Censorship on sale

This should go down into one of the guidebooks of Bangladesh. If you are itching to say something against the memory of "Bangabandhu" Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, be forewarned that you will be doing so at your own peril. For immediate confirmation, sceptics can ask the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) Group of Publications, Calcutta’s leading newspaper chain. Well, this is how the story went.

February the twenty-first is a red-letter day for Bangladeshis. It was on this day in 1952 that several students, rooting for Bengali as a state language of Pakistan, were ruthlessly shot down in Dhaka. Since then, the day has been dog-eared to mark the anniversary of the language movement in Bangladesh. Neighbouring West Bengal also goes along for the ride, and special commemorative issues of magazines during this time are not a rarity.

So when Desh, ABP’s literary fortnightly with a large readership in Bangladesh, decided to take out a special issue, it made for sound editorial and marketing sense. But they would not have known the kind of trouble they were getting into when they commissioned a piece from Badruddin Umar, Bangladesh’s well-known historian-litterateur. They did, soon enough, when the magazine found itself spurned by the Bangladeshi authorities. Culture cops took offence to Umar’s article, specifically his observation that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was nowhere in the scene when the language agitation was gaining ground in the then East Pakistan. That, for them, was vintage blasphemy. Desh must be banned!

Cut to the Desh management, for the story does not end there. What would they do now, knowing only too well that Bangladesh was an important bread-winner and that the West Bengal market had been steadily deserting them in recent years? Well, the way out would seem to be to make an appointment with the Bangladeshi deputy high commissioner in Calcutta, and tell him that printing the article was an unpardonable error, and that it had crept in without the knowledge of the editor who was out of the country. And agree to reprint, after of course trashing Umar’s piece.

Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened and a diluted Desh made it to the newsstands of Bangladesh. Moral of the story? When freedom of expression does nothing more than drain your pocket, just make liberal use of your scissors. Of course, there will be many in this market-driven age who will not fault the Desh management’s action; but, once upon a time, in the 1960s, there was a magazine which got together a whole lot of Bengali writers and artists under the banner of artistic freedom. This magazine would not fail to carry fiery articles against the lack of artistic freedom in countries like China and the Soviet Union. Were those the follies of youth, someone should ask of this fortnightly called Desh.

Meanwhile, the question remains, was Bangabandhu a late-comer into Bangla language politics?