Violence in Bangladesh - Campaign of terror against Bangladesh’s liberal voices (The Economist)

The Economist

Violence in Bangladesh

Campaign of terror against Bangladesh’s liberal voices
Recent murders have cut to the quick of the country’s civil society

Apr 27th 2016 | DHAKA | Asia

THE KILLERS came as couriers, a suspicious-looking group of five or six. The parcel they carried, to a flat in Dhaka on April 25th, was filled with machetes. Once inside they hacked to death Xulhaz Mannan, a gay-rights activist, and a friend. Across the capital, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, blamed the murders on the opposition alliance. A more plausible explanation emerged a few hours later when a local group affiliated with al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.

Mr Mannan was the editor of Roopbaan, the country’s first magazine for gay and transgender readers, and worked for America’s aid agency. He had been receiving death threats since trying to organise a “Rainbow Rally” earlier in the month for gay and transgender youth (the police cancelled it, saying it would offend religious sentiment). The latest deaths brought to four the number of liberals killed in similar attacks this month. Just two days earlier a professor of English at Rajshahi University in the north-west had been cut down, also in broad daylight. A group professing allegiance to Islamic State (IS) had claimed that killing. Last year there were at least five such murders of intellectuals, bloggers and members of religious minorities. No one has been punished for any of the crimes, although an activist from a fundamentalist group has been arrested for suspected involvement in the professor’s death.

Sheikh Hasina has said her government will not take responsibility for “untoward incidents” that befall people who express objectionable opinions. On April 17th she likened the slain bloggers’ writings to “porn” (newspaper editors, browbeaten by government censorship, omitted this word from accounts of her speech). Her stance on religious issues appears to have won over Hefazat-e-Islam, a radical Islamic outfit that used to denounce her party. Ali Riaz of Illinois State University says the killings may have gained momentum because of the state’s weak reaction. International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO, describes a “deeply politicised, dysfunctional criminal-justice system”.

The government’s response is rooted in the country’s turbulent history. In 1971 Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, claimed its independence from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and set up a secular state. But coups in Bangladesh brought to power a series of military regimes, which invoked Islam to broaden their support. One of them made the religion the country’s official one in 1988. Subsequent civilian governments have continued to use Islam in an attempt to shore up their legitimacy. Sheikh Hasina, lacking a popular mandate (elections in 2014 were deeply flawed), has become increasingly deferential to religious conservatives. In March a court took just two minutes to dismiss a petition that challenged Islam’s role as the state religion.

The opposition, however, led by Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), has been tacking in the opposite direction—partly, it appears, to shore up its credibility in India and the West. It has distanced itself from its main Islamist ally, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and no longer protests against the hanging of Jamaat-e-Islami’s leaders for war crimes committed in 1971 (the executions have been widely supported). A Hindu, Goyeshwar Roy, has risen within the BNP hierarchy, which would have been unthinkable only last year. Mr Riaz of Illinois State University says it “might be too early to write the obituary of a secular Bangladesh”. If only the same could be said for secular Bangladeshis.