Kolkata: As she turns 55 this June, Bangladeshi journalist Sumi Khan’s biggest regret isn’t that she won’t be able to celebrate it with her husband and two sons, as they all live on different continents.
What really bothers Khan is the fact that she is not in her country to file ground reports at a time of such political and social upheavals. In exile in America, Khan had to flee Bangladesh in February this year. Radical Islamist vigilante groups within Bangladesh “wanted to hang her in public for her news reports”. Having survived an attack on her life in 2004 by these very groups, Khan knew the threats were not hollow.
Talking to ThePrint over the phone, Khan said Bangladesh’s pliant media has stopped telling the truth about the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami’s hold over not just the Yunus administration, but most of the media houses in the country, even as the interim government is busy fact-checking news reports on Bangladesh from beyond borders.
“The Yunus administration has systematically stifled the free press in Bangladesh since news reports on attacks on minorities and Awami League leaders, workers and supporters were drawing international attention. And now, he has his own pliant media to obfuscate the truth,” Khan said.
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Arrests, attacks and accreditation politics
Sumi Khan was in Delhi when her colleagues were arrested after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on 5 August last year. “Immediately after, the clampdown on free media began with the arrests of senior journalists like Shyamal Datta, the editor of the daily newspaper Bhorer Kagoj, and Muzammil Babu, chief editor of Ekattor TV, one of the largest electronic media networks in Dhaka, on spurious charges,” she said.
Khan said what followed was the heckling and manhandling of prominent journalists like Munni Saha on the streets. News reports said a mob surrounded Saha in Dhaka on 30 November last year and accused her of “doing everything to make Bangladesh a part of India”. Saha reportedly kept saying, “This is also my country”. Eventually, a police team came and took her into custody. Khan said the police did nothing to stop such heckling.
The third step, according to Khan, that the Yunus administration took to suppress the free press was the cancellation of accreditations. In a news report on 14 November, The Daily Star reported that the Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, a non-profit platform of Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-origin journalists working for international media in home and abroad, has raised concerns over the interim government’s cancellation of press accreditation cards for 167 journalists, “allegedly without clarifying why it took such action”.
Khan told ThePrint this was the last straw. The remaining media personnel who still had their accreditation have begun to tow the government’s line.
Before the fall of the government, Khan was the women’s affairs secretary of the Dhaka Journalists’ Union (DJU). She was elected to the position on 11 March last year.
“Our office was vandalised by a mob on 5 August and all documents burned. The president of the National Press Club, Farida Yasmin, and general secretary Shyamal Dutta, gave statements saying the Jamaat was trying to take over the running of the club. Soon after, Dutta was arrested,” Khan said.
Khan alleged that the Yunus administration has empowered the Jamaat to such an extent that they now control the media narrative.
“Whatever remains of the press has to simply relay that narrative with hardly any questions asked,” Khan said. She added the Yunus administration’s press wing has started discrediting all foreign reports that are critical of the administration “in the garb of fact-checking”.
“I have credible information that some foreign journalists have been approached to publish positive stories of post-Hasina Bangladesh,” she alleged.
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Reporting terror, risking life
Daughter of a Mukti Joddha, a 1971 freedom fighter, who was tortured to death by the Al Badr, an auxiliary force that worked with the Pakistan army against freedom fighters, Khan has made it her life’s mission to report against radical terror. The first major pushback came 21 years ago.
In April 2004, Khan started getting death threats for her reports on the nexus between politicians and radical outfits and the targeted attacks on Hindus and other minorities in Chittagong. “I was on a rickshaw when three men pulled me down, beat me up and stabbed me repeatedly on my face and arms. It took several months at the hospital to move my hands again,” Khan said.
The attack left Khan shaken and nearly blinded, but she bounced back with more stories on the Jamaat and other radical outfits. Through a wide range of interviews—like with Maulana Haider Farooq Maududi, son of Syed Abul A’la Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and Marina Mahathir, Malaysian activist and writer–Khan tried to track the spread of radical Islam in Asia.
“Mahathir, a practising Muslim, spoke against the imposition of the burqa and the hijab, attire not suited to the climate of Asian countries, which is enforced by radicals,” Khan said.
As many international awards came her way, including the Courage in Journalism Award from International Women’s Media Foundation in 2005, she also got the chance to work abroad, but Khan kept her focus firmly on ground reports from Bangladesh.
“Maybe it’s my father’s unwavering spirit for a secular Bangladesh or my mother’s work for the upliftment of the Harijan community in the country, the idea of reporting from anywhere except Bangladesh never appealed to me,” she said.
Khan’s courage has been an inspiration for many of her colleagues. A Dhaka journalist, who did not want to be named for fear of cancellation of accreditation, told ThePrint it was never easy being a woman investigative journalist in Bangladesh writing on radicalism.
“Sumi Khan paid a heavy price for her journalism. Despite the threats and the attacks, she could do what she did before, but now it seems unlikely that she can report on Bangladesh, from Bangladesh,” they said.
For now, with America as her base, Khan said she wants to continue writing on the growing Islamisation of once-secular Bangladesh, an idea her father died for.
But she said she doesn’t feel safe in America either. “My face is known to them. And once they target you, they will come after you no matter where you go. Look what happened to Salman Rushdie in America,” she said.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)