If sycophancy was an Olympic sport, the so-called journalists of Bangladesh would certainly be in the running for the top three slots every four years. In the run up to the opening of the controversial Padma Bridge last month, ostensibly respectable journalists left no stone unturned to show their obeisance to the unelected “prime minister”, Sheikh Hasina Wajed.
The doyen of the editor corps, Mahfuz Anam compared her to Winston Churchill in writing for the ‘respectable’ Daily Star; not to be outdone in the sycophancy heats, competitor Dhaka Tribune corralled the ever-ready resident pro-Hasina American “economist” in Dhaka Forrest Cookson (whose actual job in Dhaka nobody seems to know and whose “PhD” is economics seem to have no grantor) to miraculously claim that even the CIA confirmed that Hasina was without a shade of blemish or corruption in this multibillion dollar project of ‘national pride’! And these are two of the more ‘neutral’ English dailies in the country. I guess, the moral rot that a dictatorship wreaks ultimately reaches the souls of even otherwise admirable people.
The truth behind the enormous corruption that went into the Padma Bridge is probably well known by the editors of both the Daily Star and the Dhaka Tribune, but truth-tellers don’t get invites to Gonobhobon tea parties. Hence, the task to remind us of that truth is left to Netra News, which is run by a couple of journalists who escaped to exile when the Hasina regime’s secret police went looking for them to make them ‘disappear’ like so many dissidents have. The editors of Bangladesh established newspapers may be too afraid to mention unsavory facts; some men aren’t.
The corruption was of a proportion suitably consistent with the gigantic scope of the project, and encompassed multiple continents as Hasina’s henchmen, moneymen, and bureaucrats sought a ‘few percent’ for their pockets. After all, this is a regime that presides over a country where, as the Netra News article notes, Ordinary people know about how this all works, even if they are not involved in seeking government contracts, because so many of them are forced to pay hundreds of thousands of takas (equating to thousands of dollars) simply to get their son, cousin, sister or brother the chance of a government job — whether it be for a basic position as a teacher, a police officer, or a soldier. People are well aware how this ritualized corruption results in key decision makers, including many senior government ministers, lining their own pockets.