Bangladesh has apparently devised an economical new method of ‘literary criticism.’ You can arrive at a bookshop, announce that a particular book is “banned”, pull down the shutter and ride roughshod over the booksellers.

This was roughly what happened at University Press Limited’s Banglabazar outlet on Monday evening over Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s The Unfinished Memoirs.

Two young men came looking for the book. When staff produced it, they objected to its sale, according to police accounts reported by Daily Waadaa. More people gathered. The shutter came down. Two employees, Aminul Islam and Humayun Kabir, were detained and eventually taken to Faridabad police outpost. Police later said they were released after an understanding that the book would no longer be sold.

But the ‘awkward’ truth is…The Unfinished Memoirs is not banned.

UPL has said precisely that. Banning a book, the publisher pointed out in a statement, requires a legal process. Authorities must take prescribed steps and communicate the prohibition. UPL says it knows of no such order concerning this book and will comply if a competent court or government authority lawfully bans it. Until then, it stands by what it publishes.

This ought to be an unremarkable position. In Bangladesh it sounds almost revolutionary.

One may dislike Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. One may dispute the book’s version of history, question how it was prepared for publication, challenge its provenance or dismiss it as hagiography. Last year, the Anti-Corruption Commission even placed more than 100 people under scrutiny over allegations concerning the book’s preparation and benefits allegedly received by those associated with it.

None of that, however, turns the book into contraband. Controversy is not prohibition and a mob does not acquire the powers of a court simply by turning up at a bookshop.

Books do not become illegal because someone dislikes the author. Nor does a citizen acquire the powers of a court by arriving with enough like-minded angry people.

There is an additional irony. Bangladesh has already conducted an experiment in which political power decides what the public ought not to read. The results were not impressive.

During Sheikh Hasina’s government, Adarsha Prokashoni was denied a stall at the 2023 Amar Ekushey Book Fair after controversy over three books: Faham Abdus Salam’s Mediocrityr Sandhane, Zia Hasan’s Unnayan Bivram and Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb’s Aprotiroddho Unnayaner Ovabanio Kothamala. The authors were known for criticism of the government.

Adarsha went to court. The High Court ordered that it be given a stall, but on condition that the three disputed books were neither displayed nor sold there. The books themselves had not simply disappeared from existence because officials found them objectionable.

UPL now points to that episode itself. It says it protested the treatment of Adarsha then, just as it objects to interference with The Unfinished Memoirs now. That consistency deserves attention.

UPL also recalls pressure during the Hasina years over books by Moudud Ahmed, a demand from the Dhaka University Syndicate that the publisher apologise over another publication, and the difficult circumstances in which it published Asif Nazrul’s work on the Ganges treaty. 

More recently it published Barrister Abdur Razzaq’s book on Jamaat-e-Islami because, it says, expert reviewers judged the material historically important.

That is approximately how publishing is supposed to work. A publisher assesses a manuscript. It publishes it. Readers buy it or do not. Critics attack it. Scholars dismantle it. Other authors answer it. Occasionally everyone ignores it, which can be the cruellest review of all.

What should not happen is that political fashion determines the permissible bookshelf. The ousted Hasina government should have taught Bangladesh this lesson particularly well.

Rights groups documented how the Digital Security Act was used against journalists and critics, fostering a culture of self-censorship in newsrooms. Many of its repressive provisions resurfaced in the Cyber Security Act in 2023. Now, proposed amendments to the Cyber Protection Act risk bringing some of those restrictions back yet again — old censorship dressed in new legislative clothes.

Journalists were arrested or prosecuted, critical reporting attracted legal jeopardy, and media organisations learned the ancient survival technique of discovering what the authorities disliked before publishing it.

Yet none of this produced permanent control over information for the Hasina regime. Governments can frighten editors and make publishers nervous. They cannot indefinitely prevent people from thinking inconvenient thoughts. Usually they achieve something less flattering…they make forbidden material more interesting.

That is the stupidity of censorship. Nothing improves a book’s marketing quite like announcing that nobody should read it.

There must, of course, be limits defined narrowly by law…direct incitement to violence, for example. Freedom of expression is not immunity from laws of general application. But the presumption must run overwhelmingly towards publication. Political offence, historical disagreement, embarrassment to governments and hostility towards an author are not sensible substitutes for legal prohibition.

This principle becomes especially important after a change of power.

If yesterday’s rulers suppressed books hostile to them, today’s winners do not correct the injustice by suppressing yesterday’s rulers’ books. That is merely changing the nameplate on the censor’s desk.

And The Unfinished Memoirs is hardly an obscure pamphlet that can be erased by lowering a shutter in Banglabazar. It has circulated for years, has been translated, quoted, debated and incorporated into arguments about Bangladesh’s history. 

Respected reviewers call it an important source for understanding the creation of Bangladesh and the origins of the Liberation War. Readers are perfectly capable of deciding how much weight to give it.

The same protection must extend to books about BNP, Jamaat, Awami League, the Liberation War, religion, secularism, India, Pakistan and whatever subject next irritates whichever group happens to be loudest.

Press and publishing freedom are useful precisely when they protect material one dislikes. There is little bravery involved in defending a book everybody approves of.

Bangladesh does not need officially approved history supplemented by unofficially approved mobs. It needs publishers able to publish, journalists able to investigate, historians able to argue and readers trusted to read.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa