At around 10 PM on Saturday, June 20, 2020, law enforcement officers from the Bhaluka Police Station, in the Mymensingh district off to the north of Dhaka, Bangladesh, knocked on the door of Ismail Hossain, a farmer.
Moments later, they walked out with a 14-year-old, ninth-grader in tow.
The following day, Sunday, the teenager was presented at the Mymensingh court. The complaint had come from Hanif Mohammad Nipun, secretary of the local arm of the Awami Jubo League.
The young man, so the file went, had defamed Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, in a Facebook post criticizing the government for imposing an additional tax on mobile phone use. He later admitted to the charge, but also pointed out that just hours after, he also posted a follow-up apology, admitting that he had made a serious mistake.
Nevertheless, the court found him guilty, and he was sent to the Juvenile Correction Center in Gazipur, a district between Mymensingh and Dhaka.
The 14-year-old’s case is likely one of the most perplexing (if not outright ridiculous) and worrisome demonstrations of the country’s controversial Digital Security Act (DSA), but he was neither the first nor will he be the last.
Since the DSA was enacted in September 2018, the Bangladesh government has taken advantage of the wide net it cast: suppressing dissent, silencing journalists, and arbitrarily targeting those who speak up against authorities and their allies.
Nothing new
Using the law against the press is old news in Bangladesh.
In the first week of 2016, The Daily Star Editor Mahfuz Anam, in a TV appearance, expressed his regret over publishing news items back in 2007 based on uncorroborated allegations of corruption against Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister.
In less than two weeks, 79 cases were filed against him, mostly by Awami League leaders and activists, for defamation and sedition. The cases were filed with judicial districts outside Dhaka, most of them being far off, so he had to travel several districts in a single day to appear at hearings, until the High Court issued a stay order on all the charges.
Around the same time, 55 cases were filed against Matiur Rahman, editor of the Bengali-language newspaper Prothom Alo, as well as against several other journalists working for the paper for defamation and hurting religious sentiment.
Such attacks were empowered by a legal environment already stacked starkly against the media, even before the DSA.
Homeless people line up for assistance during the nationwide lockdown in Bangladesh. Almost immediately after stimulus and relief packages were announced, reports about local government officials stealing aid surfaced.
The Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT Act) was enacted in 2006, under a government led by the then-dominant Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). In 2013, after the 14-party alliance led by the Awami League had ascended to power, they made amendments to the ICT Act. Among the changes was the inclusion of the controversial Section 57.
Previously, any offense under the ICT Act was non-cognizable and bailable. Section 57 flipped this around: any offense under the Section was now non-bailable and cognizable, giving police enormous power to arrest anyone without warrant.
The DSA takes this constricting legacy of the ICT Act, and builds it up to new, more suffocating heights, leaving people blind and unaware amid one of the largest crises to ever hit the country.
Priorities
The first case of COVID-19 in Bangladesh was reported on March 8. After much dithering, the government put in place a nationwide lockdown from March 26 to April 14, which was followed by what the administration called “general holiday”—a relaxed form of lockdown—until May 30.
After that, educational institutions remained closed but resumed activities online while other public and private offices gradually opened.
To help tide people through the lockdown, the government mobilized massive stimulus packages for large and small industries, and also provided cash assistance along with goods at subsidized prices, to the particular benefit of the poor.
But no sooner had the government started rolling out cash and food assistance than elected local government officials were caught red-handed, stealing large chunks of rice and cooking oil.
The officials initially faced administrative sanctions, with many being suspended. But with their cases suspended in legal limbo or caught in red tape, most were able to return to office in a month or two.
Journalists who covered these aid anomalies, however, found themselves on the receiving end of several charges for allegedly publishing defamatory content.
Irregularities in the country’s pandemic response also put frontline workers in the line of danger. In early April, news about anomalies in the procurement of COVID-19 safety gears at the Central Medical Stores Depot captured headlines and airtime across several print and broadcast media outlets. Doctors and other healthcare workers at public hospital, it appeared, were given surgical masks instead of N95s.
These reports went viral and took social media by storm. In response, the Bangladesh Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite counter-terrorism force, was led to form a cyber verification cell to stop the spread of false news and rumors. By mid-April, 10 people from across the country had been arrested for sharing news links on social media.
According to Article 19, a UK-based media watchdog, 113 DSA cases were filed in the first six months of 2020 alone, severely higher than the 63 cases filed throughout the entire year before. Fifty-three cases were against journalists.
August 2020. Protesters demand the release of Bangladeshi photojournalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol, who was taken into custody for multiple charges under the DSA. He was granted bail on December 2020.
In its yearly report based on data collected from newspaper reports, Ain O Salish Kendra, a human rights organization, said a total of 268 people were sued in 129 cases under the DSA in 2020.
The picture looks grimmer when it comes to violence perpetrated against journalists in 2020. Two journalists were killed and 78 seriously injured, while 166 received threats for digging out scams or rackets.
Not even the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems, was enough to divert the government’s priorities away from gagging the media.
Well-orchestrated
Despite what appeared to be a crackdown on journalists, scoops on colossal corruption in the health sector continued making their appearance on the front and back pages of print newspapers and the homepages of online news portals. But instead of taking stern action against its corrupt officials or representatives, the government chose to be more ruthless in applying the DSA.
On May 6, eleven people, including journalists, writers, and a cartoonist, were charged under the DSA for “spreading rumors and misinformation on Facebook about the coronavirus situation.” Four were shown arrest and sent to jail, while two were spared detention, but only because they did not live in Bangladesh.
According to the first information report, the accused ran a Facebook page called “I am Bangladeshi.” The page shared news items and political cartoons that demonstrated the government’s lack of preparedness for the pandemic, or its lax handling of corrupt officials.
Of the arrestees, Mushtaq Ahmed, who was denied bail again on February 23, died in his jail cell on February 25.
The synchronized series of arrests, along with a public administration ministry notice, assumed the shape of a well-orchestrated government scheme.
From this time on, it became clear that the RAB-run cyber verification cell would widen its net to target any person who would share news items on social media, especially items that were exposing corruption by people associated with the government.
Most of the lawsuits invoked sections 25, 28, 29, and 31 of the DSA. Sections 28 and 31 criminalize publication or broadcast of any digital content that “hampers religious sentiment or values,” without clearly defining what that might entail.
Section 25, on the other hand, prohibits any “false information to annoy, insult, humiliate or denigrate a person or … to tarnish the image of the nation or spread confusion.” Section 29 makes publishing or broadcasting any defamatory content illegal.
The draconian Section 57 of the ICT Act, which allows arrests without warrant, has been retained in the DSA, and is used in full force. As long as any content is published online, anyone from any part of the country can file a case against the content’s writer and publisher. Whether the cases have any legal ground is not a prerequisite.
Most alarming is the trend that police personnel do not refuse to take such cases as long as the plaintiff is in their—or the ruling coalition’s— good books.
The road ahead
The government, evidently, is using the DSA to censor media content. In doing so, it is not only squarely disregarding its commitment to the international instruments of universal human rights, but also trampling people’s right to freedom of expression as enshrined in the country’s constitution, without which no democracy can function.
That is precisely why the Editors’ Council, a body of Bangladeshi newspaper editors, strongly opposed the act and rejected it in a statement issued in 2018, right after the act was promulgated.
As the statement predicted, the DSA, in the name of curbing cybercrime, has given enormous arbitrary power to the police who may arrest anyone without a warrant.
A Dhaka Tribune editorial aptly describes the effect of the DSA on the media: “The simple fact is that the Digital Security Act … has had a chilling effect on Bangladeshi media. The act contains language proscribing reporting that is so broad in its scope and threatens such draconian consequences that no responsible editor can take the chance of publishing reports that might even conceivably fall into its purview.”
The government is delivering a message loud and clear: It doesn’t matter what the extent of corruption and misappropriation of public funds is; it doesn’t matter whether the government metes out exemplary punishment to corrupt officials or not; no criticism, whether valid or loud or toned down, will be tolerated. ●
Rifat Munim is a writer, columnist, and literary editor at the Dhaka Tribune.
FAST FACTS
● After the Awami League rose to power in 2013, they amended Bangladesh’s ICT Act to include controversial sections, setting the stage for the eventual enactment of the Digital Security Act in September 2018.
● Following viral stories regarding anomalies in health equipment procurement, Bangladesh’s elite counter-terrorism force, the Rapid Action Battalion, formed a cyber verification unit to combat what it deemed to be fake news. Not long after, several people across the country were brought into custody for sharing news links on social media.
● Most cases of the DSA are filed under sections 25, 28, 29, and 31, which declare sweeping and overly-broad restrictions against digital content. Section 57, a draconian legacy from the ICT Act, also remains in play and allows cases against writers and publishers to prosper even on shaky legal grounds.
● In the first half of 2020 alone, the DSA was used more than a hundred times, much higher than in the year before. More than 50 cases were against journalists. By the end of the year, close to 300 people had been sued under the DSA.
● Last year, more than 150 journalists in Bangladesh received threats in response to their investigations in 2020, while 78 were gravely injured. Two were killed.
By Asia Democracy Chronicles
