Niloy Chatterjee, who wrote under the pen-name Niloy Neel, was hacked to death in his home in Dhaka on Friday.
Niloy is the fourth secular Bangladeshi blogger to be brutally murdered this year.
In a recent Facebook post, Niloy described how he was being followed by two men of late. The police in Dhaka, though, were afraid of filing a report.
When I tried to lodge a General Diary about this incident, I faced an even more bizarre situation. A police officer had told me in confidence that the police do not want to accept General Diaries like this because the officer who accepts such a General Diary, related to the personal safety of an individual, remains accountable to ensure the personal safety of said individual. If the said individual faces any difficulty, then the relevant police officer may even lose his job for negligence in duty.
— Niloy Neel’s Facebook Post
The manner in which Niloy was killed resembles the murders of the other secular Bangladeshi bloggers this year. The pattern and regularity of these killings is disturbing to say the least, but the police apathy seems more unsettling.
On February 26, 2015, Avijit Roy, a well known Bangladeshi-American blogger and author was killed near Dhaka University, while he was taking a walk with his wife. Avijit was a secularist in the mould of Richard Dawkins. He was the author of Bishwasher Virus (The Virus of Belief), which talks about the intrinsic connection between religion and extremism. In a blog published in mukto-mona.com, Avijit wrote about hypocrisy and extremism in all religions. But does polemics warrant the death of a writer?
Let’s call a spade a spade. These atrocities are the products of virus-infected minds. On September 11th, 2001, Americans experienced an atrocity in their own land that killed almost 3,000 people and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage. It was, of course, the virus of religion that persuaded Mohamed Atta and eighteen others that perpetrating this bloodbath was ‘not just a moral act, but also a sacred duty. Nafis and Mohamed Atta’s cases are not isolated acts of the religion virus. Rev. Michael Bray, the American minister who was convicted of a series of abortion clinic attacks in the eighties, used Biblical verses to defend his act of terrorism. In 1992, Hindu fanatics destroyed Babri Masjid, one of the largest and oldest mosques in Uttar Pradesh of India, based on a religious myth called ‘Ram Janmabhoomi’. The incident ignited riots in India and its neighboring countries.
– Slain Blogger Avijit Roy
Avijit was the founder of Mukti-Mona, which provided a platform to secular bloggers in Bangladesh. He had received death threats many times on social media. Farabi Shafiur Rahman, a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir was arrested for Avijit’s murder. He had exchanged photos of Avijit with various people, and openly threatened to kill him.
Barely a month after the death of Avijit Roy, a young blogger was hacked to death by three men in Dhaka. Washiqur Rahman Babu, 26, was an admirer of Avijit.
One of his murderers said that he killed Washiqur because the blogger “insulted the Prophet”, but didn’t cite any particular writing.
Washiqur was a bright young man, who could write polemically about the hypocrisy of religion and politics in Bangladesh as well as the lack of outrage from liberal sections.
Bangalee Muslims are all simple and straight people. They are not communal (the commonly used word for “religious-sectarian” in the Indian subcontinent), do not care for fundamentalism, and are not religiously blind. Whatever (bad) things happen (to them), they happen due to the American conspiracies or the British divide-and-rule policy. Bangalee Muslims are as simple as the babies. They have no fault, nor do they have much virtue. They cannot differentiate between good and bad. But you could not seek consciousness from them, nor could you try breaking their blind faith. If you did, you would become their enemy. You have to allow them to remain babies. The way babies get upset and break a lot of things; similarly they would from time to time burn the houses of the wrong kind of religious people, and slaughter the atheists. You are not to say anything; if you do, it has to be balanced. Because, you are moderate, civil, intellectual.
– Translation of Washiqur Rahman’s Facebook post on Mukti-Mona
Like his colleagues, Ananta was hacked to death with machetes by a group of men he didn’t know and had never harmed. He also wrote for Mukto-Mona and had received threats from religious extremists too.
On May 11, the day before he died, Ananta wrote a facebook post about Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman. He didn’t know he would share their fate soon.
Abhijit Roy was murdered. The police stood watching the show from a distance. The murderers finished their business without any interruptions. Later the police claimed that there was no slip in their duty. I really want to know what this duty entails. The police also stood still when the murderers were fleeing after killing Washiqur Rahman Babu. But unfortunately they couldn’t come up with a story of not neglecting their duty because Lavanya, an individual belonging to the third gender, nabbed them, ensuring they were put behind the bars.
— Ananta Bijoy’s facebook post, translated by The Quint
On May 4, perhaps speaking for all his fallen comrades, Ananta Bijoy wrote “I am a common man. I do not reside in the United States, and hence I do not understand ‘freedom of expression’. I am a citizen of Bangladesh – I do not even know what my ‘rights’ are.”
Let’s hope someone protects the voices of freedom that remain, before any more are silenced.
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