I have written and spoken about Bangladesh’s socio-political and cultural matters widely. Amongst those I have written for are The New York Review of Books Online, Scroll, The Wire, Cityscapes, The Asia Dialogue, Netra News, Dhaka Tribune and Shuddhashar. I am the managing director of Netra News, and I am on the editorial board of Shuddhashar’s quarterly magazine. Additionally, I have appeared at various festivals and conferences, and on Al Jazeera, ABC Radio National, BBC Asian Network, India Ahead News and others. Below are a few of my long-form essays.
A New Chapter for Bangladesh? (The New York Review of Books Online)
When student protesters ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, they not only ended fifteen years of her authoritarian rule but also challenged her party’s self-serving nationalism.
How to kill the Fourth Estate in 48 years or less (Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia, Routledge, ed. Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett)
Abstract: The history of the dynamic between the media and the state in Bangladesh has consistently been one of the latter suppressing and censoring the former. This chapter critically traces the history of the Fourth Estate as a means of analyzing how the government has been able to neutralize all of its socio-political potential. Since independence in 1971, Bangladeshi media has evolved in tandem with global trends and technology, as have methods of persecuting journalists and controlling the press. The government has used draconian laws, violence and intimidation, and leverage through capitalist ownership models, to turn the neutered domestic media into a propaganda machine. By shutting down important avenues for honesty, dissent and resistance, the state has – over time, and perhaps irredeemably – eradicated press freedom and defined the strict parameters of what can be called the objective truth. This chapter provides a detailed look at how this has been achieved.
COVID-19 in Bangladesh: How the Awami League Transformed a Crisis into a Disaster (The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Special Issue: Pandemic Asia)
Abstract: In the case of Bangladesh, COVID-19 has laid bare the shortcomings of the state, underscoring the complicity of the military, elite class, Islamists and intelligentsia in the government’s dysfunctional, apathetic, and authoritarian approach. This essay breaks down the Bangladeshi government’s response along three key lines: the first to examine the legal basis for its response to the pandemic, the second the exploitation of labour rights and how it affects public image, and third the suppression of freedoms of speech and expression. Through discussion of these key tenets, this essay provides a comprehensive indictment of how Bangladesh is turning a crisis into a disaster.
Seeing and Not Believing (Cityscapes, Issue 8)
“Bangladesh is officially a secular nation but has a state religion. This contradiction feeds into its turbulent politics, which has made life in the capital Dhaka far less certain and social.
The Dhaka-Mymensingh highway is a four-lane motorway that runs through the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka to the northern city of Mymensingh. The road, which passes the national airport, connects rich and poor. It is the blocked aorta of a spectacularly unhealthy heart that defies science to keep beating, and supplies the myriad tarmac arteries that branch from it with an uninterrupted stream of people, all twisting, turning and manoeuvring their way through the notoriously congested capital.” Continue reading
Bangladesh looks ahead full of optimism, to a barren wasteland (Shuddhashar, Issue 11)
“All the conversations surrounding the eleventh general election in Bangladesh, scheduled for 30 December 2018, are about how free and fair it will be, or whether it will be free or fair at all. It is an objective issue as well as a partisan one, with the valid concerns of the former drowned by the myopia and hypocrisy of the latter. There is a larger matter that has conveniently slipped through the cracks of public discourse, one that has already been settled and, thus, requires no soothsaying from the surfeit of commentators. For the first time since independence, the pretence of secularism in Bangladeshi politics has been dispensed with altogether.” Continue reading
The struggle for freedom, against the definitive licensed fraud (Shuddhashar, Issue 3)
“Geography lessons from a bygone era teach that Bangladesh is the land of rivers and mosques. The rivers have waned and shrivelled, but the mosques have thrived, many assuming a nefarious cloak. Like his idol Anwar al-Awlaki, Jashimuddin Rahmani, the spiritual leader of Islamists in the country, delivered many an influential sermon at his prominent mosque, diligently attended by a growing horde of followers. His station gave him credibility, enabling him to promulgate and proliferate hate speech as religion. He was not alone. The radical bent of Salafi and Wahhabi Islam has become institutionalised at these monoliths as the propagation of an increasingly conservative ideology has gone unchallenged. Preachers lacking proper education and sound theological footing are accepted as infallible authorities on a religion that the majority of the population neither understand nor wish to. The glorification of Islam, made absolutely, and its superiority above all else, have established intolerance as a commendable value in Bangladesh, to be cherished and practised by society.” Continue reading