The behavior of the police and the government is debatable and suspicious indeed, regarding the serial blogger murders in Bangladesh. After Avijit Roy, Washiqur Babu and Ananta Bijoy Das were murdered neither the honorable prime minister nor anyone from her cabinet release any official statements. They did not stand beside the families of those murdered in fact, they and their law enforcement agencies have done nothing of note in terms of catching the perpetrators responsible for these horrific killings. Instead, after the murder of Obhijit Rai, the speech delivered by the prime minister’s son in light of the killings only bore subtle hints of the government’s support of these heinous deeds and an abundance of encouragement of course for the fundamentalists.
One by one bloggers being murdered, the failure of the government and its law enforcement agencies to hunt down those culpable, and of course the ever present lack of justice in this country, have combined together to pose a real threat to the freedom of speech reserved by free thinking individuals and commoners alike. Apart from that, introducing a law as blasphemous as the ICT section 57, the government has blocked all routes for people living in a democratic country nonetheless, to express their own thoughts and opinions under their freedom of speech rights. And yet we know that the first condition a democratic government has to fulfil is to ensure that the people have the ‘right to speech’ and provide room for free thinking.
When the chief of Hefazat-E-Islami, Allama Shafi declared that it is ‘Wazib’ or lawful to murder atheists, not only did the Bangladeshi government fail to take any legal action over him regarding these comments, it in fact gifted his party with a government leased property worth 32 million BDT. These actions provided the very catalyst fundamentalists needed to commit murder in broad daylight. These actions have set back free thoughts and freedom of speech rights movements by hundreds of years.
Why should bloggers be murdered because of what they write? Do bloggers really attack religious sentimentalism? These cogent, scientific and logically sound men and women are indeed trying to expose the side effects of religious blindness and by extension, are attacking religious sentimentalism altogether. But what I’m really trying to say is, religiously blinded people do not like reading these bloggers, for they use the powers of reasoning and science to unravel the illusions surrounding the existence of the so called deities or Gods and of the blindfold men with medieval and out-dated thoughts have wrapped around this world. These are not a recent occurrences, for history is witness to scores of incidents throughout time, where people with religious blindness have had their religious sentimentalism attacked by men who use logic and reasoning to good effect.
to be continued…
