We must never let such an environment of fear reign again
The moment the news got out that Sheikh Hasina had fled Bangladesh, the mood of the entire nation changed. The feeling of invigoration was tantamount. People felt as if they had finally been able to escape the haze of oppression that clung to the back of their necks and overseen all their hesitations to speak out. It won't be an exaggeration to say that much of the celebration that we witnessed on August 5, 2024 was due to this. The final nail in the coffin of this environment of coercion had been hammered up.
Every Macbeth has their Macduff, for whom Birnam Wood arrives sooner or later. But by the time it does, the needless loss of lives, the killings, the forced disappearances and the despotic rule of might cannot merely be mopped up as casualties under the rug. For so long, an iron hand ruled and it emanated an environment of fear. The general public, overwhelmed by this fear, had to undergo a play of amnesia just to go through their day-to-day lives.
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Fear cannot ever lead to forgetting. It is an untreated wound in the nation's body, and it festers around, growing worse and worse until drastic action is needed. The escalated end of Awami League's 15-year-old regime is proof of that. What we must ensure now is that it is never repeated. Increasingly, over the past decade, we have seen how slowly and efficiently the freedom to state one's views has been destroyed. Whether it be a Facebook post or an editorial in a national newspaper, self-censorship led the way for peculiar dancing around with words on paper. We barely ever said anything against the powers that be, and when we did, we had to couch our words with such fluff that we might as well have said nothing.
Journalists must understand that this is a historic event, that they must seize the moment and bring back the voice they lost over the past several years. They must take hold of their teeth and not let go. The power of words can never be underestimated. The power of unarmed youth who weathered blackouts and butchering deserve a record of their struggle. There must be a record, too, of all the grift that went around among intellectuals during this time. The reason this environment of fear was successful was in good part because of the collusion of a section of the intelligentsia, who had long traded in their morals for pitiful brushes with power. We must ensure that no tolerance is given to these grifters who moulded words over TV screens and op-ed pages to support regimes and their atrocities. We must strengthen our institutions so that journalists cannot be picked up due to captions that may go against the state narrative, or be forced to tangle with legal harassment over words of obvious satire.
Consistently providing a platform to such grifters have weakened our idea of journalistic courage, resulting in a new generation having to read between the lines by nature. Sheikh Hasina's resignation does not automatically liberate our tongue, for it will take time to settle into the new order of things. The following days will also show us how congenial the new order would be. The movement will truly end when the people are able to live under a clear sky, free of an encroaching greyness of coercion and arm-twisting. That work begins now.
Shahriar Shaams is a contributor to The Daily Star. His Instagram handle is @shahriar.shaams.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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