Two days earlier, on Monday, the April Fool’s Day, to be precise, three other bloggers, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, Mashiur Rahman Biplob, and Rasel Parvez were arrested. They have since been presented in a court, where after preliminary hearing, the Judge reportedly denied them bail and sent them to police custody for one week, again for further investigation. This is the normal practice with the police and therefore this instant case does not come as a surprise. If convicted they could face up to 10 years in jail  since the Bangladesh Cyber Laws prescribe such harsh punishment for defaming a religion. Like Asif’s blog, their blogs, as also Amar Blog, an online blog publishing site, they frequently used, are down following their arrests.

It is not but natural to see the plight of the four bloggers against the backdrop of increasing clamour from hardline Islamists like Jamaat-e-Islami and Hefajat-e-Islam for a more stringer anti blasphemy law apart from curbs on blogging which has emerged as a popular forum to articulate the demand for bringing to book the perpetrators of genocide during the Liberation War. The hardline Islamist groups have been holding out threats to bloggers, whose writings they see as supporting the Hasina government plan to push ahead with the War Crimes Tribunal.   In a sense therefore, the Islamists are trying to stymie the Hasina stride by targeting the bloggers.

It is possible that the authorities are trying to defuse a potentially explosive situation by taking out the four bloggers from the line of sight. It is also equally possible that the bloggers were a little too expressive in their criticism of lslamists and ideologues of that ilk. This view gains strength because police are quoted as saying that these netizens had often criticized politicians and the press for being “biased” toward Islamist views though Bangladesh is a secular Republic.  

For instance, Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, a Hindu, is known to have taken the media to task in his blog posts for not being vociferous in the condemnation of the recent attacks on Buddhist and Hindu minorities.

No surprise his name figures, along with the other three in the list of the 84 bloggers identified by Islamists as atheists in their complaint to the government that they all had committed blasphemy against Islam on the Internet. A government panel is probing the case, according to   Muhiuddin Khan, Bangladesh’s home minister. The panel includes intelligence chiefs to identify potential blasphemy on social media sites.

In recent years, Bangladesh bloggers have increasingly criticized what they see as heightened religious fundamentalism, leading to tension between the online journalists and Islamist fundamentalists. Two months ago, in February, Ahmed Rajib Haider, a prominent blogger critical of Islamic fundamentalism, was hacked to death by assailants outside his home in Dhaka.

Now it is fair to see the bloggers’ arrest in a wider context, namely the crackdown  in the wake of “Shahbagh movement," which called for capital punishment to the Jamaat-e-Islami leaders by the War Crimes Tribunal,  and the counter protests by Islamist groups demanding that the government give the death penalty to bloggers perceived as atheist.

Hefajat-e-Islam, a relatively new lslamist group, has lined up plans for a march to Dhaka  from Chittagong, Sylhet and Rajshahi later this week demanding death for ‘blogger- atheists’ and a stricter blasphemy law. It has threatened a shutdown of the city and suicide attacks if the government obstructs its march.