Our reporter encountered many threats and the journalist from another newspaper who first broke the story was sacked. Here I executed justice and you newsmen are criticising me?’
He said, ‘It would have taken three or four decades to get a verdict because our legal system is so lengthy. We were the only newspaper that ran a campaign against it. When The Daily Star came to know about it, we felt that this girl’s honour should not be worth Tk 140,000. But the family was then denying what actually happened to her. And the girl came from a poor family, so the money mattered a lot. The parents were mightily happy, because in Bangladesh what happens in these situations is that you go to the police and file a case and then the next day the culprits get bail and they go and intimidate the family. And then in front of the girl he beat the boys black and blue. He captured the 14 boys, took them to a classroom, brought the girl and her parents, and demanded each boy pays the family 10,000 taka (£89). The lawmaker took the extraordinary step of asking everybody not to go to the police station or court to file a report because he said he would punish the culprits vigilante-style. Last year there was a gang rape in Patuakhali and two of the local lawmaker’s activists were involved. It took me three years to prove to the management that I was here to stay, and in 1995 became a permanent member of staff.Ĭould you describe a particular incident when journalists at The Daily Star were intimidated? They thought we would move on to another profession soon enough. But when we joined all our supervisors had grey hair – and they thought we were no-good young things who had no real intention of becoming journalists. This injected something into me to find a profession through which I could say something and protest against injustice.Ībout 30 of us from Dhaka University responded to an advertisement from The Daily Star.
Many students were killed and I lost a friend during a police attack. When I was a student at Dhaka University it was the hub of protests against the autocratic regime of Hussain Mohammad Ershad, the chief of army staff who took over. Why did you decide to become a journalist?
Some who were not very bright and who perhaps didn’t have a job became journalists. At that time, all the bright people graduating from university wanted to join the civil service or become army gentlemen – because it meant having power. When I joined it was not the way it is now, or the way it is in the West or perhaps anywhere else in the world. Has journalism in Bangladesh changed since you first joined the profession in the early 90s?
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