There are easier ways to spend five years in a Bangladeshi government than becoming its information minister. One might try Finance, Foreign Affairs, Industries or perhaps Fisheries. Information, by contrast, has traditionally offered its occupants something between a cabinet portfolio and an ejector seat.
Zahir Uddin Swapon has just discovered this.
Only six months after Prime Minister Tarique Rahman put him in charge of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Swapon was ‘abruptly’ moved out. In came Andaleeve Rahman Partho, chairman of the Bangladesh Jatiya Party, coalition ally, television regular and possessor of precisely the sort of rhetorical temperament that governments tend to discover they need when explaining themselves becomes more difficult than governing.
Swapon was hardly dispatched into ‘political Siberia’ though. He became a political adviser to the prime minister with ministerial rank — a position that may give him considerable influence. But his departure from Information on August 21 nevertheless maintained one of the more curious traditions of Bangladeshi politics.
Information ministers do not seem to last. This is particularly true when the BNP is in government.
When Khaleda Zia became prime minister in 1991, she initially kept Information herself. Nazmul Huda took over in September. He was gone before the government was. M Shamsul Islam arrived in November 1994, and M. Aminul Haque later served as state minister as the administration approached its end.
When the BNP returned to office in 2001, history displayed its sense of humour. Abdul Moyeen Khan became information minister in October. By March 2002, Tariqul Islam had the portfolio. In May 2004, M Shamsul Islam returned for another turn.
Ziaur Rahman held responsibility for the portfolio as deputy chief martial law administrator in November 1975. Akbar Kabir followed as adviser. Then came Shamsul Huda Chowdhury, Habibullah Khan and Shamsul Huda Chowdhury again.
By the 1980s, anyone attempting to memorise Bangladesh's information ministers could reasonably have demanded hardship allowance.
Thus neither of the BNP's previous fully elected governments managed the seemingly modest administrative feat of starting and finishing with the same information minister.
Tarique Rahman's government has taken just six months to preserve the ‘family tradition.’
There is, of course, a perfectly sensible explanation for all this. Bangladesh's information minister is not really an information minister, at least not in the dreary bureaucratic meaning of the term.
The ministry has offices, departments, broadcasters, budgets, policies and all the usual administrative furniture. But the minister's unofficial job description is much simpler… explain the government. When explanation ceases to work, defend it. When defence becomes difficult, attack somebody.
It is therefore a job requiring rather different talents from, say, running the Agriculture Ministry. A successful agriculture minister is not generally expected to appear on television at night and explain why critics of the government's fertilizer policy are enemies of progress. An information minister lives considerably closer to the political trenches.
Sheikh Hasina understood this rather well. When she returned to office in 2009, Abul Kalam Azad became information minister. Three years later, she made the more intriguing choice of Hasanul Haq Inu.
Inu was not even an Awami Leaguer. He led the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal, a small leftist party whose political ancestry included fierce opposition to the government of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the chaotic years after independence. Politics, however, is a magnificent machine for producing irony. The former revolutionary opponent of Mujib's order eventually became one of his daughter's most energetic cabinet defenders.
And what a defender he became.
Inu occupied Information through some of the most confrontational years of Hasina's rule, including the 2014 election and its aftermath. Whatever one thought of his politics, nobody could accuse the government of having appointed a man reluctant to argue.
His appointment exposed the true nature of the portfolio. Hasina did not merely require someone to administer state broadcasting. She required a political combatant.
Hasan Mahmud, who became information minister in 2019, fitted the same broad description. A senior Awami League politician and formidable partisan communicator, he remained when the ministry acquired the grander title of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 2021.
The addition of ‘Broadcasting’ did little to alter the essential nature of the business. Bangladesh's governments have always had rather more information than they know what to do with. What they periodically find themselves short of is somebody capable of selling it.
This has been true almost from the country's birth.
The official chronology of the ministry begins with names that make today's frequent reshuffles look almost sedate. Tajuddin Ahmad held responsibility shortly after independence. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman took it himself in January 1972. Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury followed, then Sheikh Abdul Aziz. Mujib subsequently took responsibility again, while Taheruddin Thakur served as state minister. M. Korban Ali arrived in January 1975.
Then Bangladesh's politics exploded, and Information naturally exploded with it.
During Hussain Mohammad Ershad’s era, there were Tofazzal Hossain Khan, ARS Doha, Syed Najmuddin Hashim, Mohammad Shamsul Haque, AR Yusuf, Sirajul Hossain Khan, Shah Moazzem Hossain and Anwar Zahid.
Then came Anisul Islam Mahmud, Mahbubur Rahman, Kazi Zafar Ahmed, Syed Didar Bakht, Mizanur Rahman Shelley and ABM Golam Mostafa as the Ershad era stumbled towards its conclusion.
Kazi Zafar managed the particularly Bangladeshi feat of holding responsibility first as deputy prime minister and then as prime minister.
The revolving door was partly a consequence of the instability of the state itself. Coups, martial law, presidential governments and cabinet reshuffles naturally produced ministerial turnover. But Information appears to have possessed an unusual sensitivity to political weather.
Even Bangladesh's supposedly nonpolitical governments could not escape it.
Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman's caretaker administration held Information through the chief adviser's office in 1996. Abdul Muyeed Chowdhury took charge during the 2001 caretaker government. After the BNP left office in 2006, Mahbubul Alam and then Mainul Hosein handled the portfolio. Fakhruddin Ahmed eventually kept it himself during the military-backed caretaker regime.
The pattern repeated after Hasina's fall in August 2024. Muhammad Yunus initially retained Information as chief adviser. Nahid Islam, one of the most prominent figures from the student uprising, then received it. Mahfuj Alam succeeded him in February 2025.
Governments change. Constitutions are amended. Generals become presidents, advisers become ministers and revolutionaries become establishment spokesmen. The Information Ministry waits patiently for its next occupant.
Which brings us back to Partho.
His appointment is interesting precisely because Swapon looked, on paper, unusually well designed for the job. He had been associated with the BNP's media operations, served as founding convenor of its Media Cell and held information and research responsibilities within the party. If Information required a politician who understood political communication, Swapon was hardly an eccentric choice.
Six months later, the government decided it wanted something else.
Partho brings a markedly different style. He heads an allied party rather than the BNP itself and has spent years cultivating the sort of television presence that survives Bangladesh's talk-show ecosystem: quick, confrontational, confident and capable of converting complicated political disputes into memorable sentences.
This may be useful.
An information minister is, after all, one of the few members of a cabinet whose performance is judged partly by whether people notice him performing.
The reshuffle also gives a coalition ally a prominent seat at the table while allowing Swapon to move closer to the prime minister's political operation. It may therefore be less a dismissal than a rearrangement of political weaponry.
Still, there is something wonderfully revealing about Bangladesh's obsession with changing the person responsible for its message.
Finance ministers inherit inflation, deficits and banks. Home ministers inherit crime and the police. Foreign ministers inherit India. Information ministers inherit everybody else's problems and are then expected to explain why they are not problems.
No wonder governments keep trying new ones.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa