Qadaruddin Shishir had spent years being called an Indian agent, a military-intelligence operative, an Islamist, an atheist and worse.
Extremists had called for his death. Political activists had twisted his name into insults. Television commentators had abused him in public. Police had followed him.
But on this day, in the newsroom of The Dissent, none of that seemed to disturb him as much as a mistake in a story that had not yet been published.
Our conversation was about to begin when an editor spotted the error. Shishir froze.
His normally composed demeanour gave way to visible anxiety. Under his breath, he recited a dua (an Islamic prayer), then hurried across the newsroom to fix the problem himself.
Over the next two hours, he would speak almost matter-of-factly about death threats, police visits, coordinated harassment and political pressure. But the possibility of publishing something inaccurate seemed to unsettle him in a more immediate way.
“If I’m going to do this work,” he told me later, “I have to be hundred percent accurate.”
The anxiety is understandable.
In Bangladesh’s fractured political landscape, almost everyone seems to have a nickname for Qadaruddin Shishir.
To Awami League loyalists, he became “Qadu” or “Shibir” — distortions intended to delegitimise him. Jihadi extremists want his head after his reporting exposed the recruitment of Bangladeshis into Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.
Liberals think he has become too harsh on the country’s mainstream media. Some BNP activists, who once admired his work, now call him a “rescuer ship” of right-wingers. Some right-wingers call him an atheist.
There may be no journalist in Bangladesh today who has managed to anger so many different camps at once. Shishir appears almost pleased by the symmetry.
“The name itself carries my message,” he says, referring to The Dissent, the investigative newsroom he founded after leaving AFP. “I want to be a thorn in the side of every establishment in Bangladesh. Yes, you can quote that.”
He laughs. He knows exactly how provocative it sounds. But the sentence also explains the course of his career.
Shishir has investigated propaganda networks that promoted Sheikh Hasina’s government before the election. He has exposed fake experts and fabricated academics whose articles praising the government appeared in newspapers and websites at home and abroad.
He has challenged viral falsehoods spread by ministers and state media. His platform has traced Bangladeshi recruits fighting alongside Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, investigated how parts of the media defended a hospital accused of medical negligence and scrutinised Bangladesh’s largest news organisations with the same determination he brings to every institution capable of shaping public opinion.
Each investigation creates another constituency of critics.
Shishir has learnt to expect it.
“By establishment, I don’t just mean the government,” he said. “I mean anyone with the power to shape public opinion – governments, political parties, media organisations, religious groups. If they're influencing narratives, they should be questioned.”
That definition has given him an unusually large number of establishments to antagonise. Some of the reactions are merely abusive. Others are more serious.
“You need to be slaughtered, you son of a pig.”
“Iblis Dajjal Qadaruddin Shishir – a gay, homosexual, CIA and RAW agent. [He] launched a news portal called The Dissent to promote the ‘War on Terror’ narrative, to dehumanize the Islamist militant organisations fighting against imperialism and secularism, and spread Jihadophobia.”
“An Indian stooge… he should be eliminated.”
The messages appeared on social media accounts affiliated with extremist groups after The Dissent investigated how Bangladeshi men were being quietly recruited into Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the notorious Pakistani militant group.
For years, the route had remained largely invisible.
Young men disappeared from villages after telling their families they had found jobs in Dubai or elsewhere in the Gulf. Instead, The Dissent found, some travelled through India before slipping into Pakistan, where they joined one of South Asia’s deadliest militant groups.
Several were later killed in clashes with Pakistani security forces. Others remain there.
The newsroom identified some of the dead, interviewed grieving parents, traced recruiters operating inside Bangladesh and uncovered links between radical preachers, hijama centres and the recruitment pipeline.
It was one of the first investigations to map how a transnational militant network had quietly reached into Bangladeshi communities.
It was also the kind of story Shishir had imagined when he created The Dissent.
He did not want another website devoted to deciding whether the latest viral Facebook post was true or false. He wanted to investigate the machinery behind information: who produces narratives, who amplifies them and what interests they serve.
“We are not interested in only saying whether something is true or false,” he says. “We want to understand who is creating these narratives, why they are doing it and who benefits.”
Jamal Uddin, a lecturer in Cornell University’s Department of Communication, has known Shishir since their student journalism days at the University of Dhaka. He remembers when Shishir began working on fact-checking, at a time when misinformation was still a poorly understood beat in Bangladesh.
“Even many journalists were uncertain about fact-checking, misinformation and disinformation,” he recalls.
What distinguished Shishir, Jamal says, was his interest in more than the verdict. He wanted to know not only whether a claim was false, but how false narratives were produced and amplified.
The TTP investigation showed how far that instinct could be pushed. Another investigation showed how quickly.
When The Dissent reconstructed the killing of Osman Hadi, the newsroom identified Hadi’s alleged killers ahead of law enforcement. Using open-source intelligence, it pieced together digital traces scattered across social media and publicly available records before many official findings became public.
To Shishir, this is increasingly what investigative journalism looks like…following trails that remain invisible until someone thinks to connect them.
“The internet leaves traces,” he says. “You just have to know how to follow them.”
Threats from extremists became another part of the job. But by then, Shishir was accustomed to being treated as somebody’s enemy.
Long before militants wanted him dead, Bangladesh’s political establishment had learnt to dislike him. One defining confrontation came while he was working with Boom Bangladesh, Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partner.
The team reviewed a Facebook post by Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the son of ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, and concluded that it contained misleading information. Facebook attached a warning label.
Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi political scientist who studies democracy and authoritarianism and an adjunct researcher at the Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative, or HADRI, at Western Sydney University, says publicly fact-checking the prime minister’s son during the Hasina government “required a lot of courage.”
Mubashar himself survived torture and enforced disappearance under the Hasina government in 2017.
At a time when few mainstream media organisations openly challenged the country’s most powerful political family, he says, it was “extremely hard and dangerous” for a journalist working inside Bangladesh.
Shishir’s reporting was important, Mubashar says. But the thing that struck him most was Shishir’s willingness to continue.
“What impressed me most was that he kept working despite surveillance, police questioning and political pressure.”
The backlash came quickly.
“They started calling me Shibir, Qadu and every label they could think of to delegitimise my work,” Shishir recalls.
The attacks moved beyond social media. Coordinated campaigns portrayed him as an opposition sympathiser trying to undermine the Awami League government…a dangerous allegation for a journalist working inside Bangladesh at the time.
Supporters of the then opposition initially welcomed his work. Then Shishir’s fact-checkers began debunking misinformation shared by BNP and Jamaat supporters.
Many of them turned on him too.
Because Boom was an Indian organisation, some branded him an Indian agent. Others claimed he worked for Bangladesh’s military intelligence.
“I’ve been accused of working for everyone,” he says with a smile. His answer became a professional credo.
“Judge me by all my work,” he says he once told a police officer who was continuously following him back then. “Not by one story you happen to dislike.”
There was plenty of work to judge.
His investigations repeatedly exposed misinformation promoted during Sheikh Hasina’s government, something Shishir says he remains proud to have done while living and working inside Bangladesh as the country drifted away from democratic norms.
One investigation dismantled the long-running claim that the United Nations had recognised Sheikh Hasina as the world’s second-best prime minister—misinformation that had travelled for years through newspapers and social media.
Another exposed something more elaborate.
Working with AFP, Shishir helped uncover a network of fabricated academics and fake experts whose articles praising Sheikh Hasina’s government appeared in newspapers and websites in Bangladesh and abroad.
AFP eventually analysed more than 700 articles attributed to 35 supposed experts. Some profile photographs belonged to unrelated people. It was not simply misinformation. It was an effort to manufacture the appearance of international credibility.
Yet among the work Shishir did during Hasina’s rule, the fact-check involving Joy remains his favourite…not because it was the most technically difficult investigation, but because of what publishing it meant at the time.
“During Sheikh Hasina’s rule,” he says, “who inside Bangladesh directly fact-checked Hasina and her son under their own names? I did.”
Jamal Uddin remembers the episode as a turning point.
“At a time when most mainstream media outlets were hesitant to challenge the prime minister, examining and debunking misinformation in her remarks required remarkable courage,” he says, recalling that few journalists were willing to publicly challenge government narratives.
But Shishir’s definition of power created another problem.
Once the government was no longer the only institution in his sights, some people who had admired his work began asking why he was attacking institutions they considered worth defending.
Most investigative reporters build their reputations exposing governments. Shishir turned the lens inward.
“If we scrutinise governments,” he asks, “why shouldn’t we scrutinise newsrooms?”
That question has become central to The Dissent…and perhaps the most contentious part of its journalism.
One investigation began with the death of a woman whose family accused International Medical College Hospital of negligence.
As the family sought justice, a cluster of obscure websites suddenly appeared carrying remarkably similar articles defending the hospital while attacking the victim’s relatives.
The Dissent traced the websites and found overlapping registration patterns suggesting they were far from independent.
Then the investigation moved into more sensitive territory.
The newsroom found that a promotional video produced by Prothom Alo about the same hospital had initially appeared in a news format before later being identified as sponsored content after questions were raised.
To Shishir, the issue was larger than one hospital or one newspaper. It was about transparency.
His investigations into Bangladesh’s largest media organisations, particularly Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, have drawn criticism. Some journalists and commentators argue that his scrutiny helped legitimise public hostility toward the two newspapers and contributed to an environment in which they became targets of physical attacks.
Shishir rejects the accusation.
“I want Prothom Alo to become better,” he says. “When they make mistakes, I want to point them out. If they improve, fantastic.”
He says his criticism is meant to strengthen journalism rather than undermine it. He frequently shares Prothom Alo’s reporting, he notes, because he generally trusts its work.
But for Shishir, admiration does not confer immunity from scrutiny. Neither does seniority.
Another recurring subject of The Dissent’s reporting has been Bangladesh’s expanding class of television commentators, popularly described as “senior journalists,” who often pronounce on political events with considerable certainty and, Shishir argues, insufficient evidence.
The Dissent has repeatedly debunked false claims made by several of these commentators.
Over time, the once-respected label “senior journalist” began acquiring a second life online, increasingly used sarcastically to describe television personalities speaking with great certainty but little evidence.
One prominent example has been television commentator Anis Alamgir.
As The Dissent repeatedly challenged Alamgir’s claims, his response was rarely a rebuttal.
Instead, he publicly derided Shishir as “Al-Badr Uddin”, “Jamaat’s ghetuputro”, haramzada (“bastard”) and bandir pola (“son of a maid”), while repeatedly twisting his name into insults.
Shishir says the abuse has never persuaded him to reduce the scrutiny.
His career has been built around a recurring discovery…that every institution, however respected, becomes uncomfortable when someone begins asking questions it has never been forced to answer.
That conviction did not begin with Sheikh Hasina or militant recruitment. It began with newspapers arriving late in a village in Sylhet.
His father regularly brought them home from town, sometimes a day late, sometimes several days late. While other children read comics, Shishir devoured the papers. What fascinated him was not simply the news but its strange instability — how a story could change depending on who was telling it.
Years later, at the University of Dhaka, curiosity hardened into ritual.
Every morning before class, he stood before the newspaper rack at AF Rahman Hall and read the same story in as many as 10 newspapers.
“One paper described it one way,” he says. “Another described it completely differently.”
Sometimes the villains and heroes changed entirely. At other times, newspapers carried almost identical headlines. “That’s when I realised this wasn’t random. This was information manipulation.”
The question lodged itself in his mind: Why could the same event produce such different realities?
As Facebook transformed political debate after 2010 and misinformation flooded Bangladesh during Shahbagh, the anti-Shahbagh movement and successive elections, Shishir became convinced that the more revealing story was not always the political argument itself.
It was the machinery producing the argument. “I wanted to understand how misinformation worked,” he said.
In 2016, he co-founded BD Fact Check with another friend, helping introduce a concept still unfamiliar in Bangladesh.
During the 2018 Safe Roads movement, the team debunked 13 false claims in a single day, attracting attention from Google, Facebook and international fact-checking organisations.
The Awami League government declined registration of BD Fact Check, creating regulatory hurdles that prevented it from becoming Facebook’s official Bangladeshi partner.
Jamal says Shishir did not abandon fact-checking after the setback. He continued building his expertise through international training, eventually joining Boom Bangladesh and later leading AFP’s fact-checking operation in Dhaka.
But the better Shishir became at fact-checking, the less satisfied he became with its limits. “Fact-checking corrects individual claims,” Shishir says. “I wanted to investigate the systems producing them.”
That meant leaving AFP.
It meant giving up the institutional protection of one of the world’s largest news organisations and trying to build an independent newsroom from scratch. The name came easily.
“The Dissent,” he says, “means disagreement with the establishment.” It was the only name he ever considered.
The newsroom remains small. Funding is uncertain. The work has brought threats from militants, attacks from political activists, hostility from media figures and criticism from journalists who might otherwise be considered natural allies.
Shishir has accumulated labels from almost every direction.
To one camp, he is too Islamist. To another, an atheist. To some, an Indian agent. To others, an intelligence operative. Some accuse him of protecting the right. Others remember him as the fact-checker who publicly challenged the most powerful political family in the country.
There is a temptation to search for the political identity hidden beneath all those accusations.
Shishir offers a simpler explanation. He does not particularly mind whom a story embarrasses. He minds whether it is true.
That is why, after years of police attention, political pressure, organised harassment and threats from extremists, the thing that visibly unsettled him in his newsroom that day was an error his own publication was about to make.
For a journalist who has made a career accusing powerful institutions of manipulating reality, being wrong himself may be the accusation he fears most.
“Judge me by all my work,” he says. “Not by one story.”
—