Amid arrests and killings, Bangladesh and India must fight censorship.

Pedro_P

On the front line … Bangladeshi photographers form a human chain for Shahidul Alam in Dhaka this week. Photograph: Monirul Alam/EPA
▼ Dear Shahidul,
It’s been more than 100 days  now since they took you away. Times aren’t easy in your country or in mine, so when we first heard that unknown men had abducted you from your home, we feared the worst. Were you going to be “encountered” (our word in India for extra-judicial murder by security forces) or killed by “non-state actors”? Would your body be found in an alley, or floating in some shallow pond on the outskirts of Dhaka? When your arrest was announced and you surfaced, alive, in a police station, our first reaction was one of sheer joy.
Am Ireallywriting to you? Perhaps not. If I were, I wouldn’t need to say very much beyond: “ Dearest Shahidul, no matter how lonely your prison cell, know that we have our eyes on you. We are looking out for you.”
If I were really writing to you I wouldn’t need to tell you how your work, your photographs and your words, have, over decades, inscribed a vivid map of humankind in our part of the world – its pain, its joy, its violence, its sorrow and desolation, its stupidity, its cruelty, its sheer, crazycomplicatedness– on to our consciousness. Your work is made luminous as much by love as by a probing, questioning anger born of being a first-hand witness to what you have seen. Those who have imprisoned you have not remotely understood what it is you do. We can only hope, for their sakes, that some day they will.
Your arrest is meant as a warning to your fellow citizens: “If we can do this to Shahidul  Alam, think of what we can do to the rest of you – all you nameless, faceless, ordinary people. Watch. And be afraid.”
The charge against you is that you have criticised your country in your (alleged) Facebook posts. You have been arrested under section 57 of Bangladesh’s infamous Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Act, which authorises “the prosecution of any person who publishes, in electronic form, material that is fake and obscene; defamatory; tends to deprave and corrupt its audience; causes or may cause deterioration in law and order; prejudices the image of the state or a person; or causes or may cause hurt to religious belief.”
As both our countries hurtle towards general elections, we know that we can expect more arrests, more lynching, more killing
What sort of law is this, this absurd, indiscriminate, catch-all, fishing trawler type of law? What place does it have in a country that calls itself a democracy? Who has the right to decide what the correct “image of the state” is, and should be? Is there only one legally approved and acceptable image of Bangladesh? Section 57 potentially criminalises all forms of speech except blatant sycophancy. It’s an attack, not on intellectuals, but on intelligence. We hear that over the past five years more than 1,200 journalists in Bangladeshhave been charged under it, and that 400 trials are already under way.
In India, too, this sort of attack on our intelligence is becoming normalised. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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