Freedom for secular thought still eludes Bangladesh, a decade after blogger’s murder

The climate for freedom of secular thought in Bangladesh remains bleak a decade after religious zealots murdered blogger Avijit Roy as he left a literary festival in Dhaka, family members, researchers and human rights advocates said.

The killing of the Bangladeshi-born American citizen in February 2015 was the first in a spate of murders of secular writers and intellectuals at the hands of Muslim extremists that year and in 2016.

"The current atmosphere for secular thought in Bangladesh is absent. Ten years ago, the condition for secularthoughts was very bad," Abul Kashem Fazlul Huq, a retired professor at Dhaka University, told BenarNews.

"Blogger Avijit Roy was killed for promoting secular thoughts, my son Dipan was killed for publishing his book. What fault did they have," Kashem said, referring to his son, Faisal Arefin Dipan, who was fatally attacked in October 2015.

Ten years on, the South Asian country is still unsafe for the secular community because the threat from violent extremism remains alive despite last year’s fall of the authoritarian government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, according to observers.

It had cracked down hard on Islamic militants by launching a deadly counter-terrorism campaign in July 2016, in the wake of an overnight siege of the Holey Artisan café in Dhaka, where 24 people, many of them foreigners, were slaughtered by Muslim extremists.

But the Hasina government executed a “wrong” policy of countering militancy and terrorism that did not root out the problem, according to one researcher.