorities also closed down Drik founder Shahidul Alam’s photography show Crossfire, which depicted extra-judicial killings (Gonzales, 2010). Alam eventually won a court case to allow the show to be reopened. Battle lines were also drawn around the struggle for Indigenous peoples’ rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, as Shokaler Khobor reported that an unofficial government instruction had been given to remove the word “Adivasi” (Indigenous) from official documents. Several newspapers also asked correspondents to stop using the word, which was presumed to carry international treaty obligations. Aung Rakhine’s Mor Thengari / My Bicycle was a film on indigenous people that was silenced by the censor board. In the field of literature, the High Court ordered novelist Humayun Ahmed to revise the description of the 1975 coup in his novel Deyal (2013). Ahmed died of cancer in a New York hospital before he could follow the order, so the matter remains an unresolved chapter. Sajjad Sharif’s op-ed about this court ruling said, “French philosopher Alain Badiou said in his book Polemics, power and creativity can never have a true dialogue with each other. Ultimately, power is violent. On the other hand, creativity has no rule to follow except its internal logic. When power faces off against creativity, it can only destroy that creativity” (Sharif, 2012).

Intriguingly, a small lacuna emerged in business and economy reporting, with both Banik Barta and The Business Standard able to report on corruption and financial scandals without facing closure. This reminds us of the case of David Bergman, who reported on financial corruption in projects such as the Bangabandhu satellite without facing shutdown. It was only when he crossed over to the topic of the 1971 war that he faced full-blown prosecution. Other cases involving the “spirit of 1971” included Shamsuzzaman of Prothom Alo, jailed for a 2023 report that included a critical quotation from a citizen on the anniversary of independence.This period saw the rise of what journalism professor Abdullah Al Mamun (himself a victim of arrest and torture during the 2007-08 Caretaker Government) called “Predatory Journalism” (Mamun, 2022)— media outlets encouraged by the state to publish reports defaming political opponents and prominent citizens.

A chill descended on both official media (newspapers, television) and online media (blogs, social media) after the 2012 double murder of Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi. While various unsatisfactory theories were circulated by government agencies, the conventional wisdom was that it was their investigative reporting on corruption that may have been the real reason for the murder. Two years later, an epic cultural and street confrontation between protesters at Shahbag (“Secularists”) and Shapla (“Islamists”) metastasized into a series of fatal attacks on writers (Avijit Roy), bloggers (Washiqur Rahman, Ananta Bijoy Das, Niloy Chatterjee), publishers (Faisal Arefin Dipan), activists (Xulhaz Mannan, Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy), and professors (Shafiul Islam). The Shapla protesters, mostly madrasa students, were also brutally suppressed by the state (two TV stations were forced off air during the crackdown). Human rights NGO Odhikar published a report on the Shapla death toll, and in response, Odhikar leaders Adilur Rahman and Nasiruddin Elan were sentenced to jail for “publishing false images and information” under the ICT Act.

Murders, near-death attacks, and a suffocating environment of fear culminated in the 2016 attack on Holey Bakery, which transfixed the country with an overnight hostage standoff and a bloodbath of 28 deaths. Playing out on live television, minutes away from the diplomatic enclave, this series of events became an international stigma for Bangladesh. The government responded over the next two years with lethal force, engaging in manhunts against underground radical groups. Unfortunately, the managed nature of many of these events (e.g., the accused killed in the notorious “encounter” killings or sentenced to death in rushed proceedings), as well as state ineptitude and carelessness regarding the preservation of evidence and due process, meant that even if some assailants were captured, the prevailing attitude among the public was that the real culprits had not been apprehended. This environment of disbelief and skepticism became the default DNA of all media discourse in the subsequent years, especially online.

Social media continued to be a focus of new censorship actions. In 2010, following a similar action in Pakistan, Facebook was blocked in Bangladesh. After sustained protests from youth audiences, the ban was reversed. In 2016, BTRC shut down 32 websites, including the popular Sheershanews. Tasneem Khalil’s Netra News is based in Sweden; since Bangladesh cannot shut down the site at the server level, IP blocks have been deployed. This led to the overnight popularity of VPN software to bypass these barriers. Facebook became a focus for government prosecution, and “status messages” of Bangladeshi citizens (Shahnewaz Chowdhury, Henry Sawpon, Sirajum Munira,Anisha Siddika) faced prosecution under the Digital Security Act. Ubiquitous social media created nimble multiplier effects for citizen journalism but also created enhanced surveillance opportunities. Thus the privacy settings of social media posts became a key lever, although even those who did not have “public” posts found screenshots had been sent to authorities (as happened with Chittagong University professor Maidul Islam); such citizen spying first reported to individual employers and eventually the dreaded Home and ICT Ministry.

The government’s heavy-handed approach to suppressing dissent resulted in a new category of dissident journalists who lived abroad and were able to mount relentless critiques of the government. Tasneem Khalil (Sweden), David Bergman (England), Pinaki Bhattacharya (France), Zulkarnain Saer Sami (England), Zia Hassan (Germany), Faham Abdus Salam (Australia), and diaspora academics such as Ali Riaz (USA) emerged as popular video and print commentators. Books by three of these diaspora writers (Faiz Tayeb’s “Unstoppable Development’s Unimaginable Narrative”, Zia Hassan’s “Development Hallucination”, and Faham Abdus Salam’s “In Search of Bengali Mediocrity”) resulted in Bangla Academy cancelling the stall of their publisher Adarsha from the 2023 Ekushey Book Fair.

The final category of dissident speech that proved difficult to monitor and control was Gen-Z and Gen Alpha’s meme culture, where text was embedded within a universe of self-referential circuits and therefore much less likely to be detected, in spite of the government’s purchase of Pegasus technology. The meme culture of 2024 was highly couched in insider references (Korean serial drama), abbreviated slang (“delulu” for “delusional”), Banglish hybrid (“oy mama na plz”), and heavy doses of irony (“natok kom koro piyo” or “ a little less drama, dearest”). These all eluded the regime’s multiple agencies, which partially explains why the national scale, fierce style, and accelerating velocity of the July 2024 student uprising caught by surprise a government that thought it had suppressed all disobedient speech. The old methods were no longer working, as summarized in this meme rebuke to attempts to stage manage television statements by student protesters that looked like dated Dhallywood cinema: “This generation grew up on movies made by Christopher Nolan, and the state is trying to feed them [stale] movies by Delwar Jahan Jhantu!”

Censorship, subtle and overt, concerned with both the sacred and secular, has been a characteristic of every post-independence, civilian and military, government. There have been variations in intensity depending on the nervousness, or overconfidence, of a particular regime. The targets and taboos have also shifted, almost vertiginously during the last two decades. Certain areas, especially related to security agencies, surveillance technology and territoriality have remained permanently in the no-go zone. There are still younger dissident voices, not yet exhausted, that insist on the fourth estate’s return to its role as a defender of the right to information. Najmul Ashraf, who coined the phrase “Journalism of Oiling vs. Journalism of Bamboo,” gave a bittersweet indictment of journalism’s dire straits in the national imagination: “In my youth, I first heard this name, Press Club, from the mouth of a bus helper. On the side of the bus was written the destination, Press Club. I still see this. But to the bus driver, helper, and most passengers, Press Club is now only a ‘bus stoppage’ spot.” (Ashraf, 2012: 44)

Essays on the tattered state of the press (Ahmed, 2010) project a future rediscovery of media integrity. Danger to press freedom does not come only from crude forms of censorship, but also from the expanding corporate ownership of media, and the resulting lack of separation between capital and editorial independence. Fahmidul Haq outlines the contours of corporate controlled press: “When name is so important, political leadership or a government position can render something newsworthy. If a movie actress’ mobile phone is stolen, that’s hot news; but if the common man is rendered destitute by looters, that’s not news. And this is how we are teaching western style journalism in our classrooms. A ready space for western markets and hegemony is being created by academia and practical journalism. In today’s Bangladesh, where new money has taken control, where a large group of companies own each newspaper, we can no longer expect a pro-people role from the media” (Haq, 2011).

What is needed are movements to abolish laws that allow censorious actions (some dating back to British and Pakistan era), and to build up free speech institutions (strong press, independent watchdogs, fact-checking mechanisms, constitutional protection) that also respect the right to privacy and protect against unjust libel. The state has historically been against its citizens’ free speech, and of late the courts have become a powerful weapon for the same. A more independent judiciary, one that takes an activist role on behalf of people rather than the state, will also help strengthen the press. Finally, as part of a systemic critique of, and resistance to, neoliberal economic paradigms, the power of corporate houses in dictating self-censorship must be named and opposed. Press freedom will come not only through opposition to midnight knocks, mysterious phone calls, cancelled declarations and shutdowns, but also by vigorously resisting corporate hegemony over journalism, which can effectively neuter the media without requiring any state censorship.

Naeem Mohaiemen (naeem.mohaiemen@gmail.com) is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York. This essay benefited from comments by Sara Hossain, Sajjad Sharif, Ali Riaz, Azfar Hussain, Jyoti Rahman, Rumi Ahmed, Syed Yousuf, Shamsuddoza Sajen, Mir Shamsul Alam Baboo, and Mahmud Rahman.

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