Will Misri be able to solve the mess in Bangladesh?

Despite the regime change and the shrill rhetoric on both sides, that India still has friends in Dhaka among the people is good news for us

- JAYANTA ROY CHOWDHURY

Munni Saha, a gutsy television journalist from Bangladesh who earlier headed ATN News, was a few days back caught at Dhaka's Karavan Bazaar by a mob of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh supporters and accused of supporting the "murder of student demonstrators" in July this year.

The murder charge was hogwash. Her real "crime" was perhaps the fact that she is a well-known secular voice in the South Asian nation of 160 million.

The popular and straight-talking TV personality had earlier placed leaders from Gen Ershad to Begum Zia to Sheikh Hasina on the mat with her questions.

Her potential ability to embarrass the current regime was obviously too high to be ignored.

The principal PR problem of the ruling dispensation in Dhaka is that the government formed by micro-finance entrepreneur-turned-politician Muhammad Yunus has mostly ministers drawn from or affiliated to the Jamaat, a party which supported and whose members were complicit in the 1971 genocide by the Pakistan army when millions of ordinary Bangladeshis were killed and hundreds of thousands of their women raped.

Ultimately, the police has placed Munni under a form of house arrest.

To defame her, a news story was also planted earlier this week about her having Taka 174 crore in her bank. The journalist in question probably does not even Tk 1.74 lakh in her bank from where she has been drawing money for the last one year to run a YouTube channel which has as yet not earned any money for her.

Saha is not alone in this predicament. Hundreds of journalists, Awami League leaders and minority community prominent faces have had various kinds of charges slapped on them and have been either shut up in jails or are under threat of being taken away in midnight raids.