What NYT, Economist, WaPo won’t admit

It’s a decided surprise when occasionally the once respected Prothom Alo newspaper in Dhaka (a sister concern of the Daily Star of regime pet ‘critic’ Mahfuz Anam) spills out the beans on the nature of the ‘democracy’ that that the graduate interns at the Bangladesh beat at the New York Times or Washington Post or the compromised Susannah Savage at the Economist are too lazy to investigatehttps://www.prothomalo.com/politics/%E0%A6%8F%E0%A6%95-%E0%A6%AF%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%97%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE-%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B6%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%81%E0%A7%9C%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A7%9F%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BF-%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0 . In a daring expose with quantifiable metrics, the article points out that despite Constitutional guarantees to the contrary, the police chiefs in Dhaka and the outlying districts rarely allow public gatherings of opposition parties or any civil society organizations that are not part of the regime ideological machinery. On those extremely rare times that such rallies are allowed to fool the the likes of Ms. Savage and Tunku Varadarajan (formerly of WSJ and deeply connected to regime figures in Dhaka), non-state actors like the ruling junta’s vigilante terror group BCL (the Bangladeshi regime’s version of Iran’s Basij) descend an hour or so before the rally and randomly beat up participants and destroy audio equipment before ‘disappearing’ as the police stand mum. There have never been any prosecutions for such vandalism; on the contrary regime ministers regularly praise such para-statal violence.