Intellectual freedom in Bangladesh

"I am concerned that Bangladesh's main political parties are not seen to share that commitment to democratic institutions…. Governance is about who governs. It is about efficient, transparent, non-partisan institutions committed to the rule of law... There can be no real democracy without respect for human rights. This is not an abstract or western concept."

As an American professor of British history and as a historian, I visit Britain and Bangladesh often. When I arrive in Bangladesh as a tourist, I feel the fresh air of intellectual freedom, a willingness and love of the Bengali people to pursue truth and discuss ideas openly. In a word, I feel free. My last trip to Britain, last summer, where I was delivering a paper at a Political Science Association meeting in Oxford, I was confronted by police while walking in a park, searched, including told to take off my shoes, hand over my wallet, and answer questions like "What are you doing in Oxford?" "Who do you associate with?" "What kind of things do you talk about with people you meet here?" While no country is perfect, and certainly Bangladesh, like many regions of the world, including my own country the United States, needs improvement, the Britain government happens to be one of the most repressive and anti-democratic regimes in the world today. A recent ruling by Lord Scott, a Law Lord in Britain, looking at the detention of foreigners without trial, ruled that Britain has become "the stuff of nightmares, associated with France before and after the revolution, with Soviet Russia in the Stalinist era, and now associated…with the United Kingdom." (Sunday Herald, 19 December, 2004) Recently, Nick Griffith of the British National Party, among others, was arrested for expressing ideas in private that a government mole secretly recorded. Whether left wing or right wing, Anglo-Saxon or foreigner, Muslim, Christian or Atheist, the expression of ideas not shared by the ruling elite in Britain today is dangerous.

For an envoy from Britain to scold Bangladesh is the height of hypocrisy. In Britain today, books are banned, political prisoners are in jail for merely expressing ideas, foreigners are held without trial, opposition party leaders are arrested, citizens lose their jobs and are fired from the civil service, all for the expression of political conscience. Britain, whose parliamentary system in the 17th century gave birth to the idea of modern democracy and liberty, has now degenerated into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Bangladesh has room for improvement, as all countries. But to listen British envoys tonguelash Bangladesh is unbearable. For all the problems, I feel far more free getting off a plane at Zia International Airport and knowing that I can discuss ideas freely and without fear with everyone from a Rickshaw driver to a scholar at the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, than getting off a plane at Heathrow and looking, nervously, over my shoulder.