Badiuzzaman Bay

January 24 is observed as the Mass Uprising Day. On this day in 1969, young school student Matiur Rahman and a rickshaw puller were shot down by police on the streets of Dhaka, giving further momentum to the movement to remove the Ayub Khan regime from power.

How well do you follow the headlines of your newspapers? If one were to run a quiz to see how well the readers of The Daily Star stack up against each other, the question that is most likely to be at the top of the list would be about the name that appeared most in the headlines of our central pages over the last week.

Dawn broke in Bangladesh. Shudipto is an early riser, and today was no exception. But it could have been. He didn’t sleep much last night.

Dr Iftekharuzzaman is Executive Director, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB). In this interview with Badiuzzaman Bay of The Daily Star, he talks about distinctive features of corruption in Bangladesh, the role of the ACC, the government’s anti-corruption drive, and ways to curb systemic corruption.

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of the word “development”? I see an image of a signboard, and it’s about the Metro Rail (MRT Line-6) being constructed in Mirpur, connecting different parts of the metropolis.

I remember there was a time when, owing to my youthful naiveté, I would think that living is more than surviving.

On Friday, November 6, the first madrasa for transgender Muslims in Bangladesh was opened in Dhaka through a private initiative.

Late in the evening on November 1, 2020, journalist Golam Sarwar, who went missing on October 29, was found unconscious near a canal at Sitakunda, Chattogram.

In an article in August 2018, I argued that emerging political leaders, because of the unique socioeconomic reality in which they grew up, might be more likely to accept change and less likely to default to norms and practices pursued by their boomer predecessors.

It could have been just another episode in the regular show of police and ruling party men merrily clamping down on the “disturbers of public peace” who love to play with people’s emotions with their pesky ideas and noisy chants of human rights abuses.

From harsh legal penalties to severe moral reprimands, from street protests and sit-ins to virtual seminars and teach-ins, from increasing mobilisation and visibilisation of pro-choice activists to critical interventions by state and non-state actors—nothing, and no one, seems to be able to deter the rapists or protect women and children.

What does it mean to be nonviolent in a world full of horror and chaos, not to mention weapons and instruments of every kind created to inflict pain?

Stories of corruption no longer produce the same shock they once did.

In April, British journalist and author Susie Boniface, in an article for Mirror Online, asked her readers to take a moment to imagine a world in which there is no journalism.

No, the pandemic is not over—far from it, actually, despite what the ministers might tell you—although at times it does feel like we’ve reached the end.

Nearly half a century after the 1971 War of Liberation, it is perhaps difficult to produce or come across startlingly original ideas about Tajuddin Ahmad.

The call for defunding police in the US, after the death of George Floyd in police brutality, is one of the most striking messages coming out of what is perhaps the largest civil movement in US history.

Not long ago, I was watching a webinar on the plight of returning migrant workers streamed live on Facebook by The Daily Star.

So it’s official now. The government is going to shut down all 25 state-owned jute mills operated by Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC) and lay off about 25,000 workers involved with them.

In 1883, the American poet Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet about the virtues of diversity and inclusion.