Journalist’s image of kissing couple gets him beaten, fired

The photo — a dreamy scene of two lovers kissing in the monsoon rain — went viral in Bangladesh almost immediately after photojournalist Jibon Ahmed posted it on his Facebook page Monday.

Many on social media reacted positively to the photo’s moment of unselfconscious joy — something rare these days on the campus where it was taken, the University of Dhaka, roiled by protests and violent incidents in recent months. Three conservative students were suspended this month for allegedly assaulting two students for holding hands.

But others in Bangladesh — a majority-Muslim country where extremism is deepening — thought the photo was indecent.

According to the Bangladesh News 18 website, one conservative blogger wrote: “Lovers are getting more audacious by the day. Earlier these things were done in secret. Now they are doing it in broad daylight. The day is not far when they will be making love in public.”

Ahmed — who said the couple did not object to the photograph, taken on a public street — said he will not tolerate being a victim of moral policing.

He said in an interview with The Washington Post that he was scouting for photographs near the teacher-student center at the university Monday when he saw a couple “lip kissing” in the rain, a moment that filled him with delight. He captured the moment in one click and sent it to his newsroom, but was disappointed when his editors decided not to run the photo, saying it would prompt a negative response.

“I said, ‘No, you cannot portray this photo negatively, because I found it a symbol of pure love,’” said Ahmed, 30. He later posted it on his Instagram and Facebook accounts.

The next day, he said, some of his fellow photographers roughed him up, and on Wednesday, his boss asked him to turn in his ID and laptop.

The incident came at a time when journalists are facing a wide range of threats in Bangladesh, Steven Butler, the Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote in a blog post this year. Those include militant attacks that “decimated a once-thriving community of bloggers,” criminal defamation laws and a rising intolerance toward dissent by the governing Awami League party of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.