Unheard Voice

Zafar Sobhan wrote about a few indicators to watch out for to see how the future will look like.   We saw a couple of them yesterday — both depressing ones.  First one is a policy issue with long term impact and the second one although doesn’t have an administrative impact but shows a negative trend about the tolerance level of the current regime.

1.  Curbing out the Upazilla Council’s power and putting the Dhaka based MPs as advisors.

2.  Firing of the information secretary right after a news published in tabloid Amadaer Shomoy about his poem (read blasphemy) about the father of the nation.

Detail discussion on the alu-bokhara gate controversy is in BBC Bangla probaho ( listen to it from half way).

Update: We have been looking for the original poem without success so far.  However, we have the Amader Shomoy(AS) piece that started the controversy.   Here is the piece:

Reading through the piece, there are a few thoughts which will be a bit different from my original reaction . First a comment on the poem, then some context of the time of writing the poem, then some legal questions and then the freedom of speech issue.

The poem:

If the narrative of the poem is like the one described in the AS piece, then I must say it is a very poor quality satire.  Because there is absolutely no subtility in the piece.  The author left not much doubt in readers’ mind of who he is talking about.  Similarly, the author does not hesitate to add make satire out of the number of people killed in the 1971 war calling the real number to be around 30,000.   It smacks of absolutely horrible taste of making fun of people who were so brutally killed in one of the most brutal assassination in the history of the modern world.  He did not even spare Sheikh Russel where he says that ‘he was too young to commit crimes like his brothers did.’

Context: First the timing and the purpose of the writing.  Was it done for art’s sake.  May be or may be not.  We don’t know.  But we do know that he wrote the poem in early part of 2006 when the BNP-Jamat government was in power.  At that time, less than a year before the election, a bunch of retiring secretaries were positioning themselves to run for election.  I don’t know if he was one of them.  But it explains a lot that he didn’t have any subtlety in his piece castigating the Mujib family.  It did pay at that time to be anti Mujib.  Hearing in BBC about how he was trying to say how these characters are fiction, it seems clear that he is not trying to defend his creative license here.  However, the no matter how disgusting the piece is and no matter what his real intention was for writing the article, freedom of speech should protect his right, no? Does he have the right to write whatever he wanted?  Let’s explore that and you all can help me here with your input.

Why was he fired:

So far, it is a pure speculation that he was fired because of making fun of the father of the nation.  The government, inexplicably, has not given any reason for this firing yet.   I am not holding my breath either.  But I do want to know whether there is any restriction currently for an administrative person to speak out (even on a personal capacity) on such political matters.  As far as I know, the people involved in the administration has to maintain a strictly non political and non partisan public stand.  If that’s the case, this poem is a clear violation of that code of conduct and his firing would merit justification.

Freedom of speech:

Is this a case of violation of the free speech for the secretary?  We have argued here in this blog  whether our moderation policy is a violation of free speech that we so advocate.  Our argument was that as the conductors of this blog space, we reserved the right to maintain a healthy atmosphere for discussion in this space.  It is our right to property.  Similarly, the secretary, because of his government contract, is also bound by a certain limitation to his free speech.  Government also deserves the right to fire him if his conduct is in breach of the policy.  Of course, now that he is an average citizen, he can and should be able to say whatever he wants without retribution from the government.

Having said all that, all of the nitty gritty matters little, if there is a perception problem.  Because of the swiftness of the series of events and government’s lack of clarity in explaining its action (another pr disaster), the perception, rightly or wrongly, is forming now that that secretary was wrongfully fired because the he insulted the father of the PM.  AL talked about change and din bodol.  A real din bodol would have seen not a knee jerk reaction to a simple poem by a no name author.  But rather a thoughtful and measured response with transparent actions, if any was needed on the first place.  Now various lawsuits from various Awami party hacks are making it even worse by showing that AL is a vengeful party.  Real power is shown not by hurting a person.  In fact, real power is shown when you have all the justification to hurt someone and you don’t do it.  Bangabandhu is much bigger than trapping him into these silly controversies.  When the law and order in Bangladesh is taking a downward slide rapidly, AL will be well advised to work on the real issues rather than get mired into such unnecessary controversies.  For the sake of creating a perception of a cleaner and more tolerant government,  it needs to clearly state the reason of this firing and clearly identify the code of conduct for the government officers.  Any such action can not be arbitrary and the secretary deserves a full hearing of his explanation after the charge is clearly articulated against him and before any action is taking against him.