Dedicated to the restoration of pluralist, representative, democracy in Bangladesh. I write because they can't speak anymore.
Given how ‘elections’ happen in Bangladesh, the mayoral one in the northern half of the capital Dhaka is no surprise with the usual make-believe candidates running against the anointed ruling junta selectee and the press showing all the silly coverage of phony canvassing and long queues at polling booths. It is doubly phony since the …
Continue reading “Another day, another ‘election’ in Bangladesh”
After the chilling end of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in his country’s consulate in Istanbul, one would think that other dictatorships would pause. But leave it to the Bangladeshi regime to make sure that diplomatic immunity can be used to harass and intimidate the large diaspora, especially in West, which keeps dissenting from the …
Continue reading “Thugs with diplomatic immunity..what could go wrong!”
“To give due credit for originality, a slow cooking approach to transforming a budding democracy into an authoritarian regime without officially becoming a dictatorship is perhaps an invention of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The robust two-party parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary that Zimbabwe started with in 1979 was slowly, steadily, and methodically transformed into a …
The scale and scope of the night-before stuffing of ballot boxes was so stunning even by the ruling junta’s normal benchmarks, that it’s own ‘front’ ally (all these totalitarian parties of the Eastern European style..be they post WWII Poland or North Korea or Syria have ‘fronts’ which bring the main political machine of the junta …
It is said ‘better late than never’. What many of us had known from the time of the January 2014 ‘elections’, when the majority of the parliament was elected without a single ballot being cast, the mandarins of the global elite at London’s Economist have finally concluded as well: Bangladesh has ceased to be even …
In a January 29, 2019 piece in the Daily Manabzamin—which was retweeted by democracy activist and noted physician Dr Pinaki Bhattachariya—a tale of sadism emerged that rivals in specificity, if not in scope, the depredations of the Iranian junta. Mary, a young woman activist in the pro-democracy Opposition movement, was blinded when the junta’s police …
In election observer parlance in Bangladesh–where telling blunt truths about government shenanigans can result in long residence behind bars as the internationally renowned photojournalist Shahidul Alam found out–it is known as the “Khulna model” of elections. Realizing that the brute manipulation of election results through blatant rigging alone is not considered polite these days, the …
One of the great myths–regularly perpetuated by most Western media and think-tank types who see peripheral South Asian countries through the organic lens of the British parliamentary system or its robust Indian counterpart–is that Bangladesh has independent institutions that are merely flawed. Junior reporters or freshman analysts or interns who are often starved of research …
Five days ago, a young woman by the name of Dewan Mahmuda Akhtar Lita was picked up by the Bangladeshi junta’s police in the port city of Chittagong and jailed. No arrest warrant, no trial, no defense lawyer; no verdict; just picked up in a truck (where the brave 30 year old showed a clenched …
Continue reading “When a 30 year old woman frightens a dictatorship”
Better late than never, though I am not sure Sheikh Hasina Wazed would have won a free vote either (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/editorials/bangladesh-election-sheikh-hasina.html?fbclid=IwAR0WHcijPV-mdyyWil5ai0iY9MkvBgjqWQWm6llz408Ttjxk-9u5OmzXY_U) . But the NYT and it’s ilk share the blame too: time and again and again they have given space to the junta’s craven apologists (like K Anis Ahmed, a pro-regime publisher who, along with …
