A free press is but an organic necessity

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting. This is what the great journalist Walter Lippmann pronounced.

The news about the granting of bail by a Faridpur court to detained senior journalist Probir Sikdar — survivor of a family whose 14 members were martyred by the hordes of Pakistani military junta during our Liberation War in 1971— solaces our anxiety and unhappiness to some extent. Owner of online newspaper ‘Uttaradhikar Ekattor News’, Sikdar went to lodge a general diary (GD) with the police in dhaka for feeling a threat to his personal safety; but rather than registering his GD, the police arrested him for posting a Facebook status and transported him to Faridpur. Sikdar was released on bail in a case which accuses him of ‘defaming’ the LGRD Minister.

It is up to the learned court to decide if his observation was defamatory but the extraordinary rapidity with which he was placed on remand was perhaps due to the fact that he named a minister among others. Physically disabled with only one leg, Mr.Sikder was kept standing for an inordinately long time, and was produced in court in handcuffs, blindfolded and in shackles which is tantamount to torture.

The police ought to have alleviated his apprehension of insecurity; conversely they detained him and treated him like an ordinary criminal. Simply put, this is yet another abhorrent example of an attempt to harass journalists.

“The Indian media is sometimes said to provide the reader with more than 100 per cent of the facts. In neighbouring Bangladesh, readers are used to having to make do with less”, wrote the London-based Economist May 25th 2013 in reference to the press freedom vis-à-vis the imprisonment of Mahmudur Rahman, the editor of the country’s biggest-circulation pro-opposition paper at that time. Bangladesh’s newspaper editors demanded in joint appeal that the government free him. The government also rejected the editors’ demand that Amar Desh, Mr Rahman’s paper, be allowed to resume printing and that two Islamic TV stations be allowed back on the air. The television stations were shut down after they broadcast live images of the security forces’ attacks against hardline Islamist demonstrators, which left dozens dead. [economist.com/ blogs/banyan/2013/05/ press-freedom-bangladesh]

Free speech in Bangladesh is “under attack as never before, held hostage between angry, machete-wielding radicals on one hand and a government, quick to take offence, on the other”, claimed the Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based international human rights watchdog on 18 August. Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director of the organization, in a statement put emphasis on course correction, adopting international standards and upholding constitutional freedom.

“As long as authorities continue to crush free speech, those who speak out, risk losing their lives,” she observed in the statement titled “Dispatches: Bangladesh’s Machete Attacks on Free Speech.”

“It took more than a week for police to arrest three suspects in Niloy Neel’s murder, despite the alleged perpetrators’ identities being known to the police,” said the HRW article.

It pointed out that the police chief’s comments were shocking, but not surprising, because Bangladeshi authorities are increasingly cracking down on freedom of expression. It also referred to the arrest of journalist Probir Sikder this week.

Last week, the article added, a Bangladesh court sentenced IT lecturer Muhammad Ruhul Amin Khandaker in absentia to three years in prison for a 2011 Facebook post on the death of an acclaimed Bangladeshi film maker [Tareq Masud] in a road accident, blaming politicians for not ensuring road safety and wondering how the prime minister was spared such mishaps.

A nation and the media rise and fall together. We should remember what Josef Pulitzer (1847 –1911), publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World, said over a century ago: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.”

A Bangladesh Chhatra League leader was killed in a “gunfight” between his associates and Rab members in the capital’s Hazaribagh area the other day, around 12 hours after he and his friends allegedly beat a teenage boy to death. In Magura, former BCL leader Mehedi Hasan Ajibor, an accused in a case over the July 23 shooting that left a mother and the baby in her womb wounded, was killed in another “gun battle” between his accomplices and police.

Meanwhile, Hazaribagh Thana Awami League said BCL leader Arzu was “killed in a so-called gunfight on some trifling pretext.” In a press release, the unit leaders condemned the incident and demanded “a proper investigation into the extrajudicial killing.”

People were shuddered at the monstrous crimes perpetrated by some pro-ruling party men in Magura, Hazaribagh and Kushtia. We felt that they should be prosecuted and punished, but we were shocked to learn about their extrajudicial killing, which is absolutely unacceptable. What is needed is the rule of law.