Don’t shoot the messenger!

It is not, indeed has never been, the job of the media to come forth with positive or negative news. For journalists, the moral responsibility as also a professional one is to keep people informed of what goes on in the country, in this instance Bangladesh, and around the world. Their duty is to enlighten those in the corridors of power and those aspiring to power on happenings around the country, on the drawbacks society suffers from, on the perceived failings of government, on the ways in which the manifest wrongs visited on a nation can be righted.

When the chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission reportedly complains, in the course of a dialogue between the NHRC and the rights group Ain O Salish Kendra, of journalists projecting negative news and overlooking the positive developments taking place in the country, it becomes the job of the media to raise the issue of what an organization like the NHRC can do to be of service to citizens across the land. Human rights are guaranteed under Bangladesh's constitution, a principle which therefore makes it imperative that the NHRC play its due role. It is not enough for it to wait for reports, for certain amendments to the laws relating to it to be amended before it can make itself more effective. It needs to stress, if it feels it is in a straitjacket, the requirement for the amendment to be made through lobbying and interacting with the government of the day.

The National Human Rights Commission needs to live up to its responsibilities. There are the many ways in which it can do that. Over the issue of attacks by fanatics on religious minorities, over the damage done to their places of worship, the NHRC should be able to summon those it suspects were behind these tragic incidents as well as those it believes clearly failed in their job of coming to the aid of those belonging to religious minorities under attack and question them hard. A purposeful NHRC must have the will to do that job --- and more. Over the years, families have demanded that their sons, brothers, fathers and others who have disappeared without trace be located and returned to them. Human rights as a principle ought to have been applied here, for it is disturbing when citizens vanish and are not accounted for.

When journalists write on such sad happenings, they are not giving the nation negative news or berating the NHRC. They are simply voicing the concerns of the larger body of citizens in the expectation that such concerns will be taken cognizance of by the powers that be. For all human rights bodies and especially the NHRC, it therefore is of critical importance that every incident related to an undermining of the human rights of a citizen or a body of citizens be investigated swiftly and purposefully. Between January and November of this year, as many as 167 people died in what has been given out as gunfights. Has the NHRC thought it prudent to inquire into the circumstances in which those gunfights took place? No fewer than 78 people died in jail custody. It is perfectly plausible that some of them may have died of various illnesses, but that still does not rule out the manner in which all those others may have seen their lives come to an end.

No, the media are never happy projecting such news. Journalists in these past few years have cheerfully focused on all the positive developments which have taken place in the country --- in the economy, in women's empowerment, in education, in the expansion of digital technology across the land. But that has not prevented media people from observing the lapses occurring around them. No fewer than 198 of their own colleagues in the profession have been targets of harassment. There have been reports of land grabbing, of money laundering, of influential people with questionable sources of income buying homes abroad. Many of those sought by the law have fled to safer shores beyond the country. These are issues of public concern and journalists along with other citizens would like the NHRC to play its due role here. It can haul in the corrupt and question them; it can demand that human rights issues, of all kinds, be addressed by the authorities.

The media have faithfully reported on the consequences of natural and man-made disasters. They have, in the larger public interest, in a number of instances sought information under the Right to Information (RTI) act. In such attempts to elicit facts, they have often come up against a bureaucratic wall of resistance. When therefore a journalist writes of the failure or reluctance of a government department to provide him with the information he seeks, that is not negative reporting. It is simply shining a light on the negative attitudes of those whose task is to serve the people of this country in line with the constitution of the land. Negativism on the part of journalists comes in when they deliberately and for various inexplicable reasons hold themselves back from reporting facts. Good journalists draw the line between their professionalism and their links with influential sections of society. A good journalist will be friends with powerful politicians across the spectrum, but when it comes to questioning those politicians on the issues, he will grill them, no holds barred, on the job they have been doing or have failed to do.

Journalists are messengers who disseminate the truth. And shooting these messengers is essentially to keep the truth under wraps. Asking the media to project objectivity in their reports and assessments, telling them that they should be neutral in doing their job is as good as advising them to forgo their integrity. Journalists are a guarantee of transparency and accountability in politics and administration. They will marvel at such achievements as the construction of the Padma Bridge and will equally draw attention to the ageing freedom fighter who, unacknowledged and therefore ignored, leads a life of unmitigated poverty in a village remote from civilization.

Syed Badrul Ahsan. Sketch/TBS

No, journalists are not perfect specimens of humanity. They have their own foibles and flaws; they are prey to pettiness; they too are offered blandishments that seek to call their work into question. But, in the overall, they hold up a mirror of society, the better to make visible the potholes along the road, to ensure that exploitation by the few does not mar the future of the many.

The point should be obvious: Don't shoot the messenger. 

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a political commentator and author of biographies of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad