Making A Difference

Reason’s Martyr

Radicalism silences a bold voice in Bangladesh

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Reason’s Martyr
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Fifteen hours after he was brutally hacked to death, Avijit Roy’s 18-year-old step-daughter Trisha lamented his death on Facebook. “Fucked up as the world is, there is never a reason to stop fighting to make it better,” she wrote. The post was shared by the International Humanist & Ethical Union, with which Roy was associated.

Of her father, Trisha posted, “He was a firm believer in voicing opinion to better the world. He and my mom started dating when I was six. In the twe­lve years that followed, he became my friend, my hero, my most trusted confidant, my dance partner (even though we were both terrible dancers) and my father. Not once did he tell me to simmer down or be more polite. He taught me to be informed, bold and unafraid....”

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Roy, an engineer by training and a writer by conviction, had studied at the Nat­ional University, Singapore, before migr­ating to Atlanta. Son of  a pro­fessor in Dhaka, he wrote with both feeling and fluidity in his native tongue and founded the blog ‘Mukto-Mona’ (Freethinker) to promote rationalist thinking.

“I hope this is the last time I have to address this issue,” Roy wrote with awful prescience in one of his last posts on January 15. He was contesting the argument of several Bangladeshi intellectuals who felt that the majority of  the followers of Islam were ‘peace-loving’. Refer­ring to his popular book Bishhaser Virus (Virus of Faith), Roy argued that while some are affected by a virus, a much larger number act as carriers or are paralysed by it. That is why Hindus in Guj­arat would not save innocent Muslim children from being killed in 2002; and that is precisely why “lakhs of peace-loving Muslims” in Bangladesh fail to save Hindu households from being attacked. Signi­ficantly, no one came to his rescue when he and his wife were dragged down from a cycle-rickshaw on a busy street in Dhaka’s university area and attacked with machetes and cleavers.

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It was futile to argue with those who believed they had the divine right to kill people, Roy, an atheist, had written in the January 15 blog post. “They are only physically present in the 21st century, but their mind and conscience have been mortgaged to the seventh century.”

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Shafiur Farabi, a suspect in his murder

The two principal political parties in Bangladesh have expectedly joined the blame game. The opposition BNP pointed an accusing finger at the ruling Awami League which, it alleged, got Roy killed to give the BNP and its ally, the Jamaat, a bad name. The failure of the police to extend protection to Roy, who never sought it but who had received threats from zealots, was cited as a pointer.

While the police, which has now sought the help of the FBI and Interpol, has arr­ested Shafiur Rahman Farabi (29) as the alleged mastermind, there is no explanation why his provocative posts in the social media had been ignored. Farabi, released on bail in August, 2013, after he was arrested for the killing of another rationalist, Ahmed Rajib Haider, had sing­led out Roy as the next target. In February 2014, he wrote ominously on Facebook: “Avijit Roy cannot be killed immediately because he lives in the US, but as and when he sets foot on Bang­ladesh, he will be murdered.” His threat seems to have escaped attention, despite Roy’s father lodging a police complaint.

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An unusually courageous blogger, Roy had taken on Islamic scholars who claimed that the Quran had laid down scientific principles. He contested the claim and  showed that none of the verses dwelt on any scientific principle. But Roy did not believe in offending critics. His writings were gentle, leavened with reason, with examples drawn from science and the natural world. His readers are going to miss him terribly.

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