Dissent under Siege: Case Studies of Repression in the Digital Era of Bangladesh

From 2009 until 2023, Bangladesh’s ruling government has devised ways to erase dissent. Academics, journalists, authors, and artists were arrested or persecuted if their critical views, contents, or interviews did not align with the party’s propaganda. The culture of fear resulting from successive laws in Bangladesh is so evident that the constitutional right to freedom of speech, labeled with reasonable restrictions, went unchallenged in September 2023 when the third amendment of this law was passed. In this study, the Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT) Section 57, which was changed in 2013 with a new name, the Digital Security Act (DSA) 2018, and recently named the Cyber Security Act (CSA) 2023, is examined in terms of its consequences on academics, journalists, artists, and freethinkers. First, this paper presents the background context of the revolutionary student activism in Bangladesh and how it has been supported or exploited whenever the government has a vested interest. This background knowledge may set up the grounds for the impact of the three acts mentioned above on freedom of expression. This paper discusses three case studies available in international news archives: the detainment of international award-winning photojournalist Shahidul Alam, the custodial torture of cartoon journalist Ahmed Kabir Kishore, and the custodial death of author Mushtaq Ahmed, and finally, an interview testament to filmmaker Saddam Hossen’s ongoing case since the Road Safety Movement 2018 when numerous students were imprisoned with entirely false accusations. This study aims to comprehensively analyze Bangladesh’s evolving legal landscape concerning freedom of expression.