It is fair to say that Bangladesh is in a grip of a phobia. I
would personally like to label it as Shibir-o-phobia, which I characterize to
be the unreasonable fear of Shibir / Bangladesh Islami Chatra Shibir. Take for
example the cases below,
Case Study-1:
The Daily Star, in its somewhat
presumptive article
headed, “Shibir man held at hospital room of injured Shahbagh activist”, said
that police on Saturday arrested an alleged
Shibir activist for illegally (absurd considering he was student of the same
institution) entering the ward of injured Gonojagoron Mancha activist Tonmoy at
Rangpur Medical College Hospital. The arrested, Rayhanul Islam, is a
fourth year student of Rangpur Medical College. Rayhan entered Tonmoy’s
ward around 12:15pm and behaved suspiciously (too general an assumption, huh?),
Md Shahabuddin Khalifa, officer-in-charge of Rangpur Kotwali Police Station,
told The Daily Star.
Seeing an unknown visitor beside his bed, Tonmoy
started screaming, the OC added. Rayhan then tried to flee, but the police
personnel captured him, and sent him to Kotwali Police Station. The OC
said Rayhan was brought under interrogation to dig out the cause of his
entering Tonmoy’s room. Sounds obnoxious? Wait till you hear more.
How yellow media blew it:
Banglanews24, that classic example of
nutcase media took the responsibility of delivering judgement into its own
hands. What gave it away was not its objective reporting, but its gross assumptions.
This is what it proudly came
up with:
A Shibir activist on Saturday attempted to
murder Blogger Tanmoy, who is under treatment at Rangpur Medical College
Hospital (RMCH). During the time, police held Raihan Kabir, a Chhatra Shibir
activist, also a fourth-year student of RMCH. Security In-Charge Constable (DB)
Shahidul Islam told banglanews: “Tanmoy shouted when apron-worn Raihan entered
into the room.”
“Police held Raihan when he tried to flee the
scene,” he added. Tanmoy suspected that Raihan was sent by those who chopped
him earlier.
Let
us go back to the facts:
Tonmoy
is a central committee member of Bangladesh Chhatra League and former Chhatra
League General Secretary of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
(BUET). After a career of bashing up fellow activists and being part of the
committee in BUET that was declared void, Tonmoy was absorbed into being involved
with the Shahbagh movement. Apparently this made him a blogger in the eyes of
the government subservient media despite being involved with the dirty politics
of Chatra League all his student life and even being under the media spotlight
for beating
up and intimidating
general students and teachers of BUET.
The
depravity and boot licking nature of such media is laid bare as it attempts to
dress up former stalwarts such as Tonmoy as holders of freedom, despite
presence of evidence and witness of countless BUET students to the contrary.
I
need not stress the moronic nature of the article given above which clearly
makes a mountain out of thin air. The preposterous assumption that a 4th
year medical student of an institution is out to murder you just because he is
a supporter of a group you abhor is preposterous in itself, if not downright
ridiculous, considering the fact that the arrested student neither attacked,
nor made a move to attack and neither did he carry any sort of weapon
whatsoever.
Case Study-2:
In order to further understand the willful
spread of Shibirophobia, let us now go on to the next case study in this rather
small dissecting article. According to the UNB, members of Rapid
Action Battalion (Rab) in an overnight drive arrested 10 leaders and activists
of Islami Chhatra Shibir from Sutrapur area in the capital early Saturday.
The arrestees were Mohammad Abdul Hamid alias Jibon, 22,
president of Sutrapur Thana unit Shibir and son of Mohammad Abu Yusuf of Kartam
village in Chouddagram upazila of Comilla, Mohammad Shafiul Alam, ex-president
of Sutrapur thana unit, Mohammad Zobair Hossain, president of Jagonnath
University unit Shibir, Asaduzzaman alias Mamun, Mohammad Saiful Islam,
Mohammad Russel, Mohammad Anwar Hossain, Mohammad Arman Ali, Abdul Hye Selim
and Kazi Imtiaz Uddin.
Sources at the Rab headquarters said a team of Rab-10, acting
on a tip-off, conducted the drive in the area after midnight and arrested the
Shibir leaders and activists from a wedding ceremony.
So what did security forces uncover?
RAB members recovered huge leaflets,
posters and books from their possession. That’s it.
What yellow media saw:
Our favorite candidates, banglanews24
and the Daily Star were again part of the yellow action when they concluded a
rather startling conclusion. The conclusion
was that Shibir had changed its tactics all of a sudden and that it had begun
conductive secretive ‘illuminati’ style meetings in spectacular locations late
into glittering wedding nights. Anything to promote that secretive evil
character.
Simple Quran copies and Islamic themed
books turned into Jihadi books and social gatherings became were marketed as secretive
meetings. And suddenly, the security and national interests of the country were
at stake.
What all this really is:
Since (recent) time immemorial, Shibir
and Jamaat members have shown exceptional constraint. Excesses as reported by markedly
yellow media have ultimately turned out to be what they were, excesses. In holding
up an unchallenged stream of biasedness, the media through their narrative have
stripped Jamaat and Shibir of the right to operate peacefully. Every act of
these organizations to reach out to the people has been portrayed as being inflammatory.
Every act of reconciliation has been coated with the rhetoric of vilification. Media
such as Diganta TV and Amardesh which sought to convey the messages of these organizations
have been closed and their reach limited if not seriously curbed.
As we conclude, the questions remain.
Is the oppression of free expression of a big section of the society in the
name supposedly of curbing extremism the ultimate road to an equal society? If
not freedom of expression and an equal society, what do vested parties who deliberately
spread of phenomena such as Shibir-o-phobia and Jamaat-o-phobia stand to gain?
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