Arifur Rahman, Freedom of Speech, and principled stands

Arifur Rahman, the cartoonist who drew the “naam” cartoon for Prothom Alo is now in jail. He has been jailed for a month, without any right to legal representation. This followed protest in the streets of Dhaka by people who claimed that the cartoon offended religious sensibilities of the general people of our country. Aside from his arrest, the Prothom Alo sub-editor who was in charge of the weekly magazine Alpin, a Prothom Alo subsidiary, has been fired. The editor of Prothom Alo made fulsome apologies in his newspaper, and also in a personal meeting with the Imam of the National Mosque.

It is wrong to lock someone up without charging them for any crimes, and without letting them have access to legal representation. Mr. Rahman has only put out an expression of his ideas on the public domain. The most he should have to do is retract his views and apologize. That is how ideas are debated in a free, functioning society. His liberty certainly should not be curtailed. While one does not know his personal details, it is quite possible that he may have been the only income-generating person in his family. Anyone familiar with the socio-economic situation in Bangladesh would doubtless know the disastrous consequences on a whole group of people that would come from locking up the sole wage-earner in that group.

The argument has been made to me that this one month custody is really for Mr. Rahman’s physical safety. However, in that case, the government would have done much better publicly saying so and then posting a couple of policemen around Mr. Rahman’s house. This would have sent a clear signal to everyone involved, and also been the right thing to do. Reading Taslima Nasrin’s memoirs, I believe there was a part where she described how a police presence was thrown around her home, and officers of the Special Branch interviewed her several times, to ensure that she was satisfied with the level of protection she had, after the controversy about her book first erupted in the early nineties. The current military government would have done well to have followed that lead.

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