Dead Bloggers Society
A small community of Bangladeshi liberals prepares to screen a documentary on the fundamentalist attacks that brutally thinned their ranks even as they struggled to finish the film
Centred on blogger Avijit’s brutal hacking last year, a brave new documentary will reveal to the world the mayhem that extremist Islamic groups have unleashed in the country
The sky was overcast that February morning. As the hearse of blogger Avijit Roy slowly wound its way to the Dhaka Medical College, the rains came down, mingling with the tears of thousands of mourners.
Avijit was an atheist, a rationalist and a blogger who, through razorsharp writing, tried to encourage the Bangladeshi youth to question norms and think differently in an arena increasingly dominated by fundamentalist Islamic groups. The 42-year-old was hacked to death by machete-wielding assailants as he left a book fair in Dhaka on the night of February 26, 2015. His wife Rafida Ahmed Bonna was injured. Avijit was not the first victim of fanatics who claim atheism and liberal thinking are crimes against Islam, and he will not be the last.
On the way back from the funeral, a clutch of numbed young mourners vowed to keep the torch ignited by Avijit burning. They formed a Facebook group and, after some discussion, decided to make a short film on Avijit’s mission, his critics and his death. The idea was to establish Avijit’s death as part of a pogrom that began with the killing of over 900 educationists during the 1971 War of Liberation and that its latest targets were ‘secular bloggers’.
Over the past two decades, several liberal, free-thinking individuals in Bangladesh have been murdered ruthlessly, in their homes, in crowded public spaces in broad daylight, with hardly any response from the administration.
Avijit’s friends and fans, mostly in their 20s and 30s, named the (closed) Facebook group and the documentary Alo Hate Aandharer Jatri (The Torchbearer or Those who Travel through Darkness with Light in their hands). It was adapted from the title of one of Avijit’s books. The 34-minute film is now ready to be screened on September 12, Avijit’s birthday, across the world, says director Rakibul Hasan.
For the team behind The Torchbearer, the cost of the film has been huge, not in terms of money but in lives. Crew members received constant threats and had to operate in enforced secrecy. They met in obscure places, in small groups, borrowed equipment, never hired professionals and constantly moved residence. But despite the precautions, by the time the film neared completion, four of the support group had been brutally murdered.
One of the first social media reactions to Avijit’s death was by Washiqur Rehman Babu. In his early 20s, Washiqur worked as an apprentice in a travel company. Changing the profile picture on his Facebook account, he posted, “Amii Avijit. Shabder mrityu nei (I too am Avijit. Words cannot die).” On March 30, 2015, Washiqur,
who was helping with the documentary, was knifed to death at a bus stand near the men’s hostel he lived at in Dhaka. Blogging under the pseudonym Kuchhit Hasher Chana or Ugly Duckling, he wrote against what he felt were irrational religious beliefs. These were added to the film which began with Avijit. A week after his death, says Hasan, several members of the group met at a tea shack, held hands and resolved to carry on. But soon, there would be fewer hands to hold.
On May 12, Ananto Bijoy Das, another member of the group was hacked to death as he left his home in Sylhet for work. Three months later, on August 7, Niladri Chatterjee, better known as blogger Niloy Neel, was killed in Dhaka. The attackers barged into his flat with axes on a Friday when his neighbours had gone for namaaz. “The script was changing every month,” says Hasan. “Our documentary was getting crowded with a parade of funeral processions. We knew death could pounce on us any moment.”
And it did, with uncanny regularity. On October 31, there were two separate attacks on publishers in Dhaka who had printed books with liberal views, including those by Avijit. Three of those attacked were injured, and one, Faisal Arefin Deepon, died. All of them were bloggers and members of the group supporting the documentary.
“For months after that, we went underground. The work had reached the last leg and we were worried if things continued the way they were, there would be no one around to include us in the documentary,” says Syed Zamal, who lives in Helsinki where he works for online English daily Finland Times.
The documentary begins with a single rose, a few scattered white flowers, a father grieving over his son’s corpse, and shots of a happy Avijit with his wife and stepdaughter. “Nayan tomay dekhite na paye, royecho nayone nayone (Eyes cannot see you, yet you are in everyone’s sight).” The Tagore song plays in the background. Over the next half hour, the film traces a history of the assassination of secular, freethinking individuals beginning with the killing of nine Dhaka University teachers by the Pakistan Army in the ’71 war.
It shows enraged supporters of extremist Islamic groups walking down streets carrying placards that say: Blogging is okay, profanity is not; Kukur beral merona, kintu nastic ke cherona (Spare dogs and cats, but not the atheists); Atheist bloggers, leave Bangladesh at once. The crowds soon become mobs, burning cars, vandalising shops, beating up policemen.
The film shows radical Islamic group HefajateIslam’s chief Allama Shafi making inflammatory speeches targeting women, bloggers and all ‘infidels’, asking for action against 84 bloggers and writers on a list published by the Islamic fundamentalist JamaateIslami (JeI) party on Facebook. Four bloggers were arrested on charges of defaming religion. The list
Under constant threat, the crew met in obscure places, never hired professionals, and borrowed equipment
of 84 soon became a sort of “hit list”.
Avijit’s 81yearold father Ajoy Roy, a retired professor of physics and a human rights activist, is a recurrent presence in the film. “At one stage when we wanted to give up, he said torchbearers cannot give up so easily,” says Zamal. Roy talks about his son who lived in the United States and returned to visit his mother despite death threats. He talks of Avijit’s attempts to popularise science, prodding youngsters to question, and says only fools could have killed him for this.
Avijit’s wife Bonna says he never thought he would be attacked. “He’d say, ‘why should they target me? I never write cheap, sensational stuff. My writings are based on science and philosophy’.” The fact that the Awami League, which opposes the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)JeI combine, was in power made them feel secure. “We were naive,” says Bonna.
As it runs through a litany of murders, of intellectuals and innocents killed by those who target foreigners, Hindus and Christians, Sufi shrines and district courts, the film constantly raises a question through the voices of the writers, poets, activists and bloggers who are still alive: “Is this the country we dreamed of?” The film depicts a country that has become a battlefield between Islamic fundamentalists and those who feel the war for liberty from Pakistan was also a movement toward a secular, diverse democracy with space for differences.
“Our Constitution does not ban atheists,” says writer and journalist Shahriar Kabir in the film. He notes the growing intolerance and Islamisation of society and politics in Bangladesh since former president and leader of the freedom struggle Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in 1975. “Killing and persecution is going on in the name of religion and the victims are freethinkers who are branded apostates and infidels,” he says.
Bonna says it is almost as if an ‘enemy of Islam’ is being made of the freethinkers, so that believers have something to hit out at. Worse, the government’s response to the killings was weak and constrained by votebank politics, she says. Friends in the administration told the filmmakers that The Torchbearer eulogised bloggers, that it was “too atheistic” and “too antinational a subject for a country professing Islam as a religion”.
A select audience was invited to the first screening in Dhaka, on Avijit’s first death anniversary on February 26, 2016. “Word got around and there was a huge crowd waiting. We had to leave the venue through the back door because we feared that fundamentalists were lurking in the crowd,” says a crew member, declining to give his name. The first show in Dhaka was probably the last public screening in Bangladesh, say the film’s makers. They have organised screenings in tandem with sympathetic organisations in the UK, Sweden, Portugal and Canada on September 12, but are not saying where. “I know the places that have sent out the invitation. I cannot divulge anything more for reasons of safety,” says Hasan.