2013 was a tumultuous year for blogging in Bangladesh.
Last February, Bangladesh watched as huge crowds congregated at Shahbag, demanding the execution of war criminals. And a key factor mobilising them from the far corners of the country was blogging.
“Blogging helped reach the people who could not be reached otherwise through mainstream media,” says Syeda Gulshan Ferdous Jana, editor of the largest community of Bangla bloggers in the world, somewhereinblog.net, in an interview with the Dhaka Tribune.
The way Jana talks is unforgettable. When we met at her rooftop office located in Gulshan, she drew me in with the clarity with which she pronounces every word. Though she is fluent in English, she insisted on speaking Bangla for our interview.
“Interactions make a greater impact when they are made in a language that most of the people in that community speaks.”
That is why she and her Norweigan husband Arild Klokkerhaug founded a Bangla language blog in 2005. Their in-house programmer Hasin Hayder developed a Bangla phonetic keyboard, the first tool to write in Bangla using an English keyboard.
“If we were introducing blogging to Bangladeshi community, it only made sense that we let people write in Bangla.”
However, since inception of the website and a mostly successful journey, things have not been easy for this advocate of the freedom of expression. She confessed to have been living on a knife’s edge during 2013, as she was constantly under close observation of political parties and the media.
“It did not take long for those who wanted to resist the punishment of war criminals to try to defame me,” she explained, trying to keep her composure.
“Jamaat-e-Islam, the political wing closely affiliated with most of the war criminals, said: ‘This couple [Jana and her husband] is set to destroy Islam in our country.’”
“In order to blemish the reputation of blogging in people’s eyes, I was made the target,” Jana said. There were times when she had to take shelter in her friends’ places to hide from many dangerous threats.
Jana was offered security, which she refused to accept because she thought that would be unfair to the thousands of bloggers in her community, whose lives were also under threat.
She sees the successful execution of Quader Molla as “the victory of blogging and bloggers.”
“Freedom of expression is a basic human right, and blogging provides us with that,” she said. “It has created opportunities for citizen journalism through which people have access to rich local content.”
Jana said: “With freedom of expression comes the responsibility of expression.”
Somewhat contradictorily, but with equal passion, she said blogging “gives everyone the equal right to express oneself as it does not discriminate based on quality of language, source of information and grammar. Anyone can say anything.”
A dubious, but important right.
