Sheikh Hasina was the longest-serving prime minister in Bangladesh’s history. She was the prime minister from 1996 to 2001, and then from 2009 to 2024—a total of 20 years. This was a sharp contrast to her father Sheikh Mujib, who was assassinated in 1975 after four years in power, or General Ziaur Rahman who was assassinated in 1981 after six years in power. In a scene reminiscent of the end of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rule in Sri Lanka, jubilant crowds of thousands crashed the gates of Ganabhaban, the official residence of the prime minister, and jubilantly made off with everything they could find.

Tanzim Wahab, photographer and chief curator of the Bengal Foundation, told me, “When [the masses] storm into the palace and make off with pet swans, elliptical machines, and palatial red sofas, you can feel the level of subaltern class fury that built up against a rapacious regime.” There was widespread celebration across Bangladesh, along with bursts of attacks against buildings identified with the government—private TV channels, and palatial homes of government ministers were a favored target for arson. Several local-level leaders in Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League have already been killed (Mohsin Reza, a local president of the party, was beaten to death in Khulna).

The situation in Bangladesh remains fluid, but it is also settling quickly into a familiar formula of an “interim government” that will hold new elections. Political violence in Bangladesh is not unusual, having been present since the birth of the country in 1971. Indeed, one of the reasons why Sheikh Hasina reacted so strongly to any criticism or protest was her fear that such activity would repeat what she experienced in her youth. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975), the founder of Bangladesh, was assassinated in a coup d’état on August 15, 1975, along with most of his family. Sheikh Hasina and her sister survived because they were in Germany at that time—the two sisters fled Bangladesh together on the same helicopter this week. She has been the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including a grenade attack in 2004 that left her with a hearing problem. Fear of such an attempt on her life made Sheikh Hasina deeply concerned about any opposition to her, which is why up to 45 minutes before her departure she wanted the army to again act with force against the gathering crowds.

However, the army read the atmosphere. It was time for her to leave.

A contest has already begun over who will benefit from the removal of Sheikh Hasina. On the one side are the students, led by the Bangladesh Student Uprising Central Committee of about 158 people and six spokespersons. Lead spokesperson Nahid Islam made the students’ views clear: “Any government other than the one we recommended would not be accepted. We won’t betray the bloodshed by the martyrs for our cause. We will create a new democratic Bangladesh through our promise of security of life, social justice, and a new political landscape.” At the other end are the military and the opposition political forces (including the primary opposition party Bangladesh National Party, the Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, and the small left party Ganosamhati Andolan). While the Army’s first meetings were with these opposition parties, a public outcry over the erasure of the student movement forced the Army to meet with the Student Central Committee and listen to their primary demands.

There is a habit called polti khawa or “changing the team jersey midway through a football match” that prevails in Bangladesh, with the military being the referee in charge at all times. This slogan is being used in public discourse now to draw attention to any attempt by the military to impose a mere change of jersey when the students are demanding a wholesale change of the rules of the game. Aware of this, the military has accepted the student demand that the new government be led by economist Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s only Nobel Prize winner. Yunus, as the founder of the microcredit movement and promoter of “social business,” used to be seen as primarily a phenomenon in the neoliberal NGO world. However, the Hasina government’s relentless political vendetta against him over the last decade, and his decision to speak up for the student movement, have transformed him into an unlikely “guardian” figure for the protesters. The students see him as a figurehead although his neoliberal politics of austerity might be at odds with their key demand, which is for employment.

Students

Even prior to independence and despite the rural character of the region, the epicenter of Bangladeshi politics has been in urban areas, with a focus on Dhaka. Even as other forces entered the political arena, students remain key political actors in Bangladesh. One of the earliest protests in post-colonial Pakistan was the language movement (bhasha andolan) that emerged out of Dhaka University, where student leaders were killed during an agitation in 1952 (they are memorialized in the Shaheed Minar, or Martyrs’ Pillar, in Dhaka). Students became a key part of the freedom struggle for liberation from Pakistan in 1971, which is why the Pakistani army targeted the universities in Operation Searchlight which led to massacres of student activists. The political parties that emerged in Bangladesh after 1971 grew largely through their student wings—the Awami League’s Bangladesh Chhatra League, the Bangladesh National Party’s Bangladesh Jatiotabadi Chatradal, and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir.

Over the past decade, students in Bangladesh have been infuriated by the growing lack of employment despite the bustling economy, and by what they perceived as a lack of care from the government. The latter was demonstrated to them by the callous comments made by Shajahan Khan, a minister in Sheikh Hasina’s government, who smirked as he dismissed news that a bus had killed two college students on Airport Road, Dhaka, in July 2019. That event led to a massive protest movement by students of all ages for road safety, to which the government responded with arrests (including incarceration for 107 days of the photojournalist Shahidul Alam).

Behind the road safety protests, which earned greater visibility for the issue, was another key theme. Five years previously, in 2013, students who were denied access to the Bangladesh Civil Service began a protest over restrictive quotas for government jobs. In February 2018, this issue returned through the work of students in the Bangladesh Sadharon Chhatra Odhikar Songrokkhon Parishad (Bangladesh General Students’ Rights Protection Forum). When the road safety protests occurred, the students raised the quota issue (as well as the issue of inflation). By law, the government reserved seats in its employment for people in underdeveloped districts (10 percent), women (10 percent), minorities (5 percent), and the disabled (1 percent) as well as for descendants of freedom fighters (30 percent).

It is the latter quota that has been contested since 2013 and which returned as an emotive issue this year for the student protesters—especially after the prime minister’s incendiary comment at a press conference that those protesting the freedom fighter quotas were “rajakarer natni” (grandchildren of war traitors). British journalist David Bergman, who is married to prominent Bangladeshi activist lawyer Sara Hossain and was hounded into exile by the Hasina government, called this comment the “terrible error” that ended the government.

Military Islam

In February 2013, Abdul Quader Mollah of the Jamaat-e-Islami was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s liberation war (he was known to have killed at least 344 civilians). When he left the court, he made a V sign, whose arrogance inflamed large sections of Bangladesh’s society. Many in Dhaka gathered at Shahbag, where they formed a Gonojagoron Moncho (Mass Awakening Platform). This protest movement pushed the Supreme Court to reassess the verdict, and Mollah was hanged on December 12. The Shahbag movement brought to the surface a long-term tension in Bangladesh regarding the role of religion in politics.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman initially claimed that Bangladesh would be a socialist and secular country. After his assassination by the military, general Ziaur Rahman took over the country and governed it from 1975 to 1981. During this time, Zia brought religion back into public life, welcomed the Jamaat-e-Islami from banishment (which had been due to its participation in the genocide of 1971), and—in 1978—formed the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) on nationalist lines with a strong critical stance toward India. General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, who took control after his own coup in 1982 and ruled until 1990, went further, declaring that Islam was the state’s religion. This provided a political contrast with the views of Mujib, and of his daughter Sheikh Hasina who took the reins of her father’s party, the Awami League, in 1981.

The stage was set for a long-term contest between Sheikh Hasina’s centrist-secular Awami League and the BNP, which was taken over by Zia’s wife Khaleda Zia after the General was assassinated in 1981. Gradually, the military—which had a secular orientation in its early days—began to witness a growing Islamist mood. Political Islam has grown in Bangladesh with the rise of piety in the general population, some of it driven by the Islamization of migrant labor to the Gulf states and to Southeast Asia. The latter has steadily reflected growth in observance of the Islamic faith in the aftermath of the war on terror’s many consequences. One should neither exaggerate this threat nor minimize it.

The relationship of the political Islamists, whose popular influence has grown since 2013, with the military is another factor that requires much more clarity. Given the dent in the fortunes of the Jamaat-e-Islami since the War Crimes Tribunal documented how the group was involved on the side of Pakistan during the liberation struggle, it is likely that this formation of political Islam has a threshold in terms of its legitimacy. However, one complicating factor is that the Hasina government relentlessly used the fear of “political Islam” as a bogeyman to obtain US and Indian silent consent to the two elections in 2018 and 2024. If the interim government holds a fair election on schedule, this will allow Bangladeshi people to find out if political Islam is a dispensation they wish to vote for.

New Cold War

Far away from the captivating issues put forward by the students which led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina are dangerous currents that are often not discussed during these exciting times. Bangladesh is the eighth-largest country in the world by population, and it has the second highest Gross Domestic Product in South Asia. The role it plays in the region and in the world is not to be discounted.

Over the course of the past decade, South Asia has faced significant challenges as the United States imposed a new cold war against China. Initially, India participated with the United States in the formations around the US Indo-Pacific Strategy. But, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, India has begun to distance itself from this US initiative and tried to put its own national agenda at the forefront. This meant that India did not condemn Russia but continued to buy Russian oil. At the same time, China had—through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—built infrastructure in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, India’s neighbors.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that four governments in the region that had begun to collaborate with the BRI have fallen, and that their replacements in three of them are eager for better ties with the United States. This includes Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power in Pakistan in April 2022 with the ouster of Imran Khan (now in prison), Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly came to power in Sri Lanka in July 2022 after setting aside a mass uprising that had other ideas than the installation of a party with only one member in parliament (Wickremesinghe himself), and KP Sharma Oli, who came to power in July 2024 in Nepal after a parliamentary shuffle that removed the Maoists from power.

What role the removal of Sheikh Hasina will play in the calculations in the region can only be gauged after elections are held under the interim government. But there is little doubt that these decisions in Dhaka are not without their regional and global implications.

The students rely upon the power of the mass demonstrations for their legitimacy. What they do not have is an agenda for Bangladesh, which is why the old neoliberal technocrats are already swimming like sharks around the interim government. In their ranks are those who favor the BNP and the Islamists. What role they will play is yet to be seen.

If the student committee now formed a bloc with the trade unions, particularly the garment worker unions, there is the possibility that they might indeed form the opening for building a new democratic and people-centered Bangladesh. If they are unable to build this historical bloc, they may be pushed to the side, just like the students and workers in Egypt, and they might have to surrender their efforts to the military and an elite that has merely changed its jersey.

• This article was produced by Globetrotter.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Cyberattacks by unidentified perpetrators have targeted at least nine independent media outlets and multiple journalists in Kazakhstan since November 2023, according to data shared with CPJ by local press freedom group Adil Soz, which issued a statement on the attacks January 19, 2024, and several of the journalists, who spoke to CPJ.

The attacks, which have targeted well-known independent media including news agency KazTAG, and popular social media-based outlets like AIRAN and Obozhayu, included distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and blocking of outlets’ social media accounts through orchestrated mass complaints, causing media to lose access to their audiences and incurring heavy financial costs, those journalists told CPJ.

The latest wave follows a previous series of cyberattacks and physical attacks on independent journalists in Kazakhstan in late 2022 and early 2023. In March, authorities arrested and later convicted five people in connection with those incidents, including one who admitted to ordering the attacks. Despite those convictions, Karla Jamankulova, head of Adil Soz, told CPJ that cyberattacks against the independent press have continued throughout 2023 and intensified since November.

“Kazakhstan’s continuing epidemic of cyberattacks on the press poses a threat not just to the individual outlets targeted but has become a systemic threat to the country’s media and demands a concomitant response,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities in Kazakhstan must conduct a swift and thorough investigation into these attacks and hold all those responsible to account.”

According to data from Adil Soz, the organization recorded 56 incidents of cyberattacks on media outlets and journalists in 2023, up from 37 in 2022. Of those cyberattacks, 36 were against the websites and social media pages of media outlets, and 20 of them targeted the social media accounts of individual journalists.

Since November, DDoS attacks have targeted the websites of at least four independent media – KazTAG, independent news outlet Nege.kz, and business news outlets Kursiv.Media and inbusiness.kz, causing them to be inaccessible for short periods or load slowly, according to reports and Adil Soz. 

A January 5 statement by KazTAG said that the outlet closed access to its website from outside of Kazakhstan to fight the DDoS attacks, but the attacks later resumed from IP addresses located in the building of majority state-owned telecommunications company Kazakhtelecom. Kazakhtelecom denied involvement.

Over the same period, social media accounts or websites of at least four independent media – Kursiv.Media, and social media-based outlets AIRAN, ProTenge, Shishkin_like, and Obozhayu – were blocked by orchestrated mass complaints or by fake accounts posting banned content that triggered social media companies’ automated blocking systems, according to Adil Soz and several of the outlets, who told CPJ that it can take a long time, or prove impossible, to restore the blocked accounts. Kursiv.Media chief editor Mira Khalina told CPJ the outlet ’s Instagram accounts were blocked for over six weeks and that replacement accounts set up by the outlet remain blocked. Dmitry Shishkin, founder of Shishkin_like, told CPJ the outlet was unable to restore an Instagram account wrongly blocked in April 2023.

Askhat Niyazov, founder of Obozhayu, which covers the work of local authorities, told CPJ that in addition to blocking the outlet’s Telegram channel by flooding it with banned violent and pornographic content, perpetrators hacked or blocked the Instagram and WhatsApp accounts of Niyazov, two of the outlet’s journalists, and Niyazov’s parents and wife. Around 4,000 fake accounts left the comment “R.I.P.” under one of the outlet’s YouTube videos.

Mikhail Kozachkov, author of the popular Telegram channel Kozachkov offside, told CPJ that the channel has removed around 750,000 fake accounts posting banned or offensive content since October 2023. In November, dozens of fake Telegram accounts under Kozachkov’s name spread calls for interethnic violence, which is subject to heavy penalties under Kazakh law.

Jamankulova of Adil Soz told CPJ the ongoing attacks are having a “huge impact” on the functioning of independent Kazakh media, which often struggle financially and are forced to divert significant resources to deal with the cyberattacks. Khalina told CPJ that the attacks have cost Kursiv.Media over 19 million tenge (US$42,300) in redirected resources, lost advertising revenue, and other costs.

In January, six of the outlets filed a police complaint over the attacks but are still waiting for police to respond, Khalina said. She described the attacks as an attempt to “disable” independent journalism.

Maricheva of ProTenge told CPJ that while it remains unclear who might be behind the attacks, which usually cost tens of thousands of dollars, they require resources typically available only to wealthy business interests and those with access to state resources.

In November, a closed-doors court in the southern city of Almaty convicted Arkady Klebanov, the son of a former member of the Kazakh elite, of ordering attacks on journalists in late 2022 and early 2023, but declared him insane and ordered him to undergo psychiatric treatment. Several of the journalists targeted by those attacks have expressed skepticism that Klebanov was the real instigator of those attacks.

CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kazakhstan for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On December 4, Mohammadi, a reporter for the independent broadcaster Tamadon TV, responded to a summons by Taliban provincial intelligence officers in the southern city of Kandahar and has not been heard from since, according to local media support group the Afghanistan Journalists’ Center and an Afghan journalist familiar with his case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, due to fear of Taliban retaliation.

As of Tuesday, CPJ could not determine why the journalist was summoned, the reason for his detention, or his whereabouts.

“The Taliban must immediately release Afghan journalist Abdul Rahim Mohammadi and end the intimidation and detention of journalists in Afghanistan,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “After more than two years in power, the Taliban and its intelligence agency continues to crack down on Afghan journalists on a daily basis, hampering reporting and the free flow of information.”

Mohammadi, who has been working as a journalist for 10 years, reports on local current affairs in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. In February, armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of Tamadon TV in the capital, Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for a half hour.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told CPJ that he was not aware of the detention and declined to elaborate.

Since the Taliban retook control of the country on August 15, 2021, the Taliban’s repression of the Afghan media has worsened. On the second anniversary of the group’s return to power, CPJ called on the Taliban to stop its relentless campaign of intimidation and abide by its promise to protect journalists in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the debris from the first rounds of Israeli bombs could be cleared, the bombing resumed just as viciously as before.

The word ‘humanitarian’ has been severely bruised by the West. You might remember another phrase, ‘humanitarian intervention’, that was used as cover for the destruction of Libya in 2011 after the legitimacy of Western military intervention had been eviscerated by the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003. To rehabilitate this legitimacy, the West pushed the United Nations to hold a conference that resulted in a new doctrine, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which, while purporting to ‘ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, instead provided the West with a UN Security Council mandate (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) for the use of force. The attack on Libya in 2011 took place under this doctrine. The guise of humanitarianism was used to destroy the Libyan state and throw the country into what appears to be a permanent civil war. There has never been even a whiff of R2P when it comes to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza (not in 2008–09, not in 2014, and not now).

It does not seem to matter that more Palestinians have been displaced and killed by Israel since 7 October than were displaced and killed in the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948. If the word ‘humanitarian’ meant something in 1948, it certainly does not mean much now.

Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly escalating into the tens of thousands. In Iraq, approximately a million people were killed by the US onslaught, the sheer scale of death and the anonymity surrounding it forcing a sense distance from the rest of the world. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.

Part of the problem here is that the international division of humanity makes for unjust accounting of human life: were the Palestinians killed in Gaza treated with as much dignity as the Israelis killed on 7 October? Are their lives, and deaths, assigned equal worth? The uneven response to these deaths, alongside the uncritical acceptance of this unevenness, suggests that this international division of humanity remains in place and is not only accepted, but also perpetuated, by Western leaders, who make allowances for the killing of more brown bodies than white ones, the latter seen as precious, the former seen as disposable.

Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

During the ‘humanitarian pause’, a hostage transfer took place through which Hamas and the Palestinian factions released 110 Israelis while Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children. The stories of the Israeli casualties, many of them residents of settlements near the Gaza perimeter fence, and other hostages such as the Thai and Nepalese fieldworkers are now well-known. Less frequently discussed and much less understood are the stories of the Palestinian casualties. Equally disregarded is the fact that after 7 October, Israel launched a mass campaign to detain over 3,000 Palestinians, including nearly 200 children. There are more Palestinians in Israeli prisons now than before 7 October. During the first four days of the truce alone, Israel arrested almost as many Palestinians as it released through the hostage transfer.

It is of note that most (more than two-thirds) of the Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are never charged with any crime and have been held in ‘administrative detention’ in the military’s legal system, meaning that they are held without a time limit, ‘without trial [and] without having committed an offence, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future’, as defined by the human rights organisation B’tselem. Some of them have been lost in the maze of the Israeli incarceration system indefinitely, unable to exercise even the most basic right of habeas corpus, with no court appearance, no access to a lawyer, and no access to the evidence against them. Israel currently holds more than 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of them associated with left-wing factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). More than 2,000 of these prisoners are being held in administrative detention.

Many of these Palestinian prisoners are children. Many of them spend years in the Israeli system, often under administrative detention, unable to make a case for their release. The Defence for Children International (Palestine) reports that 500–700 children are detained each year, and a chilling report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2015 showed that Israel is in full violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990). Article 37 of the convention says that the ‘arrest, detention, or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’. As multiple cases show, Israel uses arrests as a measure of first resort and holds children for long periods of time.

Defence for Children International studied sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees from the occupied West Bank arrested between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022. The following data emerged from their analysis:

75% were subjected to physical violence.
80% were strip-searched.
97% were interrogated without a family member present.
66% were not properly informed of their rights.
55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand.
59% were arrested at night.
86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest.
58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest.
23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days.

Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

There are thousands of untold stories of the brutality inflicted upon Palestinian children. One of them, Ahmad Manasra, was arrested on 12 October 2015 at the age of thirteen in occupied East Jerusalem on the charge that he stabbed two Israelis: Yosef Ben-Shalom, a twenty-year-old security guard, and Naor Shalev Ben-Ezra, a thirteen-year-old boy, who survived the attack. The Israeli courts initially found Ahmad guilty of the stabbing but then changed their opinion to say that his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan Khalid Manasra, who was shot dead at the scene, had stabbed the two Israelis. There was no evidence of Ahmad’s complicity, yet he was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison.

Still in prison, Ahmad Manasra (now 21) has been held in solitary confinement for months on end. Khulood Badawi of Amnesty International said in late September that Ahmad ‘was taken to the mental health unit at Ayalon prison after spending the better part of two years in solitary confinement. The Israeli Prison Service has requested an extension of Ahmad’s isolation for another six months in brazen violation of international law. Prolonged solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment’.

Ahmad’s case took place during a wave of what were called ‘knife attacks’, when young Palestinians were accused of rushing at Israeli military posts with knives and were then shot dead. At that time, I investigated several of these attacks and found them to be based on little more than the word of Israeli soldiers. For instance, on 17 December 2015, Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint shot fifteen-year-old Abdullah Hussein Ahmad Nasasra to death. Eyewitnesses told me that the boy had his hands in the air when he was fatally shot. One of them, Nasser, told me that there was no knife, and that he ‘saw them kill the boy’. Kamal Badran Qabalan, an ambulance driver, was not allowed to retrieve the body. The Israelis wanted control over the body and the story they would tell about it.

Another story is that of twenty-three-year-old Anas al-Atrash in Hebron. Anas and his brother Ismail returned home from a week of work in Jericho, their car filled with fruits and vegetables. At a checkpoint, Anas got out of the car when instructed to do so and an Israeli soldier shot him dead. The next morning, Israeli media reported that Anas tried to kill the Israeli soldiers. The journalist Ben Ehrenreich, who reported the story with a fierce determination for the truth, sought out the family’s version. Anas had no interest in politics, they told him. He was studying accounting and hoped to get married soon. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials kept asking Ismail if his brother had a knife. There was simply no knife. Anas had been killed in cold blood. ‘This is a savage country’, an eyewitness told Ehrenreich. ‘They have no shame’. He meant the Israeli soldiers.

Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

The grammar of the Israeli occupation is to put pressure on Palestinians until an act of violence takes place – a knife attack, say, or even a fabricated knife attack – and then use that event as an excuse to deepen the displacement of Palestinians with more illegal settlements. The events that have followed 7 October maintain this logic. Israel has used people like Anas, Abdullah, and Ahmad, and the fabricated narratives surrounding their alleged crimes, as the raison d’etre to increase the demolition of Palestinian homes and expand illegal Israeli settlements, accelerating the Permanent Nakba.

Ten years ago, I met with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaloub-Kevorkian studies how the occupation produces an everyday form of victimhood that stretches from the streets to Palestinians’ most intimate of spaces. Her book Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear (2015) provides a glimpse into the industry of fear that is produced and reproduced in the everyday violence inflicted upon Palestinians by settlers and the military, including the difficulties that Palestinians face in giving birth and burying their dead. The depth of the violence and uncertainty, Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, moves Palestinian women to speak of ‘being choked, suffocated, or gagged’ and has led many of their children to lose their will to live. There is widespread social trauma in Palestine or what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls ‘sociocide’: the death of society.

More than fifty years of an occupation and war have created a strange dynamic. Both Ehrenreich and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work offer windows into this madness. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lives in Jerusalem, told me that she is part of a group of women who walk Palestinian children to school each day, since it is too dangerous for them to confront the police and the settlers on their own, or even in the company of their Palestinian family and friends. ‘Bikhawfuni!’ (‘They scare me!’), one girl, Marah (age 8), told her.

The children draw pictures at school. One of them drew a clown, a Palestinian clown. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian asked the child (age 9) what a Palestinian clown is, he explained, ‘This is a Palestinian clown. Clowns in Palestine cry’.

Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who moved to Beirut to edit the magazine Lotus in the aftermath of the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, wrote with horror about the plight and struggles of the Palestinians:

Tere aaqa ne kiya ek Filistin barbaad
Mere zakhmon ne kiye kitne Filistin aabaad.

Your enemies destroyed one Palestine.
My wounds populated many Palestines.

Faiz’s poem ‘A Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, written during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reflects the reality facing Palestinian children today:

Don’t cry children.
Your mother has just cried herself to sleep.

Don’t cry children.
Your father has just left this world of sorrow.

Don’t cry children,
Your brother is in an alien land.
Your sister too has gone there.

Don’t cry children.
The dead sun has just been bathed and the moon is buried in the courtyard.

Don’t cry children.
For if you cry,
Your mother, father, brother, and sister
And the sun, and the moon
Will make you cry ever more.

Maybe if you smile,
They’ll one day return, disguised
to play with you.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

At around 2:30 p.m. on November 9, around 20 men, allegedly members of the ruling Awami League party’s student wing Chhatra League, beat Alim, a reporter for the online news portal Rajshahi Post, and Rony, a correspondent for the online newspaper Bangladesh Journal, on the Rajshahi College campus in western Bangladesh, according to privately owned news website New Age, the local press freedom group Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media, and Alim, who spoke with CPJ.

“Bangladeshi authorities and the Rajshahi College administration must immediately hold accountable those who attacked student journalists Abdul Alim and Abu Sayed Rony while reporting on the university campus,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, from Washington, D.C. “The government must take action against the deeply disturbing trend of the Chhatra League’s violence against student journalists on their campuses.”

The journalists were filming an argument between the university vice-principal along with professors and the men, who were led by undergraduate mathematics student Masud Rana, a Chhatra League member who was not permitted to take an examination after repeatedly missing class, according to those sources.

The men recognized Rony, an undergraduate mathematics student, as a journalist, but not Alim, an undergraduate history student, Alim told CPJ.

The men then beat and slapped the journalists, grabbed their collars, and repeatedly pushed them into a wall before they fell unconscious and woke up in the teachers’ lounge. The journalists were taken to the hospital, where Alim was treated for a blood clot in his back and significant bruising throughout his body, and Rony for a severe head inquiry, Alim said.

Following the attack, the journalists learned the perpetrators took their phones, which were returned to them broken, Alim said. Rony did not immediately respond to CPJ’s messages.

The Chhatra League leadership on campus subsequently suspended eight members for their alleged involvement in the attack. University officials have also appointed a committee to investigate the incident, Alim said.

Rony filed a complaint about the attack at the Boalia Police Station, but it was unclear whether a formal investigation had been opened, Alim said, adding that no suspects had been apprehended by the university or police as of November 13.

Rana and the officer-in-charge of the Boalia Police Station did not immediately respond to CPJ’s messages.

On September 24, around 15 to 20 alleged members of the Chhatra League beat student journalist Mosharrof Shah on the University of Chittagong campus.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

According to an Alt News fact check, the photograph in Arpita’s tweet actually showed a biker delivering a dismantled mannequin to a garment store in Cairo. 

The ‘Abdul’ Trope

In Arabic, the word ‘abd al’ means ‘servant of the…’. Thus, ‘Abdul‘ is normally a component of a compound name referring to one of the attributes of Allah mentioned in the Qur’an or the Hadith, which would mean ‘Servant of God’ (‘Abdul Aziz’ means Servant of the Powerful). It is a common name among Muslim males.

We could find instances of the use of ‘Abdul’ in a generalized reference to Muslim men as early as in December 2014. Several users tweeted the text “हिंदू’ तो मंदबुद्धी, और अब्दुल निकला तो आतंकी” (Translation: If one is ‘Hindu’, one is retarded, but if they are Abduls, they turn out to be terrorists), in the context of the Bangalore blast of 2014, where the accused created a fake social media account to issue bomb threats using the name Abdul Khan, but later turned out to be a Hindu. At that point, it was more a snide remark than a concerted narrative.  

Over the years, the trope was used by several users, including influencers, who tried to send out a message, attempting to generalize Muslim men. One of the early instances of this trope being used with negative connotations was in November 2016. Several users tweeted out a satirical message, seemingly calling out the Opposition’s attempt to appease the Muslims. The text reads, ‘सिमी एनकाउंटर फर्जी, सर्जिकल स्ट्राइक फर्जी, काला धन वापसी फर्जी, देश का विकास फर्जी, मैं भौकूं जी, मेरी मर्ज़ी, वोट देगा मेरा अब्दुल दर्जी’. (Translation: Simi encounter is fake, Surgical strike is fake, Black money returning is fake, Country’s development is fake, I bark, my wish, my Abdul tailor will vote).

सिमी एनकाउंटर फर्जी
सर्जिकल स्ट्राइक फर्जी
काला धन वापसी फर्जी
देश का विकास फर्जी
मैं भौकूं जी, मेरी मर्ज़ी
वोट देगा मेरा अब्दुल दर्जी #SIMI pic.twitter.com/FW9ZNB7Hct

— Amit Rajwant (@amitrajwant) November 2, 2016

Shraddha Walkar Murder: The Mainstreaming of the ‘Abdul’ Trope

The use of the word ‘Abdul’ became mainstream and reached the larger masses in 2022. After the news of 26-year-old Shraddha Walkar’s gruesome murder broke, where her Muslim partner Aftab Ameen Poonawalla was an accused, ‘Abdul’ was a trending topic on social media. The Right Wing ecosystem attempted to demonise the Muslim community by implying that being involved with a Muslim man or ‘Abdul’ would result in a fate similar to Shradhha’s. Editor-in-chief of OpIndia, Nupur J Sharma, tweeted, “Aapka Abdul bhi waisa hi hai” (Translation: Your Abdul is also the same). Her tweet garnered almost 30,000 likes and close to 7000 retweets.

“Aapka Abdul bhi waisa hi hai”

— Nupur J Sharma (@UnSubtleDesi) November 14, 2022

Since then, the ‘Abdul’ trope has been tagged with the already existing ‘Love Jihad’ conspiracy theory, connecting an alleged crime to the accused’s religious identity and holding the entire Muslim community accountable. Needless to say, the ‘Abdul’ narrative has also seeped into mainstream television, with news anchors openly using the term while reporting hate crimes.

For instance, on June 9, 2023, Zee News tweeted a clip of their report on a case of alleged ‘Love Jihad’ wherein they claimed that a 20-year-old Hindu woman, who was being courted by a man who allegedly hid his Muslim identity, was later forced by him to convert to Islam and she consequently committed suicide. The clip was captioned ‘“मेरा अब्दुल वैसा नहीं है” वालों के लिए सबसे बड़ा सबक है ये केस’ (Translation: This case is the biggest lesson for those who say ‘My Abdul is not like that’!). The channel ran similar suggestive tickers like “उसका ‘अब्दुल’ भी वैसा ही निकला” (Translation: Her ‘Abdul’ also turned out to be the same) throughout their reportage. (Archive)

#DNA : ‘मेरा अब्दुल वैसा नहीं है’ वालों के लिए सबसे बड़ा सबक है ये केस !#LoveJihad #Conversion #Islam | @irohitr pic.twitter.com/m7bbBpDwbc

— Zee News (@ZeeNews) June 9, 2023

On June 8, 2023, the official handle of Right Wing propaganda outlet Sudarshan News tweeted a clip of Suresh Chavhanke’s speech in Sangamner with the caption ‘संगमनेर का हिंदू कहता था “मेरा अब्दुल वैसा नहीं है” तो सुरेश चव्हाणके जी ने बताया उसने क्या किया’ (Translation: The Hindu of Sangamner used to say ‘My Abdul is not like that’, so Suresh Chavhanke ji says what he did). Below is a translation of Suresh Chavhanke’s speech, originally in Marathi.

‘People of Sangamner used to say ‘Mera Abdul Waisa Nahi hai’, but your Abdul has now shown you that if your daughter sits in his auto-rickshaw—he is the same age as her uncle—he intentionally makes her sit on the front seat with him and touches her breasts. He is such a sinner. He has shown you that if you purchase bread from his bakery, it has his spit in it. He has shown you that if you purchase Biryani from Abdul, the Biryani contains pills to make you impotent. Abdul has shown you that whenever a prominent person comes to our place, he is killed/attacked by 14-15 years old green पिलवड  [a slang used for puppies]. A man who has so much respect in the village is embarrassed and disrespected in Sangamner. Are you now you going to bear the insult now? [Audience replies: NO]. Are you going to do a Tit for Tat? [Audience replies: YES]’

As is evident, Chavhanke uses the ‘Abdul’ rhetoric throughout the clip to address Muslims and demonises the entire community using hypothetical scenarios. (Archive)

संगमनेर का हिंदू कहता, “था मेरा अब्दुल वैसा नहीं है” तो सुरेश चव्हाणके जी ने बताया उसने क्या किया@SureshChavhanke #HinduHunkarSabha #Sangmner #Lovejihad pic.twitter.com/x1JSoVDhv6

— Sudarshan News (@SudarshanNewsTV) June 8, 2023

It is pertinent to note that claims like Muslims are spitting in food items or lacing Biriyani with impotency pills have been debunked by Alt News in the past.

In an opinion piece for ABP News titled, ‘कोई कल्पना नहीं, ठोस हकीकत है लव-जिहाद, 400 से अधिक ऐसे मामलों की पूरी सूची दिसंबर में हमने सौंपी’ (Translation: ‘Love Jihad is not a fiction, it is a solid reality, we submitted a complete list of more than 400 such cases in December’), Vinod Bansal, national spokesperson for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, called for a nationwide law on anti-conversion and harsher punishments for those who committed crimes of ‘Love Jihad’. He wrote, ‘हिंदू समाज के अंदर भी बहुतेरे लोग सेकुलर-ब्रिगेड के ट्रैप में हैं. वे कहते हैं कि हिंदू-मुसलमान से क्या फर्क पड़ता है, मेरा अब्दुल ऐसा नहीं है। अब जो स्थितियां ऐसी आ रही हैं कि कोई भी अब्दुल कैसा भी हो, उसके अंदर का अब्दुल्ला कब निकल जाएगा, किसी को पता नहीं है।’ (Translation: Even within the Hindu society, many people are trapped in the secular brigade. They say Hindu-Muslim doesn’t make a difference; my Abdul is not like that. Now the situations are such that no matter what kind of Abdul he is, no one knows when the Abdullah inside him will emerge).

The ‘Abdul’ in Audio-Visual Media 

Building on the larger ‘Love Jihad’ narrative and the ‘Abdul’ rhetoric set by the Right Wing ecosystem is a variety of audio-visual content, attempting to invoke and motivate even those among the unsuspecting ‘Hindu Samaj’ to wake up and ‘save’ Hindu women from the clutches of ‘Abduls’.

Fueling the Narrative through Mainstream Movies 

The propaganda film, ‘The Kerala Story’, was one of the first and major instances of ‘Love Jihad’ being shown on screen. The feature film sought to instill a sense of fear about the Muslim community, and often triggered violent reactions. For instance, a movie-goer approached by a vox-pop reporter for her review of the film first asks the reporter her name to confirm if she is Hindu and then says, ‘बहुत अच्छी थी लेकिन डर गई हूँ मैं। सही में देखना चाहिए। जरूर देखना चाहिए। हर हिन्दू को देखना चाहिए। मुसलमानों को देखकर डर लग गया।’ (Translation: It is very good, but I got scared. It should be watched. It is a must-watch. Every Hindu should watch it. I got scared watching the Muslims).

This is why the Prime Minister is promoting this film.

Anybody supporting this dangerous propaganda in the name of freedom of speech should know it will catalyse the ongoing persecution of Muslims. pic.twitter.com/pkHTbI8PnJ

— Vipul Kumar (@vipulizm) May 9, 2023

Full-length media productions of similar sorts can be easily found as distinct pieces of creative content on platforms such as YouTube. These then take lives of their own as bite-sized content shared as WhatsApp statuses or messages, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels.

In one such YouTube short titled ‘The Kerala Story: mera abdul aisa nahi hai | Adah Sharma | #thekeralastory’ with 1,67,000 views, parts of ‘The Kerala Story’ trailer have been compiled with clips of interviews of apparent Hindutva activists and victims of ‘Love Jihad’. The text ‘Muslim boys in india Specifically target school going hindu girls’ is imposed at the bottom of the video.

In another vox pop video titled ‘The Kerala story देखकर निकली लड़कियों ने बताया उनका अब्दुल कैसा है, सुनकर चौंक जाएंगे आप KhabarIndia’, a representative of ‘Khabar India’ interviewed women asking them suggestive questions like if they would say ‘My Abdul is not like that’ even after watching ‘The Kerala Story’. Opinions ranged from ‘अब्दुल होना भी नहीं चाहिए’ (Translation: Abdul shouldn’t exist in the first place) to ‘झांसी की रानी बनके रहना चाहिए लड़कियों को, बस’ (Translation: Girls have to live as Rani of Jhansi, that’s all).

There are several such vox pop videos with thousands of views, where the interviewers link ‘The Kerala Story’ with the ‘Abdul’ narrative. Moviegoers, too, are seen heard using cuss words and spiteful comments like ‘मेरा अब्दुल आपका अब्दुल सबका अब्दुल एक जैसे ही हैं। जिस दिन काटके बंद होंगे ना, तब समझ में आएगा।’ (Translation: My Abdul, your Abdul, everyone’s Abdul are all the same. Will realise this only the day when you get chopped to death.) as Jay Shree Ram slogans are raised in the background.

These videos and interviews are a testament to the steady permeation of this ‘Abdul’ narrative into the more expansive ‘Love Jihad’ conspiracy theory. 

‘Abdul’ in Music Videos

A music video released by the YouTube channel PD Bros Official captioned Mera Abdul Aisa Nahi Hain with more than 13,000 views goes with the lyrics ‘पहले पापा की परी थी… अब अब्दुल की जान हूँ।‘ (Translation: Back then I was my father’s angel, and now I am Abdul’s life). 

The song begins with showing ‘Abdul’ carrying a suitcase and dropping it off over a bridge. It proceeds to narrate the flashback where a man in a black Kurta-Pyjama, with shaved moustache and trimmed beard and wearing a skull cap — in other words, the stereotypical Muslim man — meets his Hindu girlfriend and gifts her a smartphone. The girl/woman in a supposedly modern outfit and a large red ‘bindi’ (the only marker of her ‘Hinduness’) sings in a baby voice ‘मेरा अब्दुल ऐसा नहीं हैं। वो सबसे अलग है। कबूल हैं कबूल है। मुझे अब्दुल कबूल है।’ (Translation: My Abdul isn’t like that. He is different from the everyone else. I accept, I accept. I accept Abdul). The intention of the content creators to infantilize the girl’s choice and decision is apparent from their use of a baby voice for this part of the lyrics. The tagline of the song reinforces the notion that all Muslim men would act in a certain way — killing their partners and disposing of them in suitcases or refrigerators.

The girl/woman goes on to sing ‘नाम चाहे रख दे वो मेरा सलमा, वही बनेगा अब मेरा बलमा, मेरे ही नाम का पढ़ता हैं क़लमा।’ (Translation: Even if he keeps my name as Salma, only he shall be my beloved; he reads the kalma in my name), indicating conversion. As her parents protest against her relationship with ‘Abdul’, she leaves the house with him, and as she goes, the lead singer pops up on the screen to deliver the message central to the video. The singer Prabhat Mishra says ‘या ये अब्दुल हो या आफ़ताब है, सब ने पढ़ी एक ही किताब हैं। सावधान हिन्दू समाज।’ (Translation: Be it Abdul or Aftab, all of them have read the same book. Beware Hindu Community).

Linking the context directly to the Shraddha Walkar case, the message of the music video is loud and clear: That all Muslims would end up killing their non-Muslim partners. The song closes with the message: ‘जब-जब हिन्दू बहन नहीं रही मर्यादा की दहलीज़ में, तो कभी मिली सूट्कैस में, तो कभी मिली फ्रिज में…’ (Translation: Whenever Hindu sisters went beyond the limits of dignity, they were sometimes found in a suitcase, and sometimes in a fridge).

In order to trace the trajectory of the on ‘Abdul’ trope, we analysed a three-part series of music videos on ‘Love Jihad’ released by Jaya’s Music (though it has no direct mentions of ‘Abdul’). The first part of the series titled ‘Love Jihad: Koi Yaad Aa Gaya’ (Translation: Remembering Someone), has over 18,000 views on YouTube and depicts a Hindu woman cop shooting a Muslim terrorist who had once pretended to be Hindu and was involved in a romantic relationship with her. She is hailed as a ‘Hindu Sherni’, (Translation: Hindu Lioness). While she had once written messages of love for her former lover with her own blood, the Muslim man, while dying, writes the word ‘Jihad’ on a wall with his own blood — conveying to the audience the mindset of the members of either community.

The second one in the series titled ‘Love Jihad 2: Mizaaj’ (Translation: Mood), has over 45,000 views on YouTube and depicts a triggering and gory representation of a woman at the hospital suffering burns inflicted by her husband’s family. Here, too, the husband was a Muslim who posed as a Hindu to woo her. But unlike the ‘Sherni’, this woman is naïve, and fell for his trap and married him. After burning the woman to death, the man goes on to find his next ‘prey’.

We found content clipped from this video tweeted once with the caption Mera Abdul Aisa Nahi Hai.

The third one in the line-up, titled ‘Aaj Kal Khab’ (Translation: Dreams These Days), has over 22,000 views and is sung by one of Hindi music industry’s most popular playback singers, Kumar Sanu. It depicts a romantic relationship between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman. The song begins with the couple being chased by a mob of Muslims, wielding swords, most of them her relatives, and ends with the couple being ruthlessly murdered by the group. The message is that the Muslim community does not allow its women to involve in romantic relationships with members of other communities. 

The takeaway of the three-part series is pretty much the crux of the current ‘Love Jihad’ narrative — that the whole idea of inter-religious love isn’t as innocent as how the ‘liberals’ think of it. It is an organised project and is unidirectional, with Muslim men always targeting non-Muslim women and the reverse never tolerated; Hindu women have to be ‘Shernis’ to save themselves from it, and if naïve, they would invite grave suffering and death.

‘Abdul’ in Cartoons

Cartoons and caricatures have forever been an effective format for delivering messages in a short but effective way. This form is also being leveraged extensively to deliver and propagate the ‘Abdul’ trope across different digital media platforms.

For instance, the Twitter and Instagram profile চণ্ডীমণ্ডপ (Translation: Chondimandop) tweeting at @bratati_maity and with an Instagram User ID bratati_maity, claiming to be ‘An unapologetic HINDU Artist’ in their bio, consistently shares caricatured Islamophobic content. One of their cartoons, probably their most widely circulated creation across platforms (over 26,000 views on Twitter and over 26,000 likes on Instagram), depicts a bearded man with a skullcap and hiding a knife behind, proposing to a woman and saying, ‘There is no love jihad. This is all propaganda. I really love you.’ And the girl who is depicted as naïve and blindfolded, unable to see the graves and the corpse of alleged victims of ‘Love Jihad’ says, ‘I know Abdul. Tum alag ho (Translation: You are different). I trust you blindly.’ In another cartoon shared by the same creator on Instagram, a girl is depicted as hugging a bearded and skull-capped man saying ‘Mera Abdul alag Hai’ as her parents exclaim ‘No!’. In the next frame, ‘Abdul’ is shown as lighting her on fire, saying, ‘She said No’ while the girl cries, ‘Oh, No!’. 

Who is the next? pic.twitter.com/34eF6eNeMT

— চণ্ডীমণ্ডপ (Chondimandop) (@bratati_maity) June 1, 2023

This cartoon captioned ‘Yes “alag hai”, they kill differently’ shows one woman hugging a man and saying, ‘Mera Abdul alag Hai’ and another woman walking with her man saying, ‘Mera Bhi’ (Translation: Mine too). One woman is shown stored in a fridge in pieces, and the other is shown as attacked by the man with a dagger and rock.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by চণ্ডীমণ্ডপ (Chondimandop) (@bratati_maity)

The user also caricatures another character, ‘Suparna’, who is depicted as a typical ‘Hindu Sherni’, who can see through ‘Abdul’ and his tricks and keeps debunking his reasons for putting down Hinduism and demands of her conversion.

pic.twitter.com/iT9RlCkizn

— চণ্ডীমণ্ডপ (Chondimandop) (@bratati_maity) May 28, 2023

Another caricature by cartoonist Ganesh Bhalerao is widely shared by multiple users on Instagram and Twitter with ‘Abdul’ references. The cartoon depicts a bearded-skullcapped man holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand and hiding a dagger in the other and a blindfolded girl running towards him, jumping over the tombstones of alleged ‘Love Jihad’ victims thinking ‘मेरा वाला ऐसा नहीं हैं!’ (Translation: Mine is not like that), while the signboard reads ‘लव जिहाद पार्क’ (Translation: Love Jihad Park).

Cartoonist Manoj Kureel shared a cartoon captioned ‘पतन की सीढ़ियां’ (Translation: Stairs of Downfall) with the hashtag #MeraAbdulAisaNahiHai which depicts a Hindu girl climbing stairs and running towards the stereotyped image of ‘Abdul’. The staircase is labelled as ‘Love Jihad’, and each stair is labelled: distance from culture, Bollywood, absence of family values, secularism, distance from religion, ignorance, etc, which are supposedly factors that influence Hindu girls to accept Muslims as partners.

Along with cartoon caricatures, the ‘Abdul’ trope is circulated widely in the form of memes and such forms of content.

The Justification Mechanism Normalizing Vigilantism

As it is apparent from these representations, a sub-narrative is being weaved into the larger narrative of the ‘Love Jihad’ conspiracy theory. The ‘Hindu Sherni’, who is rooted in traditions and conforming to family and societal values, understands and thwarts ‘Abdul’s’ tricks, in contrast to the naïve and infantilized liberal Hindu girl/woman who falls for ‘Abdul’s’ trap. This narrative seamlessly plugs and plays in a social setting dominated by notions of misogyny and patriarchy.

Such depictions of interfaith relationships involving a Muslim man reinforce the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative. For instance, this YouTube short video by Hindutva Status, with over 11,000 views, showing women who agree that ‘Sare Abdul Ek Jaise Hi Hote Hain’ (Translation: All Abduls are the same) is shared with glorifying background music, effects, and banner and this short video by Jha shorts with just 196 subscribers, but over 19,000 views fictionally represents a woman lecturing, with utter contempt, to a girl who has faith in her Muslim boyfriend, on the fate that awaits her. Girls/women who do not conform to the narrative and pursue such relationships or publicly express opinions defending it are conveniently portrayed as corrupt, brainwashed, and requiring help. They are accused of lacking the primary faculty of thinking, and their capability and agency to decide for themselves are consistently questioned and attacked. This is effectively leveraged as a moral justification for calling out their relationships in public, leaking their details (doxxing), threatening their friends and families, and the public calls for action to ‘save’ them from ‘Abduls’. All of it contributes as small pieces of the larger narrative, coming together to project ‘a painted devil’ and set the perfect environment for vigilantism, doxxing, suspicion, and hate of the Muslim other.

Jaisal E K is an intern with Alt News.

The post ‘Mera Abdul Aisa Nahi Hai’: How the ‘Abdul’ trope has been mainstreamed to demonise Muslim Men appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

A video of a man beating a woman is being widely shared on social media. In the video, this man first hits the woman with a stick and grabs her hair violently. It is being claimed that the man is Muslim while the woman is Hindu. Social media users are amplifying the footage with captions like, “A few days ago when people would call her out on Twitter, she would call them haters who are discriminating on the basis of religion. Now is she enjoying secularism with her Abdul? Take a close look.”

Twitter blue handle ‘@jajabor_sanjeev’ made the same claim while sharing this video. (Archived link)

मेरा अब्दुल ऐसा नहीं
कुछ दिन पहले इसको ट्विटर पर बहुत से लोगों ने समझाया था तो बोली तुम नफरती हो,हिन्दू मुस्लिम करते हो,
अब ये अपने अब्दुल के साथ सेकुलरिज्म इंज्वाय कर रही है @NSO365 identity not confirmed pic.twitter.com/AG9bpOuWTr

— Jajabor (@jajabor_sanjeev) June 10, 2023

Another Twitter user has also tweeted this video with a similar claim. (Archived link)

कुछ दिन पहले इसको ट्विटर पर बहुत से लोगों ने समझाया था तो बोलती थी कि तुम नफरती हो, हिन्दू मुस्लिम करते हो, अब क्या ये अपने अब्दुल के साथ सेकुलरिज्म इंज्वाय कर रही हे….? गौर से देखिए । pic.twitter.com/RhxS00FK4r

— रजनीश कुमार 15.1K+100% FB (@Rajnesh_3840) June 10, 2023

Many other users also posted this video on Facebook and Twitter.

Fact Check

To gather information about the video, Alt News performed a keyword search on YouTube. We found a report dated June 5 by a YouTube channel named ‘India News‘ covering the viral video. It mentions that the incident occurred in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh and the couple seen in the clip are husband and wife. The man has been identified as Shivam. 

Another video report by MSS NEWS included a statement by the victim, identified as Jyoti Yadav. Jyoti reveals that her husband had beaten her because of dowry. He also had an affair with another woman. After beating up his wife, he took her to a place near a railway gate and threatened her with dire consequences if she said anything other than what her husband told her to. At the end of the statement, Jyoti explains that no action was taken thus far following her complaint.

After the fight, Shivam fled, leaving his wife and two daughters behind. Later, the woman went to a police station in a critical condition, and was admitted to a hospital. At the same time, the victim’s mother lodged a complaint against Shivam and his parents at the Bakwer police station. Zee Salaam and ABP Live also published reports covering this incident.

Using this information as a clue, we found a report by Amar Ujala which stated that Shivam Yadav brutally beat his wife Jyoti in Nahariya village in Bakwar region. The reason for the assault was said to be non-fulfillment of dowry promises. It also quotes the woman’s mother, Munni Devi, as saying that Shivam and her daughter had got married five years ago. Shivam, a driver by profssion, often beat up Jyoti over dowry demands.

To sum it up, the man who beat up his wife in the viral video is not a Muslim. The individual has been identified as Shivam, who allegedly beat his wife over dowry demands.

The post Shivam from UP beat up wife over dowry, video shared with ‘Abdul’ jibe to communalise crime appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kinjal.

On Monday, May 8, the provincial directorate of the Taliban-controlled Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the eastern province of Khost detained four journalists after summoning them for questioning, according to the exile-based media support group Afghanistan Journalists Center and the London-based broadcaster Afghanistan International.

Authorities accused the journalists of violating the Taliban’s media policies, according to the AFJC report, which cited an anonymous source that did not specify which policies they allegedly violated. CPJ could not immediately determine where the journalists are being held.

“The Taliban must immediately release four journalists recently detained in Khost province and stop the harassment and intimidation of the press in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The Taliban must abide by its own promise to protect press freedom. The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice should be held accountable for its crackdown on journalists.”

Those sources identified the journalists as Sakhi Sarwar Miakhel, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Gharghast Radio and TV; Mohammad ud Din Shah Khiali, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Wolas Ghag Radio; Pamir Andish Mohaidi, editor-in-chief of the privately owned Chinar Radio; and Abdul Rahman Ashna, a reporter with the privately owned broadcaster Nan FM.

Shabir Ahmad Osmani, the Taliban’s director of information and public affairs in Khost, said the journalists had been summoned so authorities could share “some important issues” with them, and denied that they had been detained, according to AFJC.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response.

Afghanistan’s independent media have come under increasing pressure since the Taliban took back control of the country in 2021. On March 31, Taliban authorities shut down the women-run broadcaster Radio Sada e Banowan for allegedly playing music, which the Taliban banned after its return to power.  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

Police filed the first information report opening the investigation following a complaint by Masud Rana, a businessman who alleged Bhuttow had defamed Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s information and broadcasting minister and joint general secretary of the ruling Awami League party, in a London Bangla Channel video published on January 4, according to a copy of the report reviewed by CPJ.

In that video, Bhuttow alleged that Mahmud had purchased a residential property in the United Arab Emirates using laundered money.

The complaint accuses Bhuttow and London Bangla Channel of violating five sections of the Digital Security Act: transmission or publication of offensive, false, or threatening information; unauthorized collection or use of identity information; publication or transmission of defamatory information; publication or transmission of information that deteriorates law and order; and abetment, according to the first information report.

Each of the first four offenses can carry a prison sentence of three to 10 years, and a fine of 300,000 to 1,000,000 taka (US$2,849 to $9,496), according to the law, which says that abetment can carry the same punishment as committing an offense itself.

Bhuttow said he did not know if any court hearings had been held in the case.

CPJ called and messaged Rana, Mahmud, and Manjur Quader Majumder, officer-in-charge of the Chawkbazar police station, but did not receive any replies. Mahmud’s personal assistant told New Age that the minister did not ask Rana to file the DSA case.

Earlier, in September 2022, Bangladesh authorities arrested Abdul Muktadir Manu, Bhuttow’s brother and a member of a local administrative unit with the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Bhuttow told CPJ that he believed authorities arrested his brother in retaliation for his journalism. Prior to the arrest, Bhuttow had published two interviews with retired Lieutenant Colonel Hasinur Rahman, who received international attention for his allegations that Bangladesh’s military intelligence secretly detained him in 2011 and 2018.

Since his brother’s arrest, Bhuttow has received threatening calls and text messages from anonymous numbers, warning him to stop his reporting or face further investigations in Bangladesh, according to Bhuttow and copies of the messages reviewed by CPJ.

A first information report on Manu’s case accused him of working with Bhuttow to spread rumors and attempting to remove Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power. Authorities also accuse Bhuttow of encouraging his brother to attack police officers in 2021, during clashes between BNP factions in the town of Moulvibazar.

Bhuttow told CPJ that Manu was not involved in that incident, and he believed authorities sought to prolong Manu’s arbitrary detention and intimidate Bhuttow over his work. Manu was released on interim bail on September 21, 2022, and has to frequently appear in local courts for proceedings in the two cases, Bhuttow said.

Mohammad Zakaria, superintendent of the Moulvibazar district police, acknowledged receipt of CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app, but did not provide further information by the time of publication.

Since August 2022, police officers and officials with National Security Intelligence, Bangladesh’s civil intelligence agency, have repeatedly visited the homes Bhuttow’s family members, including his brother Abdul Hamid, a businessman in the capital city of Dhaka, and questioned them about their relationship with the journalist and his work, Bhuttow told CPJ.

CPJ called and messaged Roy Niyati, a Dhaka metropolitan police spokesperson, and National Security Intelligence Director-General Major General T.M. Jobair, but did not receive any replies.

CPJ has documented other instances of retaliation against the family members of foreign-based Bangladeshi journalists, including the March 2023 assault of the brother of U.K.-based journalist Zulkarnain Saer Khan, as well as the September 2022 arrest of U.K.-based journalist Shamsul Alam Liton’s brother and the October 2021 arrest of U.S.-based journalist Kanak Sarwar’s sister. Those journalists’ siblings have been released on bail, the journalists told CPJ via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On Tuesday, February 21, Taliban officials, in a meeting with journalists in the southern province of Helmand, announced a ban on all media outlets—including Taliban-run Radio Television of Helmand and Bakhtar News Agency —preparing and distributing photos and videos, according to the media watchdog Nai and a journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Taliban authorities have not clarified whether text-based media activities are still allowed; however, Bakhtar News Agency has stopped operations in Helmand, because the ban on recording video and taking pictures has prevented them from producing any content.

Separately, on Monday, February 20, Taliban officials in northern Parwan province ordered the media to change their coverage to fall in line with what is reported by the Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency, stifling all independent reporting, according to a local news report and another journalist inside Afghanistan, who spoke to CPJ by messaging app on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“The Taliban’s severe restrictions imposed on the media in Helmand and Parwan provinces reflect an alarming escalation of local information control,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “The Taliban must immediately reverse these devastating orders and allow journalists to report without fear of retaliation. Access to information inside Afghanistan depends on it.”

Abdul Ahad Talib, the Taliban governor of Helmand, said during the February 21 meeting that recording videos and taking photos are forbidden in Islam, which is why the ban includes Taliban-run outlets, the journalist told CPJ. Taliban officials also warned the journalists attending the meeting not to discuss the order publicly.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response. CPJ was unable to locate contact information for the Taliban governor of Helmand.

In August 2022, CPJ published a special report about the media crisis in Afghanistan, showing a rapid deterioration in press freedom since the Taliban retook control of the country one year earlier, marked by censorship, arrests, assaults, and restrictions on women journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.

The murder by Israeli occupation soldiers of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, was an exception, partly due to the global influence of her employer, Al Jazeera Network. Still, Israel and its allies labored to hide the news, resorting to the usual tactic of smearing those who defy the Israeli narrative.

Palestinian journalists pay a heavy price for carrying out their mission of spreading the truth about the ongoing Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Their work is not only critical to good and balanced media coverage, but to the very cause of justice and freedom in Palestine.

In a recent report on January 17, PJS detailed some of the harrowing experiences of Palestinian journalists. “Dozens of journalists were targeted by the occupation forces and settlers during the last year, which (recorded) the highest number of serious attacks against Palestinian journalists.”

However, the harm inflicted on Palestinian journalists is not only physical and material. They are also constantly exposed to a very subtle, but equally dangerous, threat: the constant delegitimization of their work.

The Violence of Delegitimization

One of the writers of this piece, Romana Rubeo, attended a close meeting involving over 100 Italian journalists on January 18, which aimed at advising them on how to report accurately on Palestine. Rubeo did her best to convey some of the facts discussed in this article, which she practices daily as the Managing Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.

However, a veteran Israeli journalist, often touted for her courageous reporting on Palestine, dropped a bombshell when she suggested that Palestinians cannot always be trusted with the little details. She communicated something to this effect: Though the truth is on the Palestinian side, they cannot be totally trusted about the little details, while the Israelis are more reliable on the little things, but they lie about the big picture.

As outrageous – let alone Orientalist – such thinking may appear, it dwarfs in comparison to the state-operated hasbara machine of the Israeli government.

But is it true that Palestinians cannot be trusted with the little details?

When Abu Akleh was killed, she was not the only journalist targeted in Jenin. Her companion, another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was present and was also shot and wounded by an Israeli bullet in the back.

Naturally, al-Samoudi was the main eyewitness to what had taken place on that day. He told journalists from his hospital bed that there was no fighting in that area; that he and Shireen were wearing clearly marked press vests; that they were intentionally targeted by Israeli soldiers and that Palestinian fighters were not anywhere close to the range from which they were shot.

All of this was dismissed by Israel, and, in turn, by western mainstream media, since supposedly ‘Palestinians could not be trusted with the little details.’

However, investigations by international human rights groups and, eventually a bashful Israeli admission of possible guilt, proved that al-Samoudi’s account was the most honest detailing of the truth. This episode has been repeated hundreds of times throughout the years where, from the outset, Palestinian views are dismissed as untrue or exaggerated, and the Israeli narrative is embraced as the only possible truth, only for the truth to be eventually revealed, authenticating the Palestinian side every time. Quite often, true facts are revealed too little too late.

The tragic murder of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah remains the most shameful episode of western media bias, to this day. The death of the boy, who was killed by Israeli occupation troops in Gaza in 2000 while sheltered by his father’s side, was essentially blamed on Palestinians, before the narrative of his murder was rewritten suggesting that he was killed in the ‘crossfire’. That version of the story eventually changed to the reluctant acceptance of the Palestinian reporting on the event. However, the story didn’t end here, as Zionist hasbara continued to push its narrative, smearing those who adopt the Palestinian version as being anti-Israel or even ‘antisemitic’.

(No) Permission to Narrate

Though Palestinian journalism has proved its effectiveness in recent years – with the Gaza wars being a prime example – thanks to the power of social media and its ability to disseminate information directly to news consumers, the challenges remain great.

Nearly four decades after the publishing of Edward Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate”, and over ten years after Rafeef Ziadah’s seminal poem “We Teach Life, Sir”, it seems that, in some media platforms and political environments, Palestinians still need to acquire permission to narrate, partly because of the anti-Palestinian racism that continues to prevail, but also because, per the judgment of a supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist, Palestinians cannot be entrusted with the little details.

However, there is much hope in this story. There is a new, empowered and courageous generation of Palestinian activists – authors, writers, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers and artists – that is more than qualified to represent Palestinians and to present a cohesive, non-factional, and universal political discourse on Palestine.

A New Generation’s Search for the Truth

Indeed, times have changed, and Palestinians are no longer requiring filters – as in those speaking on their behalf, since Palestinians are supposedly inherently incapable of doing so.

The authors of this article have recently interviewed two representatives of this new generation of Palestinian journalists, two strong voices that advocate authentic Palestinian presence in international media: journalists and editors Ahmed Alnaouq and Fahya Shalash.

Shalash is a West Bank-based reporter, who discussed media coverage based on Palestinian priorities, counting many examples of important stories that often go unreported.  “As Palestinian women, we have a lot of obstacles in our life and they are (all) related to the Israeli Occupation because it’s very dangerous to work as a journalist. All the world saw what happened to Shireen Abu Akleh for reporting the truth on Palestine,” she said.

Shalash understands that being a Palestinian reporting on Palestine is not just a professional, but an emotional and personal experience, as well. “When I work and I am on the phone with the families of Palestinian prisoners or martyrs, sometimes I break into tears.”

Indeed, stories about the abuse and targeting of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers are hardly a media topic. “Israel puts on the democracy mask; they pretend that they care for women’s rights, but this is not at all what happens here,” the Palestinian journalist said.

“They hit Palestinian female journalists because they are physically weaker; they curse them with very inappropriate language. I was personally detained for interrogation by Israeli forces. This affected my work. They threatened me, saying that if I continued to depict them as criminals in my work, they would have stopped me from being a journalist.”

“In Western media, they keep talking about women’s rights and gender equality, but we don’t have rights at all. We do not live like any other country,” she added.

For his part, Alnaouq, who is the head of the Palestine-based organization ‘We Are Not Numbers’, explained how mainstream media never allow Palestinian voices to be present in their coverage. Even pieces written by Palestinians are “heavily edited”.

“It is also the editors’ fault,” he said. “Sometimes they make big mistakes. When a Palestinian is killed in Gaza or in the West Bank, the editors should say who is the perpetrator, but these publications often omit this information. They do not mention Israel as the perpetrator. They have some kind of agenda that they want to impose.”

When asked how he would change the coverage of Palestine if he worked as an editor in a mainstream Western publication, Alnaouq said:

I would just tell the truth. And this is what we want as Palestinians. We want the truth. We don’t want Western media to be biased toward us and attack Israel, we just want them to tell the truth as it should be.

Prioritizing Palestine

Only Palestinian voices can convey the emotions of highly charged stories about Palestine, stories that never make it to mainstream media coverage; and when they do, these stories are often missing context, prioritize Israeli views – if not outright lies – and, at times, omit Palestinians altogether. But as the work of Abu Akleh, al-Samoudi, Alnaouq and Shalash, and hundreds more, continues to demonstrate, Palestinians are qualified to produce high-quality journalism, with integrity and professionalism.

Palestinians must be the core of the Palestinian narrative in all of its manifestations. It is time to break away from the old way of thinking that saw the Palestinian as incapable of narrating, or of being a liability on his/her own story, of being secondary characters that can be replaced or substituted by those who are deemed more credible and truthful. Anything less than this can be rightfully mistaken for Orientalist thinking of a bygone era; or worse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo.

But four years later – despite police assurances of progress and two arrests – nobody has been tried or convicted in the journalist’s murder. Meanwhile, crimes against journalists continue. Since Divela’s death, at least 30 other Ghanaian journalists and media workers have faced abuses in connection with their work, including attacks, threats, and arrests.

Ahead of the fourth anniversary of Divela’s murder, CPJ followed up on each of these cases to learn whether anybody had been held responsible. While there were a few patchy attempts at accountability, CPJ found a broad pattern of impunity that flies in the face of Ghana’s reputation as a stable democracy where freedom of the press is enshrined in the country’s constitution.    

Since 2019, CPJ’s research shows that 14 journalists and media workers have been physically attacked in relation to their work – nine of them by members of Ghana’s police or military. The attacks have continued in spite of Ghana’s police and media groups adopting a 2019 framework for improved relations and the safety of journalists. Officials involved were rarely disciplined, and when action was taken journalists said it was insufficient.

In one incident, police officers kicked and punched journalist Malik Sullemana when they arrested him in March 2019, leaving him with blood clots in his left eye and bruises on his limbs. Police temporarily suspended three officers while they conducted an investigation, but Sullemana said that he received no further update about the inquiry. He said that he has since seen several officers involved back on the street in uniform. 

“When something happens people talk about it and then it fizzles out,” said Sullemana, one of the 17 Ghanaian journalists and media workers detained since 2019, most of them briefly.

CPJ found that at least 10 journalists have received written or verbal threats in connection with their work over the past four years. That includes Erastus Asare Donkor, who went into hiding after he was threatened on television by parliament member Kennedy Ohene Agyapong in July 2021. Agyapong, who had also threatened Divela before his murder, said Donkor should be “beaten seriously” over his reporting about Ghanaian officers’ alleged shooting of protesters. Police and parliament both opened investigations into Agyapong’s statement, but the journalist said he was never informed of the findings.

In addition, since 2019, CPJ has documented attacks on the offices of at least three private broadcasters – Benya FM, Zylofon FM, and Radio Ada FM – during which the assailants assaulted journalists, vandalized the premises, or stole equipment. In separate interviews, staff from each of the outlets said the authorities’ responses were insufficient.

In the January 2021 attack on Zylofon FM, for instance, the broadcaster’s security guard shot the attacker and police apprehended the injured man, but after he recovered he escaped from the hospital and has not been rearrested, according to Zylofon presenter Ahmed Abubakar.

The broad lack of accountability has resulted in a tendency toward self-censorship among members of the media, say those interviewed by CPJ. 

“Journalists will always balance a likely attack against the benefits of the story they are pursuing,” said Muheeb Saeed, senior Africa program officer with the Media Foundation for West Africa, a Ghana-based organization that monitors press freedom across the region. He questions whether Ghana’s authorities have the will to protect the press. “The state is too powerful to fail if it actually meant to stamp out impunity. At the highest level there is no commitment.”

Sullemana, for his part, said the attacks amounted to a stain on the country’s reputation. “We are one of the countries in Africa that the rest of the world looks up to. The world considers Ghana as a country of good governance and rule of law,” he told CPJ. But, he said, “it is not safe to practice journalism in Ghana.”

CPJ emailed Ghana’s police press office and its parliament but received no response. Phone calls to police spokesperson Grace Ansah Akrofi went unanswered. CPJ also emailed Ghana’s military but received no response.

Here are details of the cases involving the 30 journalists who have faced abuses for their work since Divela’s murder and what, if anything, authorities have done to respond.

• Malik Sullemana and Raissa Sambou Ebu, reporters for the state-owned Ghanaian Times, were attacked by police in March 2019, and Sullemana was also arrested. Police temporarily suspended three officers involved and opened investigations into others, but Sullemana told CPJ the journalists received no follow up from authorities and that he subsequently saw the officers who attacked him on the street in uniform. 

• Emmanuel Ajarfor Abugri and Emmanuel Yeboah Britwum, an editor and a reporter with privately owned news website Modern Ghana, were arrested by officers from Ghana’s Ministry of National Security in June 2019. Officers confiscated their phones and laptops, and allegedly tortured Abugri. He sued the National Security Coordinator, Inspector General of Police, and Attorney General over the incident and in June 2022 those authorities settled the case, agreeing to publish an apology to Abugri, to recover his confiscated devices, and to compensate the journalist 50,000 Ghanaian cedis (US$ 4,946), according to court documents reviewed by CPJ. As of early 2023, Abugri had received no apology nor the money he is owed, according to his lawyer, Samson Lardy Anyenini. In addition, authorities named in the lawsuit appear to want to revisit the settlement. In a letter, which CPJ reviewed, they asked the journalist’s lawyer to “discuss a proposed revision” of the requirement for an apology.

• Bestway Zottor, director of privately owned broadcaster Radio Tongu, was arrested and detained for two days in January 2020 after authorities accused him of using his radio station to promote separatist agitation. The next month, authorities closed down the broadcaster, which remained closed as of early this year, Zottor told CPJ. 

• Samuel Adobah, a journalist with the privately owned TV Africa broadcaster was attacked by security officers in April 2020. Adobah told CPJ that the military sent him a letter of apology saying the officer who attacked him would be penalized and the military would compensate medical bills for injuries incurred during the attack. Adobah said that he never learned what happened to the officer nor did he receive any money from the military, which did replace a phone that an officer smashed. 

• Yussif Abdul Ganiyu, a reporter for the German government-funded Deutsche Welle, was attacked and briefly detained by security officers in April 2020. Ganiyu told CPJ that Deutsche Welle reported the incident to the Ministry of Information and that he gave a statement to the military police about the attack but that nobody followed up with him. 

• Emmanuel Ohene-Gyan, an editor with the privately owned radio broadcaster Empire FM, was threatened by a family member of a politician in June 2020 over Ohene-Gyan’s reporting that the politician died of COVID-19. The individual said that he must remove his reporting or face the family’s anger. Ohene-Gyan told CPJ that he didn’t report the threats to police because he believed they wouldn’t be taken seriously.  

• Rebecca Asheley Amarh, a reporter with the privately owned Kingdom FM radio broadcaster, was briefly arrested in June 2020. In the same incident, police threatened Philip Akutey Azu, a reporter for the privately owned Atinka TV broadcaster. The two were forced to delete their footage of police slapping a delegate of a local political party. Amah told CPJ that they provided a statement to the Ghana Journalists Association about the incident, but did not learn if anyone had been held to account. 

• Stanley Nii Blewu was beaten by soldiers when both he and Joseph Armstrong Gold-Alorgbey were briefly detained in August 2020. The two reporters for the privately owned TV3 broadcaster had been reporting on a sanitation project. At the time, a military spokesperson told CPJ it was a “misunderstanding” that had been resolved. Blewu said that he didn’t hear further from the military. 

• David Tamakloe, editor in chief of the privately owned Whatsup News, was arrested and criminally charged for “false news” reporting in October 2020. Tamakloe was again arrested and detained by authorities on separate “false news” allegations in April 2021, but has not been formally charged. Tamakloe told CPJ that his 2020 case was ongoing, but his last hearing was in December of that year and he has not been notified of the status of the case. 

• Oheneba Boamah Bennie, a host with the privately owned Power FM broadcaster, was arrested and detained by authorities in December 2020. Authorities sentenced the journalist in February 2022 to two weeks in prison and fined him 3,000 Ghana cedis ($US468) on a contempt of court charge over posts about politics he made on Facebook.

• In December 2020, Afia Pokuaa, an anchor with privately owned Despite Media, was threatened with death for her reporting on that year’s general election by a Ghanaian YouTube personality. She left the country for several weeks as a result. She said she reported the threats to police but received no follow up. 

• In late December 2020, freelance investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni was threatened with death in emails over his election reporting. He said he reported the threats to police, but they closed the case after failing to find the perpetrators. 

• In January 2021, Phillip John Quartey, an anchor with the privately owned broadcaster Metro TV, and a colleague he declined to name for security reasons were verbally threatened by two unidentified men who exited a car and told him they wanted to kill him over his reporting. Philip said he reported the matter to police, who told him they were investigating and would get back to him. As of early 2023 he had not heard from them. 

• In early January 2021, an unidentified man broke into the office of privately owned radio broadcaster Zylofon FM and began shouting the name of anchor Ahmed Abubakar before pepper spraying a technician and vandalizing equipment. Abubakar was unharmed and a security guard shot the man. Police took him to the hospital but he escaped and remains at large. 

• Erastus Asare Donkor, Kofi Asare, and Michael Sakyi, respectively a reporter, a camera operator, and a driver for YouTube-based news outlet Joy News, were arrested and detained, and their car attacked by soldiers in January 2021. Donkor told CPJ that the military conducted an investigation but he was never apprised of any findings. 

• In a separate incident, politician Kennedy Ohene Agyapong said Donkor should be “beaten seriously” for his reporting in July 2021. Donkor told CPJ that Agyapong had not been held accountable for his actions as police and parliament did not release the findings of their investigations into the incident. 

• Caleb Kudah and Zoe Abu-Baidoo Addo, reporters with the privately owned Citi FM broadcaster, were arrested and detained by Ghanaian police in May 2021, and officers beat Kudah in custody. Ghanaian authorities announced the suspension of four officers involved, but within days local media reported that one of the suspended officers was reinstated and promoted. 

• Korle Adjaotor Sorngortse, Ruby Ate, and Gideon Amanor Dzeagu, staff of privately owned broadcaster Radio Ada FM, were attacked in January 2022 at their office by 10 masked and armed men, who threatened to come back and shoot them if they didn’t stop reporting on a specific story. Authorities opened an investigation into the incident, but Dzeagu told CPJ in early 2023 that “we have not received any feedback from the police.” 

• Eric Nana Gyetuah, a producer with privately owned broadcaster Connect FM, was arrested and attacked by police officers in February 2022. Gyetuah told CPJ that police officers had assured him months after the attack that they would inform him if they had any update on their investigation. He has not heard anything since.   

• Michael Aidoo, a member of an investigative journalism fellowship program organized by the local press freedom group Media Foundation for West Africa, was attacked by soldiers who apprehended him and took him to a military base in March 2022. Muheeb Saeed, a senior program officer at the foundation, told CPJ in early 2023 that the defense ministry had not responded to a letter it sent requesting an investigation into the incident. 

• Eric Blessing Eshun and Emmanuel Egyirfah, a host and a producer with privately owned broadcaster Benya FM, were attacked in May 2022. Ghanaian police charged three men for the attack but local media reported that the men pleaded not guilty and were granted bail within days. The journalists’ colleague, Usman Kwaku Dawood, told CPJ that a ruling in the case was expected on January 25.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Evelyn Okakwu.

One of the men held him at gunpoint, threatening to kill him, while the other tried to break into his car, according to Mujeeb, who spoke with CPJ by phone, the Urdupoint news website, and the Digital Media Alliance of Pakistan, a local digital media industry group.  

Mujeeb said he fought back, taking away the pistol from the man holding him at gunpoint after he opened fire and hit the seat of Mujeeb’s car. Mujeeb handed the gun over to the police while filing a report on the incident.

Mujeeb founded the IMN three years ago, focusing on current issues in Gilgit-Baltistan, a part of the Kashmir region that borders Afghanistan and China. IMN has over 250,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 2,300 followers on YouTube.

He believes the attack may have been a failed abduction attempt and says the Gilgit-Baltistan government has not launched any investigation to find the attackers – possibly, he says, because  IMN’s Editor-in-Chief Shabbir Mir wrote an April 2022 report for The Express Tribune, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, alleging that Gilgit-Baltitstan’s chief minister held a fake law degree.

CPJ emails to the office of the chief minister and the Gilgit-Baltitstan government’s secretariat did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On September 13, officers with the detective branch of the Bangladesh police, in the Noakhali town of the southeast Chittagong division, arrested Nur Alam Chowdhury Pervez, brother of Shamsul Alam Liton, editor of the privately owned United Kingdom-based Weekly Surma newspaper, according to news reports, a report by The Weekly Surma, a Twitter thread by Bangladeshi editor Tasneem Khalil, and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

The September 13 police first information report, a document that opens an investigation, accuses the U.K.-based Liton of spreading anti-government propaganda on social media platforms and alleges that Pervez conspires with Liton to create “confusion and agitation” among the public.

Separately, on September 9, police in Moulvibazar town in the northeast Sylhet division arrested Abdul Muktadir Manu, brother of Abdur Rab Bhuttow, a special correspondent for The Weekly Surma and head of the privately owned digital news platform London Bangla Channel, according to news reports and a person familiar with the case, who spoke to CPJ by phone on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

“The Bangladesh government’s targeting of family members of critical journalists is an egregious form of retaliation that must not go unnoticed by its diplomatic partners and the international community,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “Authorities must swiftly and unconditionally release Nur Alam Chowdhury Pervez and Abdul Muktadir Manu and cease subjecting family members of foreign-based journalists to detention, harassment, and other forms of reprisal.”

The September 10 police first information report alleges that Manu is conspiring with the U.K.-based Bhuttow to remove Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power and “destroy the image of the state.”

Both police reports cited a section of the Bangladesh Code of Criminal Procedure that allows authorities to conduct warrantless arrests if there is “reasonable suspicion” that an individual may commit an offense.

The arrests came days before the prime minister left on official visits to the U.K. and the United States.

The person familiar with Pervez’ case told CPJ that he is also the brother of Hasina Akhter, host of the U.K.-based political affairs talk show Table Talk with Hasina Akhter, and Shah Alam Faruq, editor of the U.K.-based, privately owned digital news platform Shoja Kotha. On August 14, Liton published an editorial for The Weekly Surma calling on Hasina to hold government officials accountable for alleged money laundering.

CPJ’s source said they believed Pervez’ arrest was either retaliation for his sibling’s critical journalism or because of Liton’s organization of a protest in front of the British parliament in support of Bangladeshi victims of enforced disappearances on August 30. Pervez is the Noakhali district president of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, a socialist party associated with Hasina’s ruling Awami League party.

Separately, the person familiar with Manu’s case told CPJ that they believed his arrest was in retaliation for Bhuttow’s critical journalistic work, most notably two interviews he published on the London Bangla Channel in August 2022 with retired lieutenant colonel Hasinur Rahman, who received international attention for his allegation that Bangladesh’s military intelligence secretly detained him on two separate occasions in 2011 and 2018.

That person told CPJ that Bhuttow received several anonymous threatening calls and messages following the publication of these interviews, warning him to stop his critical journalistic work.

Manu is a government servant with a local administrative unit associated with the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, according to news reports and the person familiar with the case, who added that Moulvibazar jail authorities have denied Manu access to his family since his arrest.

The Bangladesh police, the Awami League, and the prime minister’s office did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.

Previously, Bangladesh authorities detained Nusrat Shahrin Raka, sister of the U.S.-based Bangladeshi journalist Kanak Sarwar, from October 2021 to March 2022, and have repeatedly harassed the mother of Khalil, who is based in Sweden as the editor-in-chief of the Netra News website.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

In mid-August, Sierra Leone’s broadcast media regulator, National Telecommunications Commission, suspended the licenses of privately owned broadcasters Star Radio and Star TV for over two weeks and denied workers access to the broadcasters’ transmitters in Brookfields, a neighborhood in western Freetown, the capital, according to an August 19 commission statement and Philip Neville, the broadcasters’ founder who holds 70% ownership of shares and handles the finances.

Neville, who spoke with CPJ by phone, said that in mid-August, commission officers arrived at the offices of the broadcasters’ transmitters and ordered all the staff to vacate the premises. Neville also said the officers told him that they gave the order because the broadcasters failed to pay about 140 million leones (US$10,000) of allegedly accumulated debt that the broadcasters owed to the commission for broadcast licenses, including some licenses no longer in use. Before the commission officers’ visit and the suspension of licenses, the broadcasters believed payments to the commission were up to date and there was no debt, according to Neville.

“Authorities in Sierra Leone should allow Star television and radio stations to continue reporting the news and provide the public with information,” said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, in Nairobi. “Media regulators are too often used as tools to gag the media and the suspension of Star raises concern over freedom of the press in Sierra Leone.”  

The commission’s statement said that the broadcasters failed to comply with sections 30 and 65 of the country’s telecommunications laws. According to CPJ’s review, Section 30 allows the commission to suspend or cancel broadcast licenses for various violations, including fraud, treason, or “where the suspension or cancellation is in the public interest”; Section 65 requires broadcasters to obtain “a general or specific license” to operate a radio transmitter. Neither section indicated penalties for violations and CPJ could not determine how the commission calculated the US$10,000 amount.

On August 25, Neville said that the broadcasters were permitted to resume usage of the transmitters and begin broadcasting again after his office paid 74 million leones, the equivalent of about US$5,300, to the regulator on August 23, adding that the regulator still expected the broadcasters to pay the remaining amount.

According to Neville and a copy of a 2017 letter he wrote to the commission, which CPJ reviewed, authorities granted the broadcasters separate licenses to operate in five regions—Freetown, Mile 91, Makeni, Bo, and Kenema—at the cost of US$700 annually for each radio frequency and US$2,000 annually for one television frequency.

Neville’s 2017 letter also said he had informed the commission that year that the broadcasters no longer used three of the frequencies in Bo, Kenema, and Makeni to reduce production costs, but continued to pay 6 million leones (about US$430) monthly to cover the licenses still in use. However, Neville told CPJ that the commission continued to bill his office for renewal of licenses no longer in use. Neville told CPJ that the broadcasters had always paid for the licenses used. 

Neville told CPJ that he did not understand how the US$10,000 amount had been determined. He added that paying that full amount would place financial strain on the broadcasters’ operations.

Daniel Kaitibi, commission director general, and Abdul Ben-Foday, commission director of corporate and industry affairs, both confirmed to CPJ over the phone that the broadcasters’ licenses were suspended because they allegedly owed the commission US$10,000. Ben-Foday told CPJ that the commission was empowered by law to make access to the licenses conditional on payment.

Neville alleged that the commission’s decision to suspend his broadcasters’ licenses was in reprisal for Star TV’s August 13 airing of an episode of a Facebook talk show “Tell It To Racheal,” by U.S.-based journalist Racheal Bangura Davies.  

Participants on the episode, which CPJ reviewed, blamed the Sierra Leonean government for causing violence that erupted during a nationwide protest on August 10.

Neville said the airing of the talk show episode “did not go down well” with the government, which accused the broadcasters of inciting the public against authorities. The government used the commission to punish the broadcasters, Neville said.

In a text message to CPJ, Sierra Leone information minister Mohamed Rahman Swaray denied that the suspension of the broadcasters’ licenses was connected to the airing of the talk show episode.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Lansana also tried to throw Gbla’s phone, which he was using to film, to the ground, the journalist told CPJ, saying he was able to keep control of his camera but was forced to stop filming.

The incident took place while Gbla filmed members of parliament arguing after a hearing on the country’s new currency, when some of the politicians attempted to stop him, saying that the hearing had ended and there was no more news to report, he told CPJ.

In a phone interview, Lansana told CPJ that he believed the discussion among members of parliament was cordial, and said he stopped the journalist from filming because the session had ended, and he believed further recording would prevent parliament members from conducting cordial discussions.

The journalist said he refused to stop filming until Lansana pushed him so hard he struggled to stand upright, and then other members of parliament intervened and escorted Gbla out of the building.

While discussing the incident during a July 7 interview with privately owned broadcaster Epic Radio, Lansana confirmed pushing Gbla, whom he accused of trespassing, but added that he did not intend to fight with the journalist, only to ensure that he left the premises. Lansana also cited his displeasure with Gbla TV’s coverage of him in 2020. In a report that year, Gbla TV described Lansana as securing his position through a court decision, rather than an electoral victory.

When CPJ asked how the 2020 Gbla TV report influenced his behavior, Lansana declined to comment.

After the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists sent a letter on Gbla’s behalf to the parliament’s clerk, the clerk apologized to Gbla and promised to investigate the incident, the journalist told CPJ.

CPJ called and texted the clerk, Umarr Paran Tarawally, for comment on various phone numbers, but the calls did not connect and text messages failed to deliver.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The letter is addressed to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and State Secretary and Special Envoy for International Climate Action Jennifer Morgan, who are scheduled to co-chair the Petersberg Climate Dialogue with el-Sisi on July 18 and 19.

The signatories urge Baerbock and Morgan to press el-Sisi to release all individuals arbitrarily detained in Egypt for their journalism, to unblock all censored news websites, and to ensure that the rights of press freedom, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association are protected.

The letter notes that such reforms are particularly vital ahead of the COP27 U.N. summit on climate change, scheduled to be held in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh in November.

The letter also called for the release of jailed blogger and journalist Alaa Abdelfattah, who has been on hunger strike for over 100 days to protest the dire conditions of his imprisonment. As of December 1, 2021, at least 25 journalists were imprisoned in Egypt, making it the third worst jailer of journalists in the world.

The full letter can be read here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“The Taliban must take immediate measures to halt repeated arbitrary detentions and abuse of journalists in Afghanistan,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The Taliban must immediately release journalists Abdul Hannan Mohammadi and Khan Mohammad Sial and investigate the assault of Mohammad Ikram Esmati.”

On May 10, Taliban police in the provincial capital Trinkot in southern Uruzgan province detained Sial, a broadcast manager for independent Paiwaston TV station, and have held him in Uruzgan’s central prison since then, according to a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, and tweets by veteran Afghanistan journalist Bilal Sarwary.

The journalist told CPJ that Taliban members beat Sial and told him to confess that his outlet was funded by foreigners and was both morally and financially corrupt. The Taliban members also told Sial that he would be released if he confessed, according to the journalist familiar with the case.

Separately, on June 14, Taliban intelligence agents detained Mohammadi, a reporter for Pajhwok news agency in northern Kapisa province, while he was on his way to an assignment and transferred him to an undisclosed location, according to a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation and independent news website Etilaatroz. CPJ was unable to confirm the reason for Mohammadi’s detention.

In a separate incident on June 14, Esmati, a former journalist for the independent Kabul News TV station, was stopped in District 5 of the capital Kabul and searched at a Taliban checkpoint by a Taliban member, who found his press identification cards and began questioning him about his journalism, according to Esmati, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a BBC Persian report. Esmati was dismissed by the outlet one day before the assault for an unknown reason, according to those sources.

Three Taliban members then put Esmati in a vehicle, drove him to a remote area, and beat him with their guns and fists for approximately five minutes until he received a hard blow to the head and lost consciousness, according to those sources. Esmati said he believed he was unconscious for about 10 minutes and was alone when he woke up. Esmati was later treated at a hospital and said he was not seriously injured.

CPJ has documented the increasingly prominent role of the General Directorate of Intelligence in controlling news media and intimidating Afghanistan journalists.

CPJ contacted Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesperson, for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response. CPJ was unable to determine contact information for Kabul News TV. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Reporting in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has become so difficult that dozens of Kashmiri journalists have fled the valley in recent months, fearing they will be the government’s next targets, three journalists told CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.  Gul, a journalism student and trainee reporter at the independent online news portal The Kashmir Walla who was initially arrested for tweeting a video of a protest, is one of three journalists targeted amid the recent Public Safety Act crackdown.

Police have since re-arrested two other journalists — Fahad Shah, founder and editor of The Kashmir Walla, and Aasif Sultan, a journalist with the independent monthly magazine Kashmir Narrator — under the law after they were granted court-ordered bail in separate cases.

The re-arrests follow the government shutdown of the Kashmir Press Club, the largest elected trade body representing the region’s journalists, in January.

The following month, an executive magistrate issued an arrest warrant for Gowhar Geelani, a prominent Kashmiri writer and commentator, on grounds of preventative detention to keep the peace. A self-identified “civil society” group plastered “wanted” posters in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district offering a reward for information on Geelani, who has gone underground, a local correspondent for a news magazine, who is familiar with his case, told CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

On April 17, officials with the newly created State Investigation Agency (SIA), tasked with investigating terrorism cases, arrested research scholar Abdul Aala Fazili for an opinion article published in The Kashmir Walla in 2011.

The arrests and harassment of Kashmiri journalists follow the resurgence of the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, following the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Intent on converting India from a secular democracy to a Hindu rashtra (nation), the BJP-led government has worked to extend its dominance over Muslim-majority Kashmir through heavy militarization as well as arbitrary detentions and crackdowns on freedom of expression. By targeting the local press, the government seeks to tighten its control over the narrative surrounding its human rights abuses in Kashmir, two of the journalists who requested anonymity told CPJ.

Sambit Patra and Syed Zafar Islam, national spokespeople for the BJP, did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app. Dilbag Singh, director-general of the Jammu and Kashmir police, also did not respond to requests sent via messaging app. The offices of Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and India’s Home Ministry, which oversees the Jammu and Kashmir administration, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

In 2017, the government began targeting Kashmiri journalists under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which carries harsh bail provisions. At age 22, photojournalist Kamran Yousuf was the first Kashmiri journalist detained under the law, from September 2017 until March 2018. In March 2022, a court finally discharged him of the UAPA terror funding allegation due to lack of evidence.

Sultan was also arrested under the UAPA, in August 2018, after he published an article in the Kashmir Narrator on Burhan Wani, leader of the armed Hizbul Mujahideen group, whose killing by Indian security forces in 2016 sparked massive anti-government protests. The case against Sultan, who is accused of “harboring known terrorists,” has been marred by procedural delays and evidentiary irregularities.

Sultan was finally granted bail in the UAPA case on April 5, but he was held at a police station in Srinagar for five days without legal basis before being re-arrested under the Public Safety Act. He is now detained in a jail in Uttar Pradesh, which is experiencing a massive heat wave.

After the BJP-led government’s unilateral revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special autonomy status in August 2019, Kashmiri journalists faced significant obstacles when authorities imposed an internet shutdown and communications blackout. 4G access was not officially restored until February 2021. Authorities have shut down the internet in various areas of Kashmir at least 25 times this year, according to the digital blackout monitoring website InternetShutdown.in.

Meanwhile, legal harassment, threats, physical attacks, and raids on the homes of journalists and their family members have become the new norm. In 2020, the government introduced a stringent media policy that presented new guidelines on media accreditation and empowered the government to determine what constitutes “fake news.”

Online archives of local newspapers are disappearing as well, in what freelance journalist Aakash Hassan called an “erasure of memory” in a phone interview. While some archives were deleted because publications did not pay maintenance fees, others were removed in response to government pressure, two of the journalists who requested anonymity told CPJ.

Still, the use of the Public Safety Act to keep the three journalists locked up marks a disturbing new trend. While authorities have repeatedly used the law against Kashmiri human rights defenders and political leaders, CPJ has documented only one prior use against a journalist: Qazi Shibli, editor of the independent news website The Kashmiriyat, who was detained for nine months without trial from July 2019 to April 2020.

“The PSA was slapped against [Gul] only to keep him in jail after the court granted him bail,” Shah told The Wire news website prior to his own arrest just weeks later. Police first arrested Shah on February 4, on accusations of sedition and violating the UAPA. He was then trapped in a cycle of arrest, court-ordered bail, and re-arrest involving years-old criminal cases in which The Kashmir Walla and other journalists associated with the outlet, though not Shah, had been accused. On March 14, police arrested Shah for the fourth time in 40 days, under the Public Safety Act. He has since been moved to Kupwara district jail, about 80 miles from his family.

On April 17, SIA officials and police raided Shah’s home and the office of The Kashmir Walla. The police report against Fazili led to the opening of an additional terrorism investigation into the unnamed editor of The Kashmir Walla and an unspecified number of other unnamed people associated with the news site.

Since its founding in 2009, the outlet had shut down three times due to lack of funding, interim editor Yashraj Sharma told CPJ in a phone interview. “The economic situation of independent media in Kashmir was always disappointing. Now, while we cling to hope of a speedy judicial process, we face a really uncertain future ahead of us,” Sharma said.

Journalists who spoke to CPJ denounced the recent use of the Public Safety Act, particularly the vague arguments given in the government’s detention orders, which CPJ reviewed. Authorities argued that extending Gul’s detention was necessary because he would otherwise be released on court-ordered bail.

The orders against Shah and Sultan deploy eerily similar arguments, accusing the journalists of “having a radical ideology right from your childhood,” “circulating fake news,” and “working against the ethics of journalism.” And although the police asserted that Sultan was not arrested in relation to his journalism in a response posted on Twitter to CPJ’s August 2020 advertisement on Sultan’s detention in The Washington Post, the detention order specifically cites his article on Burhan Wani.

“Even if you don’t commit any crime, they are sending the message that they can jail you anytime without any real case,” a freelance Kashmiri journalist told CPJ on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

The Kashmiri media “has reached a breaking point, where journalists are wondering whether it’s worth it to report from Kashmir,” said the journalist, who recently fled the valley due to fear of government retaliation. While hoping to continue his work or studies abroad, the journalist said he has been informed by police sources that he is on a government no-fly list.

About 22 Kashmiri journalists appeared on the no-fly list as of September 2021, according to The Wire. This is in line with the accounts shared with CPJ by numerous Kashmiri journalists, who have reported significant difficulties in traveling abroad, particularly to attend panels and award functions.

The persecution of Shah and Geelani, who have contributed to foreign-based media, demonstrates that “being associated with foreign outlets doesn’t guarantee you a degree of protection anymore,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, an independent multimedia journalist from Kashmir. After Hameed Naik fled abroad in 2020 following repeated intimidation by law enforcement, his family members in Kashmir have continued to face harassment and questions about his reporting, social media posts, and plans to return, he said.

Meanwhile, self-censorship prevails among Kashmiri journalists, with local newspapers refraining from reporting on the recent arrests due to fear of reprisal and cuts to government-funded advertisements, two of the journalists who requested anonymity told CPJ. Many write without bylines.

“Everyone is grappling with the single question,” Hameed Naik said. “Who is next on the list?”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Sonali Dhawan.

The State Investigation Agency (SIA) in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir arrested Abdul Aala Fazili, a former contributor to privately owned news portal The Kashmir Walla, on Sunday, April 17, in relation to a November 2011 opinion article, according to news reports. The SIA and Kashmir police also raided The Kashmir Walla office, the home of editor Fahad Shah—who was arrested in March—and Fazili’s home, seizing electronic devices including laptops.

According to the Indian Express, the SIA claimed that Fazili’s 2011 opinion piece supporting Kashmir’s separation from the Indian state was “highly provocative, seditious and intended to create unrest” and written to propagate “the false narrative which is essential to sustain [a] secessionist cum terrorist campaign aimed at breaking the territorial integrity of India.” The SIA did not give any information as to why it was acting now on the article.

“The Jammu and Kashmir authorities’ vindictive campaign against journalists has reached the point of absurdity with the arrest of former Kashmir Walla contributor Abdul Aala Fazili and the opening of another investigation into editor Fahad Shah over an 11-year-old article,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, from Washington, D.C. “Indian authorities must drop its investigation into Fazili and Shah and immediately release them.”

Fazili is a former contributor to The Kashmir Walla who is currently a research scholar at Kashmir University, according to those news reports.

According to a statement by The Kashmir Walla, the SIA and Kashmir police raided Shah’s home and the outlet’s office for three hours on April 17. According to the outlet, officials seized two reporters laptops, a computer from the multimedia department, six hard drives, and five CDs. Officials also searched reporting notebooks and phones of two reporters who were present in the office during the raid.

The SIA accused Fazili and Shah of violating four sections of the Indian penal code, including criminal conspiracy, waging or attempting to wage war against the Indian government, sedition, and making assertions prejudicial to national integration, and two sections of the anti-terror Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for unlawful activities and terrorism, according to The Kashmir Walla.

Under the UAPA, Fazili and Shah could face up to seven years imprisonment. If found guilty of violating the four sections of the penal code, they face a life sentence.

CPJ was unable to confirm Fazili’s current whereabouts. Shah is currently in preventive custody in Kupwara District Jail after he was granted bail in two investigations where he has been accused of violating the UAPA and other Indian laws, as CPJ documented and news reports.

Dilbag Singh, the director-general of the Jammu and Kashmir police, did not immediately respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via messaging app. CPJ could not locate contact information for the SIA’s spokesperson.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.