This is the second year in a row that a stall at the Ekushey Boi Mela has been shut down for selling a book that could hurt religious sentiments and cause all-round bad feelings among readers.
Just to recap: Some time on Monday afternoon, police raided the stall of Badwip Prakashan in the Suhrawardy Udyan part of the book fair.
The owner of the publishing house, Shamsuzzoha Manik, was detained, along with two of his associates. Several books were seized.
If you are feeling déjà vu, it’s not because of a glitch in the Matrix.
In the book fair last year, Rodela Prakashani had carried a book that had offended a group of extremists.
The offended party had threatened Rodela Prakashani’s staff and had tried to shut down Rodela’s offices.
Wanting to avoid any further trouble, Bangla Academy took the prudent course of action and closed down Rodela Prakashani’s stall.
This year though, there was a key difference. It wasn’t the fair’s organisers, but the police who marched into the Ekushey Boi Mela -- one of the most vibrant and lively celebrations of our national heritage -- and ordered the shutting down of a book stall.
Let us set aside the issue of what exactly the contents of the offending book were, and whether or not they qualified as being objectionable enough to be unsuitable for public consumption.
There are, indeed, blasphemy laws in Bangladesh which say material that hurts religious sentiments can be banned or confiscated by the government. If the book or books in question fall in those criteria, we have to respect the decision to take the material off the shelves.
But the more important question in the case of Monday’s event is: Was it all done by the book?
The grounds of the Ekushey Boi Mela deserve to be treated with a certain amount of respect, as this annual event is the thing that carries forward the torch of 1952, year after year.
If something is to be done on the grounds of the Boi Mela, we must ensure that due process has been followed.
For example, the official rules and regulations of the book fair stipulate that if objectionable content is found anywhere, the publisher will be given a deadline to remove the content.
It is only in the event of a failure to comply that the authorities would move in and close the stall.
Was this process followed in this case, that is, was Badwip Prakashan given such a deadline?
Did the fair organisers know what was about to happen, and were they OK with it? Organisers were not seen with the police during the raid, according to news reports.
It is being said that visitors had complained about the contents of some of the books at the fair, and some of these objections were circulating on social media, which is how the police came to know about them in the first place.
Are complaints written on Facebook pages enough to necessitate a raid on the Ekushey book fair grounds?
One of the fair’s organisers revealed that the police had said the stall in question could jeopardise the security of the fair.
So which is it -- a matter of security, or a matter of protecting religious sentiments? We need to be clear on this.
Furthermore, if it was a matter of security for the fair grounds, we need to know how exactly a book could be a risk factor.
I suppose a book could be used as a weapon -- I own a hardback copy of the Oxford English Dictionary that could fully knock out a person if wielded in the right way.
Nevertheless, the public needs to be given the assurance that rules -- both the law of the land, as well as the regulations of the Ekushey Boi Mela -- are indeed being followed, and that extremists or other vested interests aren’t pulling the strings.
We can all respect the rule of law, but we cannot and should not appease fundamentalist agendas that do not speak to the interests of the country or the secular spirit of the Boi Mela.
We cannot clamp down on the freedom of writers, readers, and publishers in a way that looks arbitrary and oppressive.
Public sentiment needs to be protected, but so does the freedom and sanctity of the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela.
We need to make sure our law enforcement always follows procedure, so that this wonderful annual book-buying tradition of ours isn’t marred by the fear of harassment.
