This harassment embarrasses us all

It is time the hounding of Mahfuz Anam came to an end. The shrill manner in which he is being harassed by elements close to the ruling party shames us all. The sheer number of cases filed against him, the enormous amount of money demanded as damages (for what?) from him are all surefire ways of informing the world that in this country, even as we speak of building a stable construct of democracy, we do not have it in us to respect people who have opinions to disseminate, indeed to uphold the freedom of the media.

Mahfuz Anam is not a highway robber. He has not committed blasphemy. He has not indulged in murder. There is no sign that he has undermined the law and the constitution and has engaged in acts subversive of the state. So where is the criminality he has committed? And what is the nature of the sedition, the treasonous act, for which some enthusiastic people are cheerfully filing one case after another against him? There is a warrant out for his arrest. The law minister tries to clarify matters and tells us it is not a warrant but a summons. Fine.

So where is that great act of crime Mahfuz Anam, with whom you may agree or not at all over ideas, is guilty of? He has admitted that he made a mistake in publishing certain reports in his newspaper without verification in the times of the last caretaker government. And that admission is his crime? A reason for him to be vilified all over town and all across the country? There have been others who remain in the public memory for their explicit defence, indeed extolling, of the 'virtues' of the caretaker administration we speak of.  Among these others have been journalists who have never faltered in switching political loyalties every time the winds changed direction. No one is filing cases against them. There have been politicians who in moments of intimidation and fear undermined their own leaders. No one says they committed wrong. There are people who have sought violently to overturn the state through their acts of medievalism. And they remain untouched, and they lurk in the bushes for a chance to strike again.

The harassment Mahfuz Anam is being subjected to embarrasses all of us who believe in the power of journalism to hold power to account. The embarrassment broadens out into wider areas, to have us remember that it is a man who over the past many years has presided over a media organization which has never played truant with history that we condemn to perdition today. His dedication to the noble principles underlying the War of Liberation is a truth we have always respected. His belief in secular democracy has been without any scratch. Yes, he has had his disagreements with governments, this one as also earlier ones. But if dissent is subjected to intolerance, if a different point of view is read as a cardinal sin, it is the entire edifice of democracy which begins to wobble. The matter is not just of a newspaper, the one Mahfuz Anam has presided over so well over the years, being pushed into a state of the vulnerable. Neither is all this hounding of the man a mere matter of the reputation of a journalist, of an individual, being tarred with innuendo and humiliation. The trouble comes on a bigger scale. If today it is Mahfuz Anam who is being abused, tomorrow it will be others who will be dragged through similar mud.

Those who have engaged in this campaign of vilification are clearly people who have failed to see the wider ramifications of their acts. They do not understand that the entire sordid episode of demanding that Mahfuz Anam be tried for sedition and hauled into incarceration, that his newspaper be shut down are in effect setting a very bad, troubling precedent for the future. A bad message is being sent out to the country, to the world out there — that press freedom in Bangladesh remains in a straitjacket of vulnerability. Hounding Mahfuz Anam is, let us be clear here, a dire warning to others that they must not cross the line. And no one knows what that line is, where it begins and where it ends.

Mahfuz Anam is certainly not journalism personified. He may not have been the ideal editor. His opinions on national issues are not the last word in journalism. But he is one of us, an important member of the journalistic profession, a citizen as driven by patriotism as the rest of us. Let not this ongoing and inexplicable condemnation of him mutate into an uglier truth — that freedom of expression in this country is a tentative truth, that an exercise of journalistic prerogatives could well push us all down the precipice.

Let a halt be called to this campaign against this editor, for the destruction of one journalist is a diminishing of all other journalists. There are far greater thoughts we can call up within ourselves. There are higher peaks we might try to scale.