"A List of Right Wing Experts" - Jamaat Comments Take A New Twist
(Small updates and links included since first published)
Muhammad Jafar Iqbal writing in Prothom Alo a few days back. I usually read his columns on the day they come out, but this weekend has been too busy for that. Besides, it looked like another impassioned plea against war criminals by a man who lost family members in 1971, so I thought that could wait. It looked like that until section 3, para 2.
There Dr. Iqbal says this:"Television channels have been sent a memo from government agencies. That memo contains the names and phone numbers of a certain brand of intellectuals. The tv channels have been instructed to invite at least one guest from this list for each of their talk-shows. I was outraged to see the list. If some newspaper were brave enough to publish that list, then the people of this country would be outraged as well. Most of the people on the list are extreme right-wingers. If this is indeed the ideology of the current government, then it is not hard to guess where Mujahid or Shah Hannan are getting their courage from."
Interesting. Right after the DU riots, talk shows were cancelled for a month as everyone remembers. They resumed under certain "informal guidelines" that included:
D. Inviting the same guest repeatedly is to be discouraged.
E. Enough care should be taken in the selection of guests for talk shows. Noted thinkers, intellectuals, academics, and businessmen can be invited. Panels of guests should comprise people of various ideals.
There is no mention of a "guest list" in the guidelines of course. On a sidenote, it is around this time too that certain Islamists (not Jamaat necessarily) suddenly found their voice and clamoured for the arrest of an innocent cartoonist, putting even a pro-free-speech advocate like New Age on the backfoot. They brought out processions on the streets within a month after students were clubbed black and blue for doing the same.
Back to this guest list. There has been talk of a list of "approved" guests for a while now on the Bangladeshi blogosphere. Till now however, everyone thought that this list consisted more of the pro-CTG variety people than the anti-Muktijuddho/"rajakar" type of people.
If MJI is right, the question that badly needs to be asked is this: can the CTG not find enough ideological/intellectual spokespeople in Bangladesh from among pro-71 people?
Truth is they can, it's not hard at all.
The question then becomes more ominous: why then are they not doing so? And who is sending out these lists with these snakes on them? And why?
6 comments:
Asif:
A curious coincidence: The previous deputy director general of DGFI was Golam Azam's son, and a current DDG is the son of a very senior member of Jamaat. Seems like DGFI has a Jamaat quota.
Since the guest-list-prescription came from DGFI, I am not at all surprised that it contains mostly right-wingers--the deputy DG had a hand in preparing it.
And thanks for the link to Dr. Iqbal's article; otherwise I would have missed the it and possibly not known about the Dec 9 seminar on the 1971 genocide at Kean University. We will be asking people in the tri-state area to attend.
I guess this is the pre-cursor to our version of FOX News and "Fair and Balance" reporting. Perhaps Jamaat is doing a market analysis to test their targeted population segment. I go back to my previous thought that Jamaat is trying to exploit the vacuum left by the BNP fallout. They are reading that within the elite circles, after the jailing of Hasina, CTG’s strongest support is coming from the BNP deserters who have accepted democracy as a failed experiment and are ready to settle for a CTG orchestrated center-right authoritarian anti-India, anti-US, anti-NGO, anti-liberal, anti-socialist regime. They are also reading that in the non elite circles the broadcast media has a far deeper reach than before where there is a growing anti-intellectual bias that they can easily exploit using their fundamentalist rhetoric. With the ban on outdoor political activities, they have the Madrasas, the Mosques and now the TV talk shows to deliver a well orchestrated an unchallenged message to sway public opinion in their favor, not in one giant sweep, but chipping away at the status quo bit by bit.
Man, do I love you digs or not!
Ok. I think it was Salam Dhaka who reported it first: a DGFI list of people banned from talk-shows and newspaper columns. That list included 30 something "will not be accepted."
Now, when I see Shahrier Kabir in the now infamous ETV talk show where S A Hannan fueled Jamaat's revisionist adventure, that confuses me.
http://deshivoice.blogspot.com/2007/10/infamous-interview-part-3.html
Looks like DGFI has suddenly withdrawn its ban on SK taking part in talk shows and writing newspaper columns.
J, Tasneem bhai,
We might just be reading too much into MZI's assertions, which is why I highlighted in bold "If MZI is right". I am willing to equally accept that he is on the whole wrong about this list. After all, rumours of such a list have been flying around for some time now, but yet Shah Hannan is the only extremely rightwinger we've seen.
The best thing is of course not to have lists at all.
Mahmud bhai,
"an unchallenged message to sway public opinion in their favor, not in one giant sweep, but chipping away at the status quo bit by bit."
Surely there is some psychology theory that says that repetition of one side's UNCHALLENGED story eventually convinces people that it is the truth? I think human beings know this instinctively. You may have hit on something there. Makes the work of historians and genocide-documenters all that much more important, yet who's listening and who's funding them?
With this current Government taking over the power on 11/01/07 and because of the mass anti corruption drive, as like many others, I am thrilled and really excited about the future of our country. The role of ACC behind this change is really praiseworthy.
The local Member of Parliament of my area Mr. Mirza Abbas was also arrested and punished in this drive. But to our utter surprise, local Jamaat E Islami leader Mr. Khondokar Abdur Rob, Ward Commissioner 36 (Purana Paltan, Naya Paltan, Shantinagar) was never arrested.
When I first moved into this area this person was living in a slum and was working as a cashier in a local restaurant. As far as I remember, other than doing his job he used to gather people for processions and public gatherings arranged by Jamaat E Islami. In 2001 with the direct influence of the then Government of Four Party Alliance he became our Ward Commissioner.
I do not have the details about his current wealth and assets but what I can see now is, he lives in a posh apartment at Purana Paltan (Thikana Apartment), drives one Pajero, one Voxy Microbus, one of his son studies in a very expensive private university in Malaysia, and I also heard he got lands and apartments in different areas of the city. With a local BNP leader named Osman Gani, they also grabbed several lands in Paltan area and now developing multistoried buildings on those lands. He is also known to be a very highly regarded donor to Jamaat E Islami Bangladesh.
I wonder how he became so much rich so quickly.
Not only that, as the Baitul Mukarram area is under this ward, I have a doubt he is also involved in the political turmoils in and around the mosque. No one dares to say him anything as he keeps a good rappo with the local Paltan Police Station and with Shibir activists. Not only that but also he manages the media effectively namely the daily newspapers named Daily Shangram, Naya Diganta and Daily Inqilab. In addition to that, his supprters in the area demands he pays a daily amount to the local army camp and to the taskforce establishment at Dhaka City Corporation office. He is just a ward commissoner so think about the big guns!!!
This rather good phrase is necessary just by the way
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