A few decades after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, Bangla has emerged as the dominant language of online media. The conscious twinning of vernacular media with technology has been behind this phenomenon of people being able to express and exchange thoughts in the cyber domain in their mother-tongue, including development of mass-manufactured Bangla keyboards. In the whole of the subcontinent, this is an unmatched achievement. This comes with a very popular and vibrant blog-centric cyber-activism culture in Bangla where many ideological shades are represented - from Liberation war idealists, Marxists, atheists, Islamists, feminists, secular and non-secular Bengali nationalists and so on. Sometimes blog-debates also influence off-line political discourse. In short, the Bangla blogosphere plays a role in the political discourse of Bangladesh.

Avijit Roy, a famous blogger who founded the blog MuktoMona (Freethinker) and a prolific and popular writer propagating rational and scientific spirit, was hacked to death in the university area of Dhaka on 26th February, in full view of bystanders and security forces. His wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonna, has been very badly injured while trying to protect her husband. The assailants managed to slip away and still haven’t been found. Ansar Bangla-7, a little known Islamist group has claimed responsibility for this murder. While there has been widespread condemnation of this event in Bangladesh, many Bengali Islamists have been openly jubilant in social media on Avijit’s death. They rue the fact that Avijit Roy put their religion under the scanner of rationalism and critiqued it thoroughly. Avijit also did this for all religions, including Hinduism – the religion others falsely but automatically associated with him, given his family origins. He was personally an atheist. It must be supreme irony that atheist Avijit Roy was a Malaun (a derogatory codeword for Hindu Bengalis used by Islamists in Bangladesh – its an Arabic word that means who is deprived of God’s mercy) in death. Atleast that’s how those who are happy about his brutal killing will remember him - a blasphemous Malaun. However, the Hindutva types who are trying to score some points using Avijit’s corpse wouldn’t have been amused if they read what he had to say about Hinduism. There is a difference between those who want to protect the gods and those who believe that gods protect them. I happen to be in the latter category.

Earlier in February, Govind Pansare, veteran communist leader, rationalist, freethinker and social activist, was killed in Maharashtra. The attack happened in broad daylight. One can be almost sure that his killers won’t be found. We also know typically in what situations the police can’t find the killers. These are unholy times in the subcontinent with the ferocious rise of portable religion with communitarian faith-systems being under constant assault. This is a disturbing scenario. One cannot simply point at Pakistan and feel smug about themselves anymore.

Some brown people are very sensitive to the plight of Whites in Whiteland and take to protesting the horrible killings of French cartoonists. They have a certain idea of the ‘world’ and the ‘global’. Of course, the majority of the world appears like backward creatures to them, not worthy of the same kind of sympathy and solidarity. Some Delhi people had turned up at the French embassy after the cartoonists’ killings. There was no such protest in Delhi for Avijit Roy. It was left to Kolkata to organize a street-protest in solidarity with another Bengali. That is fine but it’s important to note that the contours of fashionable brown cosmopolitanism has never been colour-blind. Ask them the name of any Indonesian intellectual. Their faces will show 50 shades of incredulity - Indonesian intellectual?

Those whose mental worlds are colourless without being appendages to White culture and who respond reflexively to White #JeSuis symbolisms might do well to appreciate what a friend from Dhaka says, “there is difference in terms of power between a ‘Hindu’ blogger, the weakest of weak in Bangladesh, and a satire magazine run by majority white French men in France.' When you see pictures from the ‘good days’ of 1960s and 70s when Afghanistan was but a cool stopover in the white Hippie trail running across many national borders from Turkey to Goa, hold of your identification with that ‘liberty’. No group of only browns was allowed to go from Goa to Turkey, ‘for fun’. Let us learn to respect our dead without imported tears. (IPA Service)